Author: noel saw

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W3 Total Cache: Tips

We’ve mentioned W3 Total Cache before as one of our favorites WP plugins and no doubt it has a ton of options. One of the most confusing things is the “preview” mode. Once you’ve setup the configuration including enabling and disabling modules, how does one get out of preview mode and “go live?” Not as intuitive as one would think…just click on the “disable” button in the preview module. After going live, make sure to clear all your cache files.

I wish the designers of W3TC did a better job of “going live” with a simple button rather than having to “disable” preview mode.

Also here’s a great in-depth guide to W3TC at Zemalf.com.

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DIY CDN (or load balancing) for WordPress

Here’s sort of a part 2 to our previous “Speed up your WordPress site” post. Admittedly, it’s not quite your own CDN (Content Delivery Network) but the idea is similar: automatically copy data to other virtual server URLs so your page data can load in parallel. How could one do this? There’s a plugin for that – it’s called WP Parallel Loading System. According to the plugin author, your browser will only allow 2 concurrent connections from the same URL on a page. This plugin will off load data to a new URL that you’ve setup and should re-code your pages to automatically pull the content from there.

You’ll need to be versed in your web host company’s control panel (like cPanel or Plesk) to setup virtual sub-domains but other than that it seems pretty straight forward. Theoretically if you have accounts at other web hosting provider, you could have sub-domains setup there too. Anyone tried this and any good (or bad) results?

Get it: WP Parallel Loading System

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WP theme as malware?

Just when you thought it was safe to download randomly found WordPress themes, we run across a report at OttoPress of a dodgy site called “top-themes.com” that’s offering themes that could turn your WP site into a remote-controlled automated link spamming tool. This might be a good argument to only use trusted theme providers like WordPress.org or Wufoo.

Speaking of security, be sure to update your WP to v3.0.3,  (and yep it came out pretty quickly right after v3.0.2).

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Keep track of all your WP sites with a dashboard

If you’re a hardcore WP proponent with a lot of WordPress sites under your control, WP Status Dashboard can help you keep an eye on them. This self installed app can display all your WP site status on single page with the following stats: search engine indexable status, WordPress version, and number of plugin updates available. You could make this dashboard page one of your default browser home pages every time you launch your web browser.

This app costs $20 at CodeCanyon. It requires a bit of technical knowledge – you’ll need to know how to setup a MySQL database file. It’s too bad that this app itself is not built with WP to make it really easy to use.

Get it: WP Status Dashboard

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Great visual tools for communicating with clients

I know this post isn’t WP related but if you’re doing a lot of web design work, using either app mentioned below could save you a ton of time…

You’ve probably heard the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”? If you and your client just can’t get on the same page using email or even voice communication, why not try using a visual mark-up tool like Skitch or Jing? Skitch is a Mac-only tool that let’s you quickly snapshot your screen, draw arrows, write up annotation/notes, and publish to a web page very, very quickly. How quickly? Well how about under a minute start to finish?  Skitch has been in beta for almost 2 years and they’ve finally released “v1.0” that’s even more polished and better that I ponied up $15 for one year of “pro” features.

How about Jing? Jing’s advantage is that it captures up to 5 minutes of your on-screen activity and you can record your voice during the capture to annotate it. Jing’s also has a cross platform – it works on both Mac and Windows. Like Skitch, I paid for the pro version for $15/year. The only draw back is that Jing’s workflow is not as quick as Skitch but it makes up for that with the screencast function.

Get it: Skitch | Jing

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Replacement content editor for WP

Have a love/hate relationship with the built-in HTML (rich content) editor for WordPress? Why not give Foliovision’s Foliopress editor a try?

It has a simpler one row toolbar, ability to strip pasted text formatting, and best of all the ability to use simple <br> without them being stripped out like WP’s built-in editor.

It also features a different image upload and library dialog window but we had some problems with adding an image to this post on Firefox for the Mac. It looks promising with larger thumbnails of images in your media library but we couldn’t get it to work at this point. 🙁

Update: if you’re looking for something that will allow code like iframe or embed tags, try the Extend KSES plugin here.

Get it: Foliovision’s Foliopress editor

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Quick Tip: Add year automatically to footer

If your theme didn’t come with an automatic copyright year function, you can quickly add this code to the “footer.php” file so the current year shows up.

<?php echo date(‘Y’); ?>

If your site is more than two plus years into it, you can add your first year as a fixed date and then add add the snippet above.

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When Pigs Fly – Microsoft switches its blogging users to WordPress

You know this is not an April Fool’s Joke because we’re in the next to last month of the year. Microsoft has admited defeat in the blogging applications war by switching over users of Windows Live Spaces to the mostly free hosted WordPress.com site. Who would have ever thought that Microsoft with their billions in R&D would be moving their users over to a company (and platform) which has a fraction of their revenues. So WordPress.com now has 900k blog sites versus 400k from last month. Read the article at TechCrunch for the full details.