Tag Archives: wordpress

It’s baaaaack!

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Kool-Aid Man

Image via Wikipedia

After a now completed year-long project took my full attention, I’ve re-launched my blog. It feels great to be back. Taking it down was a mistake as I really enjoyed the outlet; sharing PHP tips & tricks, and releasing news about projects that I’m a part of is a lot of fun and good for the soul. So, I’ll be getting back into the swing of things, posting often once again.

It’s amazing to look back and see how much stuff has happened in a year. I’m flipping through my older posts and remembering them like they were a decade ago instead of  just one year!

A few geeky points about the blog:

  • It’s HTML5 WordPress. Oh, yeah! (cue Kool-Aid Man)
  • It uses Microformats (I love these things)
  • The theme is my own design built off of the WordPress Toolbox theme
  • http://www.stiligececilie.net/ provided the amazing free FB, Google, etc. icons under my Twitter widget. If you’re into graphics design, you have to check out her stuff. It’s awesome.
  • It’s got some kick-ass jQuery that lets you scroll infinitely through my posts instead of pagination
  • This will be my 101st post. Sort of makes sense to cross that line when I relaunch :)

 

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Featured WordPress Plugin: W3 Total Cache

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Let me be straight with you: Every WordPress blog on the web should have this plugin installed.

And, no, I’m also not being paid to say that. :)

W3 Total Cache is exactly what its name suggests: A total caching solution for WordPress blogs. WordPress is a good publishing platform and content management system (CMS) but runs into problems quickly when more than a few visitors hit your site. Even moderately busy websites can buckle under the strain of the database connection pools, stylesheets, Javascript, and HTML that WordPress uses.

Some of the neat features that W3 Total Cache includes:

  1. “Minifies” CSS, Javascript, and HTML by removing all whitespace. To see an example, view the source code of this page. This means there is less data to send to viewers of your website which also means your website loads faster.
  2. Final output is cached and then re-served to the next viewer without having to rebuild. This means that in many circumstances, your blog might only be recreating your site dynamically once an hour. Otherwise, the cached version will be served, greatly increasing the performance and stability of your site.
  3. Uses advanced disk caching techniques to cache output or can also take advantage of Memcache technology (if supported by your server) to increase speed even more.

Before W3 Total Cache I was a fan of WP Super Cache. And before that, I used WP Cache. Neither of the latter two can hold a candle to the capabilities and caching power of W3 Total Cache.

For more information on how this plugin can increase your website’s performance, take a look at W3 Total Cache on the WordPress Extend website.

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Must-have WordPress Plugin: wp-db-backup

Posted on by John Rockefeller
"Add New Post" page of the WordPress...
Image via Wikipedia

I run a number of WordPress sites around the web, including the official Synn Studios Inc. blog, the Synndicus site, the iN Magazine site, and the blog you’re currently reading, Digital Oasis.

Trying to maintain a backup schedule for numerous blogs is a full-time job if you’ve got to do it all manually.

Thankfully, backing up your WordPress database is made simple by installing and using the WordPress plugin wp-db-backup. This handy plugin lets you download a copy of your WordPress database at that moment or schedule a backup to happen automatically. For my sites, I choose the latter.

A typical WordPress database backup is quite small and is easily E-Mailed. Once the plugin is installed, I set wp-db-backup to E-Mail my Gmail account a zipped copy of the database every day.

From there, I set up a Gmail mail filter to automatically Archive and label the zip as a backup. Whenever I need to restore a backup, I just open my Gmail and click the “Backups” label.

What sort of tools or plugins have you found to help you maintain your WordPress sites?

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Add Jack of All Links to Social Bookmarking Reloaded

Posted on by John Rockefeller

If you use the WordPress plugin Social Bookmarking Reloaded then you can benefit from the addition of the Jack of All Links social search engine icon on your pages. For the uninitiated, check out the previous article I wrote about the service. Otherwise, follow these instructions to add Jack of All Links support to Social Bookmarking Reloaded:

 

1. Update your sites.xml file.

Add these lines to the bottom of your “sites.xml” file just before the </social_sites> tag. The file “sites.xml” is located in the “./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded” directory.

<site>
 <name>Jack of All Links</name>
 <url>http://www.jackofalllinks.com/action/submit?url={link}</url>
 <img>jackofalllinks_mini.png</img>
 <key>jackofalllinks</key>
</site>

 

2. Grab the Jack of All Links mini icon.

Download this image to your Social Bookmarking Reloaded directory (“./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded”).

 

 

3. Enjoy!

After you do these two simple steps, logging into your blog’s administration panel will give you the ability to select Jack of All Links as one of the icons to show in your “Bookmark to:” bottom bar on each of your posts. For an example, look at the “Bookmark to:” bar on this post!