Fated Strife

Current Mood: Happy

Well I decided to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version today. I was unsure if I wanted to upgrade at this time as I worried some of my plugins wouldn’t work or my site would break completely.

Thankfully the upgrade seems to have went well, all my plugins still work (Did need to upgrade one or two of them but no big deal). I hope this might help the issue of speed when it comes to my site. The problem doesn’t affect any of the other sites I have setup on my server except this one. I’ll get it figured out one day I’m sure.

Good job to the WP team, I had played around with the nightly releases for awhile on one of my home servers and really liked it. Plus it came out on my birthday on Saturday so it was like a birthday present.

Tags: 2.5, Plugins, upgrade, WordPress

Well I’ve done some stuff to the site/server lately.

First off, I get a 4/5 on built with for “its utilization of web technologies which includes analytics, frameworks, syndication and document formatting“. I’d like to get a 5/5 eventually.

I’ve also installed WordPress Super Cache. This should help the speed issues I’ve had with my site, at least I hope it does. I’ve noticed as well as a few others that the load time has been reduced a bit so hopefully that’ll help keep readers from fleeing my site due to slow load times.

Also thanks to Donncha, I decided to install XCache to go along with eAccelerator to help with my site as well as several others I host on my server. So far it seems to be doing a good job.

Unfortunately, I did run into a problem with XCache, after building with the source and installing (and fixing the paths a bit) the XCache admin page (and XCache WP plugin) complained that it wasn’t loaded. I eventually had to move the Zend config in php.ini to after the XCache config, all seems to be working now though. Hopefully that may help some others who have installed it and are experiencing the same problem.

I’m eventually planning to upgrade to PHP 5, I’m still at 4.4.2 which is doing just fine but a few applications I’ve been wanting to try only seem to be compatible with 5. I’m not really up to the task of upgrading it (Apache is also something that I need to update to 1.3.39 or something newer), but I fear that I may end up just breaking everything. It took a lot of confidence for me to rid myself of the RPM deal a year or two ago and install everything from source, it was worth it though as it provided some learning for me.

Anyway, hopefully things will be a bit faster, less load on the server, and if something ever gets slashdotted or dugg, the site might just hold up.
If you notice a problem, error on a page, page not loading, site loading way slower than it did, etc please leave a comment or use my contact form and let me know.

Also thanks to Donncha and NeoSmart for the great plugins!

Tags: apache, built with, digg, Donncha, eaccelerator, php, plugin, Plugins, RPM, server, site, slashdot, super cache, update, upgrade, WordPress, xcache

I recently added the Snap Shots Plugin.
From the Snap Shots site:
Snap Shots enhance links with visual previews of the destination site, including summaries of Wikipedia and IMDb, YouTube videos, stock charts and more. It’s an enhanced way to surf because links are no longer blind, but a source of information.

So when you put your mouse over a link (link to outside this site) it will popup a little square that shows a preview of the site, or summaries of articles, things like that.

Thanks for the great plugin Ajay!

Tags: imdb, Plugins, snap_shots, visual_previews, wikipedia, wordpress_plugin, youtube