OpenID enabled again!

It’s been a long time since I last allowed OpenID on this site. In fact, I disabled the OpenID plugin on Christmas Eve 2007. At that time, my reasoning was that the plugin added a great deal of JavaScript and additional CSS to the page. (I had complained that the size of a web page including stylesheets and JavaScript had increased to more than 60 kilobytes.)

It doesn’t seem to be much of a concern now. According to Safari’s Network Timeline tool (under the Develop menu), the homepage is now over 600 kilobytes including stylesheets and JavaScript, and it isn’t slow, even on lesser connection speeds. I’m still trying to optimize the site, but I guess having plugins like WP-PostRatings just add to the size of the site. (I don’t really like Prototype, jquery, and that sort of JavaScript library because they are bulky and require the whole thing to be loaded. The Yahoo! UI is a much better library.) However, to be honest, the biggest file size component is the graphics (screenshots and such), because they go over 300 KB.

Let’s talk about OpenID:

Yahoo! recently embraced OpenID, and the new version of the plugin that I’ve installed now supports using your Flickr page as an OpenID. It’s a nice, simple way of logging in to thousands of sites on the Internet. I have liked this concept for a very long time, and am now re-opening up the OpenID log-in and registration and comment authentication system. I believe that users shouldn’t have to register for all the sites they browse.

Let’s talk more about the site’s size:

Only 5 users over the past month have visited this site on dial-up. Understandably, using the site will be a horrible experience for dial-up users, but 5 users are not significant enough for any concern. I will therefore not aim to optimize the site for dial-up; my goal is to make it an enjoyable experience for users on 256+ kbps connections. The size of the home page (XHTML only) is about 50 KB, and the size of the stylesheets is only 11 KB. What is weighing down this site is the inefficient ITK Ranks scripting system, which has about 10 different complex JavaScript files in an unoptimized format, and the inefficient JavaScript used for ads. OpenID and PostRatings aren’t actually that bad.

To help minimize any pains of surfing our site, I will be optimizing the ad system and showing less banners on the site, opting for PHP rather than JavaScript invocation, and also trying external ad management like Adroll. (I remember taking banners off for a few weeks sometime early in 2007. That worked extremely well.)

A final word: what is really adding to the size of our site is images. I like using graphics to illustrate what I am saying, as opposed to text-only content. Realize, however, that if it weren’t for the images (particularly the resized pictures from Flickr, which is bad at image compression), this site would be only 100 KB, compressed. That’s pretty good for a modern blog. I will try to reduce the amount of resized pictures from Flickr. (The original pictures that I create are a lot smaller than the resized versions.)

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Site gets refit

Amazing what the change of the theme can do for you — or your site.

I’ve moved off “Geekie.org 2″, our previous theme for Geekie.org that was a two-sidebar design based on the Vistered Little 1.6a release. Now I’m using Vistered Little 1.7.7, an excellent theme for WordPress that can be customized to your needs.

I haven’t yet managed to recover the added functionality from “Geekie.org 2″, like PayPerPost disclosure badge integration, or the dual sidebar, or the Google-powered search, but I think the new header (complete with image) is quite nice.

Utilizing a new fixed image system designed by me that will not have any problems regardless of screen resolution (a previous bugger), I no longer need to worry about what size my users’ sizes are. The new image, which takes advantage of JPEG (albeit lossy) compression and the CSS-based white background, nicely represents our site. Of course, it will be switched every once in a while.

Another change is the integration of FeedBurner; our main RSS/ATOM feed now redirects automatically to the browser-friendly page at FeedBurner. Not only will this allow me to track our users / subscribers more accurately, it gives me a ton of options for adding interactivity to each post (you may have noticed the FeedFlare links below each individual post that allow Stumbles, Diggs, and bookmarks).

Our banners have also changed, moving back to the leaderboard style that was used on this site months ago. Hopefully the ads aren’t too intrusive; I’ve tried to make them as least annoying as possible. There’s also the banner below the first post, which will hopefully interest you enough for a few clicks and/or conversions (eg. the Diino 2 GB free space offer, or Amazon Associate stuff).

Please note that a new licensing notice has been added at the bottom of every page, explaining that content from this blog is now released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License, and that our feed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Links to our privacy and disclosure policies are also there, to ensure that the user knows of such requirements.

Look out, as our site will be changing!

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Favourite WordPress Plugins

A site I recently encountered posted a list of “favorite Wordpress plugins“. Although I do agree with some of the things on there, I disagree with many others. Allow me to post my own list:

• All in One SEO Pack is a great plugin, which “out-of-the-box” does everything imaginable for your blog. That is, everything from META tags to messages to the search bots, and even automatic META descriptions. (Add META Tags was on the author’s list, but it is not compatible, since it has multiple redundancies already provided by All in One SEO Pack.)
• OneClick Installer, which takes the pain out of uploading new themes and plugins. I personally don’t upload themes at all, and I often need to use my cPanel File Manager to edit my plugins anyways, so this only saves me time with the plugins that don’t cause errors. (On a host with PHP/CGI installed, the “edit file” command from within WordPress doesn’t work.)
• Ultimate Google Analytics, which makes it easy to install the Google Analytics code on a blog. It also adds the advanced feature of being able to track external links, mailto links (I never use them), and downloads.
• Google XML Sitemaps, which creates a new sitemap for Google and Yahoo! whenever a post is made or its functionality is triggered. My only concern is that its “human-readable” version, that is, with the XSL stylesheet, is not validly coded into the main XML file, and doesn’t load properly in Firefox.

My list is quite short, since I don’t feel like slowing down my blog with an excessive amount of redundant plugins. The author of the post listed the following plugins, which I reject:

• FeedBurner FeedSmith — I do not believe that tracking your feed readers is necessarily a good thing, and even more so when they are unknowingly forwarded to FeedBurner. It’s also questionable to me — why would you want to deliver your RSS/ATOM feeds through an external service?
• Related Posts — for many blogs, searching through the database for relevant posts is performance-intensive, and overall bad for the user’s experience.
• Social Bookmark Creator — perhaps, at some time in the future, I shall use something like this, but I don’t like clogging up site design with additional external links or images.
• Global Translator — Geekie.org and many other blogs are in English; letting Google’s machines, no matter how good they are, translate our work is questionable.
• WP-ContactForm — the author’s homepage can’t be displayed, so I don’t have much to say about this. Besides, within the FreddyWare Solutions Enterprise Network, we have one centralized location for contact forms. (For instance, you can send me an e-mail through our official form at http://www.freddyware.net/contact.form/frederick.ding.)
• WordPress Database Backup — WordPress has such nice built-in backup (export) and restore (import) functions that I believe such a plugin is useless to most blog owners.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I’m just recommending what I think are best.

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WordPress not optimized for search engines

WordPress is, in its “natural” - that is, packaged - form, a wonderful piece of software for blogs on the Internet. But WordPress in its natural form is also designed for humans… not search engines.

I’ve known of this problem for a very long time, since before this site was created. Back then, I believed that having a blog that could be fixed later was better than no blog at all, regardless of search engine rankings. Now, I have some different opinions.
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