Archive for April, 2009

  • Go
    Speed Up Your WordPress: Mastering Yahoo!’s Thirteen Performance Rules
    Friday, April 24th, 2009

    The problem is that while the info is definitely out there, it's not all in one place (at least as far as I've browsed). Moreover, there are a couple of specific applications of the speed tricks that haven't been clearly laid out before (particularly, applying Cache-Control headers to dynamic images generated by the WordPress Facelift plugin, or the ideal .htaccess settings if your host is MediaTemple). In the interest of time (and laziness, our one true virtue), I've compiled an easy-to-apply series on YSlow that will get your WordPress sped up in no time.

  • Go
    The Unavoidables: Don’t Make Me Download a Lot of Crap; or, Sometimes You Just Deserve an F From YSlow, You Shameless Self-Promoter
    Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

    In all seriousness, however, Yahoo! recommends some (semi-doable) solutions. One idea is to combine all your CSS background images into one enormously fat image, and then use background-position to display portions of that image in different visual areas of the page.

  • Go
    Three Sexy Performance Rules for .htaccess on WordPress: Configure ETags, Gzip Compression, and Expires Headers
    Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

    For those of us cheapskates on shared servers, our greatest weapon against the admonitions of YSlow is .htaccess, that innocuous text file that has the capacity to blow up your website if you mistreat it. To defeat rules #3: Add an Expires or Cache-Control Header, #4 GZip Components, and #13 Configure ETags, we need the following .htaccess swank.

  • Go
    Nobody Wants to See Your Whitespace: Minify CSS and Javascript using Yahoo!’s UI Compressor
    Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

    Beating rule #10 is easy. We want to serve CSS and Javascript that has been minified (and obfuscated, if you please) to our readers, because that's less overhead for them to download. We also want to do it without screwing up our code, so I recommend using Yahoo!'s UI Compressor.

  • Go
    Take Care Home Health
    Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

    Susanne S. Wise, the owner of Take Care Home Health in Sarasota, Florida, approached me to give Take Care a fresh new look. Working with Erika Wise within the company, this is what I came up with.