Archive for January, 2007

Speed up your WordPress site

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Although my site doesn’t really get much traffic, I tried to improve the site response.

The best way I found was to cache your site using the WP-Cache-2 Plugin by Ricardo Galli.

For a blog site, most contents usually won’t change very often. Even if you are really energetic and passionate, one post a day would be probably the most you can do.
However, the comments on your post can change much more frequently. If you set the cache to expire in 1 hour, new post or new comments in that hour would not show up because the old cache is still there. I guess this is still a bug for the plugin, but should be able to get fixed.

Other than the bug, the caching solution worked very well. I used Apache Benchmark (ab) tool to test the speed before and after enabling the caching plugin. The speed boost is almost 4 times with caching (from 800ms/request to 200ms/request)!

If you can bear with the cache expiration bug, this plugin is highly recommended for a busy WP site!

Apple’s iPhone – Sleek but pricey

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

iPhone

Just watched Steve Jobs’ keynote speech for the launch of iPhone. He is such a good speaker and I cannot imagine anyone replacing him as the best spokesman for Apple.

The iPhone was not a big surprise, as rumors had been around for a LONG time. However, the sleek look of the phone and the touch screen User-Interface still fascinated me. I liked Apple’s approach to small electronics. They built software to support their own hardware and the hard work definitely paid back. The success of Intel-based Macs and iPod showed their strength. No one else could do the same, well, except Microsoft (remember, they released Zune … ).

United Nation Indigenous People Dance

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

I wanted to try out the service from Youtube, so I uploaded this video I shot using my digital camera back in August, 2005, when I was visiting United Nation Headquarter in New York City.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77P0dAMbf_U[/youtube]
Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin for WordPress was used to embed the video into this post. Really simple and easy. Great plugin!