2009 begins, and – at long last – Cipher Mysteries has lurched back up to PageRank 3 (“PR3”), which is the height it had reached back when it was still with Blogger.
But because of all the super-duper WordPress plugins (like Tim Trott’s Folding Categories plugin, etc), visitors are now finding more of what they’re interested in here, and then staying on the blog for nearly twice as long as they used to – and all the major browsers are able to index the site far more comprehensively than they used to. Twice as many visitors per day reading twice as many pages is good news all round, I’d say. 🙂
One intriguing thing is that nearly 50% of recent Cipher Mysteries visitors use Firefox 1.x as their browser: so, what’s so wrong with FireFox 2.x or FireFox 3.x, then?
All the same, even though WordPress is such a better platform than Blogger, there are still many, many things I’d like/plan/hope to fix: for example…
- Even though I’ve installed a WordPress plugin (“CSS-Compress”) to serve up compressed CSS files (this would help to reduce the initial load-time), this apparently isn’t working. 🙁 [Fixed: bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) needed to be in header.php for the plugin to work, oops]
- The SEO Pager plugin isn’t producing any CSS (don’t know why, though I’d guess it’s probably a PHP 4 issue), so the page-numbers at the bottom don’t have nice little boxes around them. 🙁
- I’d love to make small icons inline in the CSS, but Internet Explorers before version 8 don’t handle these (boo, hiss), so I’d have to do browser-conditional stuff when generating the CSS
- I ought to get the hosting company to upgrade the server to PHP 5
- I ought to ask the hosting company to install eAccelerator to speed up PHP bytecode generation
- I ought to ask the hosting company to turn on MySQL caching
- Is there a WordPress performance profiling plugin out there? Is there an easy way of working out which plugins are slowing the page-loading down (apart from just turning them off)?
…and so forth. These kinds of things could halve the loading time for the blog: but maybe I’m just kidding myself that they would make a difference, perhaps it’s fast enough already.
Anyway… a Happy New Year to you all! 🙂
A survey of U.S. Census records in 1810 shows two persons named Thomas Beale, in Connecticut and New Hampshire. However, the population schedules from the 1810 U.S. Census are completely missing for seven states, one territory, the District of Columbia, and 18 of the counties of Virginia.