My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…
You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I’ve had to tidy up and “rethink” the structure of the site.
The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:
Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog
Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.
I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.
This is a test post to see how Windows Live Writer works. Windows Live Writer is an “off line” blog posting tool. Naturally, it is designed to work with Windows Live blogs, but it also supports WordPress and others.
How about this for timing….on February 27th, I upgraded my version of WordPress from 2.0.4 to 2.1.1. It was quite some time since my last upgrade, and there were several security fixes that I needed to get installed. I was briefly proud of myself for getting my site sort of up to date.
