Experimenting with WordPress Caching

In the last few days, I've read about caching WordPress blogs to improve performance. I've played with this in the past, but always gave up as it wasn't something I needed, at least not yet. However, I took another stab at it and installed W3 Total Cache to see how much good it would do.

The plugin is amazingly easy to setup and seems to work well. However, one thing that kind of annoys me is that new blog posts don't update the home page. Of coure, I can turn off caching of the home page, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a cache. As a happy medium, I turned down the caching to 300 seconds (5 minutes). If I ever get Fireballed, I'll change things around and hope for the best. (For those out of the "know", fireballed means getting linked to by John Gruber's Daring Fireball site. Basically if you get linked from there, your site is going to get pounded with hits.)

WordPress SSL Admin and Twitter Tools

For a long time, I've used WordPress for my blog hosted on my own server or virtual server. This has allowed me to experiment with plugins and play around with various settings. As I've been doing a lot of posting from my iPad using the WordPress for iOS app, I realized that the posting link was over a non-secure link, so my admin password was passing in the clear over the Internet. I set out to secure the admin portion of my blog. I read an article over on WordPress's site.

The actual securing it wasn't that difficult. I already had an SSL certificate from StartSSL which works well and the price of free is good. In addition their certificates use a subject alternative name which lets me secure blog.gruby.com as well as gruby.com if I choose to use that in the future.

After a few posts, I realized I had a problem. I use the Twitter Tools plugin to tweet each time I post. The URL in each tweet had https in it and I didn't need to put excess load on my server encrypting public pages. So I went about figuring out how to create my own WordPress plugin to remove the https and replace it with http. I'm not a php expert nor a WordPress plugin expert, but I came up with a plugin that appears to work.

This plugin is free to use and maybe it will help someone.

        Apr 7, 2011
        

          
            The rise of the casual gamer
          
        
I've always been intrigued with video games, but was never very good at them. I had a PlayStation that I bought at a clearance sale, then bought a refurbished PlayStation 2, and now have a Wii that a client bought for me. Video games hold my attention for a little bit, but I grow tired of them quickly, probably because I have to turn on the TV and go into another room to play. I believe (as do some tech experts) that console gaming is going to be relegated to the hard core gamer and that smartphones and tablets will be more than sufficient for the casual gamer.
In fact, I think that smartphones and tablets (e.g. iPad) is making people that really aren't gamers into people that are playing more and more games. If you look at the types of games available for iPhone and iPad, there is a huge range with some of the more addictive ones such as Angry Birds requiring very little skill to play. I think that one of the problems with game consoles is that some games require far too much time to master and have too many controls (look at the number of buttons on a PlayStation controller).
I have a bunch of games on my iPad and really enjoy playing them; I think that Angry Birds informed me that I had already passed 5 hours of playing! Ouch, that's a lot of wasted time! My manager told me that she has probably passed 80 hours playing it on airplanes (that seems a bit much to me, but what do I know). In addition to the simplicity of the games (in terms of mastering), the very low cost makes it a no brainer for people to pick up the games.
Is it bad for more people to play games on these devices? If it helps pass the time and relaxes people, I don't think it can hurt. If it becomes so addictive that they play them while walking across a street then, yes, there is a problem.

        Apr 6, 2011
        

          
            Review: MacBook Pro 15" (Early 2011)
          
        
As someone that deals with computers all day long, I need to upgrade my hardware periodically as the applications get more complicated and my productivity starts to decrease. I try to get a new machine about every 2.5 years. My previous machine was a 15" MacBook Pro right after the unibody redesign. The machine performed quite well and my SSD upgrade last year kept it going. There was nothing really wrong with the machine, but the new version of Xcode and the increased complexity of my projects began to cause me some frustration waiting for builds to complete.
When I started my new job, I wasn't issued a new machine and didn't ask for one as I wanted to wait for the next revision of MacBook Pros. When the new machines got announced, I put in my request and it was approved (slightly different from what I wanted, but still an impressive machine). I ended up with a 15" MacBook Pro, 2.2 GHz Quad Core i7 processor, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, high density, matte screen.
Since I had an SSD in my last machine, the big changes for me were the faster processor (2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo vs. 2.2 GHz Quad Core i7) and more memory (6 GB vs 8 GB). The first thing I did when I got the new machine and set it up was to compile one of my projects. The project was taking 45 seconds to 1 minute to compile. On this machine, the compile took about 15 seconds! Sweet!
What more can I really say? Compared to my old machine, this thing screams, but I'm sure I'll say it is slow in no time at all!
I haven't had a chance to give it the full laptop treatment (take it on a trip and see how the battery performs), but my first impressions are quite positive. I don't really measure app launching as some people do as I don't launch apps all day long; the compile time is the number one performance boost that makes me glad that I got a new machine.
Pros

It's fast. There is no doubt about it, this machine can outperform a lot of desktop machines.
Thunderbolt/DisplayPort can do audio out to an HDMI adapter which means I have one less connector to connect when I "dock" my machine.
Built in SD card reader eliminates the need for me to dig out a reader when I need to configure my Eye-Fi card (I don't transfer photos using the card, just over WiFi.

Cons

It's expensive. The price tag on this thing is something around $3000 which is a lot of money. However, if it was my own money, I would have gotten a similar machine as it is a tool that helps me earn money.
The high density display is a bit hard to read.
I'm undecided on the matte display; I've had glossy displays before and they work fine.

Summary

My "review" isn't like the detailed reviews that Macworld publishes, but sometimes people just need a yes/no on buying something. I've been a fan of the MacBook Pro line for a number of years and this machine definitely doesn't disappoint. However, when I get new machines, I like to get them immediately after Apple announces something significant and this upgrade with the Quad Core i7 is definitely one of those times. Luckily the major upgrades seem to coincide with when I want to upgrade.
For professional users, you can't go wrong with a 15" MacBook Pro, The size is right for the infrequent traveling I do, but is more than adequate for use as a desktop machine. I won't get another desktop machine as the portability is worth so much to me even if I don't use it all that often.