Craig M. Rosenblum

Good Morning,

I have done a lot of work in the last few months, to get my site’s maintenance automated, so that I can focus on design and programming…

Here is the list of things I have automated:

1. Optimize All Tables
2. Delete All Post Revisions
3. Delete Spam Comments
4. Copy MySQL Log Files to Central LogFiles Location

And I am always looking for more ideas, more ways to automate…

When you have a website that has a complex and growing platform like wordpress, you always have to both plan for the future and plan for the worst. So that you and your site are fully educated and prepared for problems.

Here are a few questions I ask myself or others all the time:

• How have I prepared my site for high levels of traffic
• Is my site secure from hackers
• Do you take regular backups in case of any problems
• What kind of maintanance plans for your database do you have?
• Will you be alerted if your site goes down?

Now you can see this is a short list, I am sure other experts have longer lists of things to prepare for, but if you aren’t prepared, you’ll be just another in a long list of wannabe sites that just didn’t spend the necessary effort to be well planned.

The boy scouts motto is good, even to this day…Be Prepared!

Wordpress Configuration Tricks

Like all of you, I am always on the prowl for a method, technique or tool I can use to get better performance. Especially when you are on budget, cheap or home hosting websites, you have to make the extra effort, that when people do visit your site, that it is rather fast loading..

This tutorial, offers many solid tips, how to setup wp-config.php.

What I was using to look for extra possible settings, was this really powerful and neat-o plugin called WP System Health.

Which what it does, is put on your dashboard, an complete tabbed-layout of your different server setting and statistics, including: System, PHP, WordPress and Database.

So I was looking at the Wordpress Tab inside this plugin, and it had a bunch of settings turned off, that I thought might help improve performance. Either the settings it were referring to are old, or deprecated, or possibly obsolete.

But I had to at least try em out..

Such as:

define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, true);

or

define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); // enable the cache
define(‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true); // enable the cache
define(‘CACHE_EXPIRATION_TIME’, 3600); // in seconds

and

/** Whether to enable compression of Stylesheet files being served. **/
define(‘COMPRESS_CSS’, true);

Still so much to learn, and so hard to find good solid and reliable tips, what do you all think?

Any favorite wordpress performance setting tip? That does not require a plugin?

Lighttpd Installation Guide On Windows

I am really loving using Lighty, which is a highly scalable web-server software, that was created and programmed for unix/linux, but some fans of it, rewrote it to use cgywin, which allows porting, not easily, of linux apps to windows.

I am really a fan of well-written, well demoed tutorials, and this is a really nice one…

I really wish there was a lot more support for lighty on windows, there are a couple of really nice sites out there, but not a lot of recent information for windows users…

Here are a few good lighty links:

• Lighty Official
• WLMP Custom
• Lighty Tray – System Tray App for Controlling Lighty
• Vista Gadget for Lighty
• Kevin Worthington

I mean for any webserver software, there is usually a good learning curve, to go from using,to mastering it. And just would help more if more people from windows used and supported lighty.

I mean, IIS, is good, but apache is much greater, than that..And with some solid support lighty, can kick both of them in performance…

But we need a solid community, who want solid scalable web server apps in windows…

What do you all think?