Blog Tools
I have made a few changes in some of the tools I am using here at Mephistos (and indeed my other blogs Lance of St. Eligius and Traveller’s Haven Farms). A few of them are still in process but several are complete and as usual I like to share those kind of things here. Some of these changes date back to when the CPU was being ate up by scripts running and some of them are just an effort to make things a bit cleaner on the site.
- WP-Super Cache is the biggest new plugin I am using on my sites. I think I have mentioned this before, but just to be sure, I will mention it again. The plugin has lots of options and settings for exact behavior, but the bottom line is it caches pages for serving up on request instead of generating each page view on the fly from script execution and database calls. This tool alone is responsible for getting the CPU usage on the share server platform back under the acceptable limits.
- Google Adsense has always been the way I have made a small amount of revenue off my sites. Since the recession the amount made has dropped off significantly. That being said, it has never paid out much more than the cost of maintaining the sites. I have been using a plugin called Easy Adsense for a while with good success. It allows for multiple configurations and can push ads at the beginning, middle, or end of a post. I had been pushing two and the one in the sidebar. I have decided to back that off to just one at the bottom and the sidebar for a bit. It makes the blog posts a bit cleaner and hopefully will not diminish the click-through ratio to negatively.
- I had been using a plugin called Snazzy Archives, which was processor intense, generating thumbnails of all the images in a scrolling graphic by month and year of the archives. Granted those do not get hit often, but it was huge when they did. I have switched to something called Clean Archives, which uses a Java Script and build a set of text links organized by date giving the titles. It is much more readable but does require titles a bit more in line with the content (not that my pictures are anymore fitting often time). After seeing how much cleaner this looks I have to recommend this over my long ago cool thoughts about Snazzy Archives in the past.
- WP-PageNavi is a plugin that I gives some extra page navigation (see the bottom of the page, where it gives a range of pages as well as first and last pages of all blogs. I have used it here on Mephistos for a long while, but I have added it to the other blogs recently as well. I recommend it given the slight overhead and the ease of navigation it brings to a site with several post that may be interesting to the new person that stumbles along.
- Lastly, I have turned off the WP-Polls and Global Translator plugins. The former seemed to not really get much interest when polls were put up. What interest there was fairly predictable and mostly from the five or six same people who I could just ask. The later, while it did bring in a few extra page views, seemed to be largely mis-directed given the search criteria typically used. It also created huge amounts of extra pages for each language used. All of which required a lot of CPU and of course space as well. I may turn this back on for the romance languages or few top noted Western languages.
I'll have to give these a spin, Ray. I'm currently using Super-Cache, but I'll have to look into the others. Thanks!
I always look at the plugins that I am using and am thinking which ones to remove, but then I remember that all of them serve some purpose, then I sigh and log out :D
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