Phill Price | Photography » Phill Price | Photography – Photography from London, England

Whistling wink

Phill — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:55:00 +0000

Polite conversation

Phill — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:33:21 +0000

I’ve no idea what these two gentlemen were talking about, mostly because it was in Italian, but the hand gestures were flowing freely from the ticket inspector of the ferry system, in a nice way.

Gloss

Phill — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:50:51 +0000

A Palace fit for a queen

Phill — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 19:37:00 +0000

city silhouette

Phill — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:19:14 +0000

Best Viewed Bigger

Photoblog performance tips: Day 12 – Next Steps

Phill — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:02:31 +0000

Yesterday we looked into the benefits of keeping an eye on Google Webmaster Tools. Today we’re going to look at the next steps to take, in increasing the performance of the site, as its the last day (sad face).

Where next?

The last 12 days have achieved a lot in terms of the technical work behind speeding up a site. In fact, a lot of the hurdles have not been overcome, which leaves us going deeper into performance tuning the site.

You could turn your attention to small increases that may give you the edge, such as lazy loading avatars, or removing that widget you don’t really need, or the tag cloud no one uses.

You could take the milliseconds out here and there by profiling the queries that are run to display a page and finding which is slowest.

You could go nuts and host the site fully in the cloud, using something like EC2, but maybe that’s too much.

Maintenance

But what you must do is put in your calendar a monthly routine to backup your database and files. There are plugins that might work to do the database export automatically but don’t rely on them.

You should also seriously think about setting up WAMP or MAMP to have a local testbed for your site should a new version of something come out, or you want to make changes and are worried about the outcome. Don’t forget to change things though when copying the database.

Lastly

Also, don’t forget the main reason you have the blog – to post content there. Until Google works out how to rank photos for prettiness, you’re going to have to caption them and write articles too.

Thanks for reading along. If you’ve liked this series, why not subscribe. I also post a photo every now and then (hopefully more frequently now I’ve got this lot off my chest!). Also, don’t forget to take the Christmas decorations down today!

PS. A big thank you to my wife for editing this to make it vaguely resemble English, You’re a star :)

Photoblog performance tips: Day 11 – Google Webmaster Tools

Phill — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:35:37 +0000

The kilobytes downloaded indexing the site have dropped hugely since I implemented the work.

Yesterday we looked into the content part of the site in a more SEO way, looking at the reports from HubSpot’s Website Grader and Blog Grader. Today we’re visiting the mothership: Google Webmaster Tools.

Hopefully in the past 11 days, Google has begun collecting data about your site since you first authorised it. We’re going to go through a quick guide into what they mean.

Site Configuration > Sitemaps

You should really have a sitemap for your site, an indexable file that tells search engines where pages are, when they were last midified, and how often they change. If you’re really geeky you can read the protocol guidelines, otherwise you should have a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. Make sure you submit it here, and Google will know the structure of the site and how often to update the index.

Site Configuration > Settings

Here, you can if you wish, target a particular geographic area over and above another, for instance the UK. More importantly, you should set up a canonical domain for the site i.e. www.phillprice.com or phillprice.com. Additionally, you can set up rules in your .htaccess file to push all traffic to one of these two. I prefer the www, but its up to you. Remember to match this choice throughout your site though, in links and the WordPress settings.

Diagnostics > Malware

This should hopefully be empty, however if you’ve been languishing on older versions of wordpress or there are any other security problems you may find problems here. Google have advice if you do have some unwanted attention.

Diagnostics > Crawl Errors

As you might expect, Google is a giant link-checking service. As such it can give you a list (albeit not one that can update as quickly as using Integrity or Xenu), but it is rather explicit in all of the pages. However, as with all of the items on this list, it’s not quick at updating changes. I’ve got problem links fixed from October 2010, and it’s still trying to find them in January!

Diagnostics > Crawl Stats

This is a nice indicator of the work we’ve done in the past 11 days. I did the work involved in late november and the chart showing the amount of content downloaded (in the chart above) shows a dramatic improvement!

Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions

This really delves back into yesterday’s work in that Google doesn’t like different pages with the same title or meta description. Make them relevant and different from each other, that’s all I can say!

Labs > Site performance

As stated earlier in the series, Google is now using performance as part of its algorithm into when and where you appear in results, to prove that they’ve been running page speed against it themselves! However, yours may be blank. Mine hasn’t updated since I’ve done the work which is fairly irritating.

We’re close to the end of the series now. Tomorrow we’ll look into future performance work and general maintenance that can be undertaken. If you’ve got any ideas, please Contact Me!

Photoblog performance tips: Day 10 – Website Grader

Phill — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:54:48 +0000

Yesterday we supercharged our site by adding a CDN. We’re almost at the end of the 12 days series, but there are further things to help your site and today we’ll be turning our attention the Website Grader.

Whilst this isn’t directly related to performance, this will help the visitors that are now speeding around your site along with their journey. If you haven’t already, run reports from blog grader and Website grader (don’t enter your email unless you want to, the result will show in the browser).

A lot of this will be beyond today’s article, but you should take care in most of the aspects of each report. We’ll concentrate on the II. Optimize and IV. Convert parts of the Website report and the IV. Search Engine Findability and V. Blog Content sections of the blog report.

Optimize

The main part of this report concentrates on SEO. If you haven’t already, you should be using Yoast’s SEO plug-in to corral the beast of WordPress into shape. I wont rewrite his excellent tutorial.

Convert

By default you should have an RSS feed with your blog, whether you choose to put full images or just thumbnails is a personal choice. You may prefer to use a plug-in to add additional copyright information. For instance I use Yoast’s RSS Footer.

Search Engine Findability

You might need to refresh the results after using Yoast’s plug-in (and using it fully – which will be the majority of today’s work) for this to kick in. You really should take care to have good titles and descriptions for your work, as this generally becomes the snippet in search results.

Blog Content

This part of the report is a bit subjective, but it it also based around proven performance from other sites. I found this section on frequency to be very interesting.

See, now we’ve got the big technical pieces out of the way, we’re moving towards the main core of the content. Tomorrow we’ll delve further into Google Webmaster Tools. See you then.

Photoblog performance tips: Day 9 – CDN Part 2 : Caching

Phill — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:19:15 +0000

Now we have our files up in Amazon S3, we need to turn on Cloudfront Hosting to enable visitors to get these from their closest server location. This is one of those times where you may need assistance from a friend/host to set up part of it, particularly the CNAME section.

Update: My billing for December came in at a whopping $0.18! Hardly breaking the bank!

Amazon Cloudfront

If you haven’t already, sign up for Cloudfront to start with. This may take some time to come through.
When you’re logged into the Management Console, go to the Cloudfront tab.
Create a setup by clicking Create Distribution.
Leave the distribution method as Download.
Select the bucket you created earlier.
In the CNAME section, add a subdomain you’re not using at the moment, but want to. For instance I use cdn.phillprice.com.
Click Create

Setting up the CNAME

This is the more difficult bit. Now your hosting is set up you’ll have another temporary url. For example, they gave me the memorable d168fgmtak2ncc.cloudfront.net, so we need to link the CNAME field we put into the setup and this temporary address. This is the bit you’ll probably need help from your hosting company to set up.

In the time it’s taken your host to make the CNAME change, the S3 content should have uploaded, been distributed and cloudfront should be set up using your domain name. Try a file you know should be there and check it’s working, eg. I checked http://cdn.phillprice.com/css/style.css

Making WordPress use the CDN

Now we’ve set everything up, it’s time to amend the setting yesterday in WP Super Cache to the new domain name.

Go the the Settings > WP Super Cache page.
Then the CDN tab.
Update the host-name accordingly.

Test, Test, Test.

Now it’s all set up and the cache cleared, you’ll need to test, test, test for broken items. Clear your browser cache and check a few pages whilst logged in. When you’re happy the world is ready to see it, delete the cache from WP Super Cache.

Go to the Tester & Contents tab.
Click Delete Cache to empty everything out from before.

Now you should have a performance increase, although you can’t gzip or remove ETags from Cloudfront, so you might get some errors, but overall you should have a performance increase. Tomorrow we’ll get more into the content of things with the Grader tools.

Photoblog performance tips: Day 8 – CDN Part 1 : Storage

Phill — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 18:28:37 +0000

Yesterday, we set up WP Super Cache to speed up our site, which is a great step. We can go further though and setup a way to cheaply host items in multiple places around the world, closer to those looking for it. This can speed up delivery, especially large items like photos.

Amazon (purveyor of everything from books to bookshelves), also have a pair of web services which we will set up now. The services do cost (s3 pricing, cloudfront pricing), but we’re talking about site being a couple of pence per year on top of normal hosting!

Due to my experience with setting up these accounts, I suggest you sign up for both of these first before attempting any of the other work involved. Be prepared to wait a few hours for your account to be setup (they email you when it’s ready).

Amazon Simple Storage Service – S3

Sign up for an Amazon S3 account. This may take some time to come through.
When you’re logged into the Management Console, go to the S3 tab.
Create a storage area by clicking Create Bucket.
It doesn’t matter what you call it, but it has to be unique. For instance mine is called phillprice-com-images, so you can’t choose the same name.
Pick a region to host it. I’ve chosen Ireland as it’s close to me. There is different pricing for different areas. Northern California is roughly 10% higher to host in, and has no real benefit.
You’ll now have a temporary URL http://s3.amazonaws.com/phillprice-com-images, but we won’t be using it.
You have a choice in how you tackle the next bit. You can either mirror the folder structure that exists in your blog, or improve upon it.
1. The easy option is to create a folder structure in S3 to match WordPress exactly, but only upload the js, css and images or…
2. The better option would be to restructure it for a smaller url as possible, and then update the theme accordingly, so you could for instance create an images, css and js folder.
When you have a folder structure ready, navigate into it and click Upload.
Select the files you want to go into the folder and click Set Permissions.
By default, all of the content you place in S3 is secure. As you want these to be seen by everyone, check Make everything public and click Set Metadata.
Click Add more metadata, set the key to Expires and the value to something in the future. For instance Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT and click Start Upload.
Repeat with the rest of the files. If it gets too tedious, try the S3 Fox extension for Firefox or Cloudberry Explorer.

Tomorrow we’ll get the files actually in use from Cloudfront, the actual CDN. It may take some time for it to work, so it would be best to Sign up for Cloudfront today. See you tomorrow.