10 Sep

Site Performance

The speed your site responds to queries is used as part of the overall ranking algorithm – sites that don’t respond at all are likely to get dropped from search engine indexes. Therefore turning on any performance enhancements you can is a must if you want to maintain rankings.

To that  end I’ve been working on performance on our sites. My previous post was about turning on PHP errors and correcting them. One page on an internal site went from taking a few minutes to render to under 20 seconds all because I had $$var instead of $var in one line in a loop.… Read the rest

27 Aug

Typical Lazy PHP Programmer

That’s me, write a program and it works, don’t bother initializing variables, etc. That was until I moved to a new host that had display errors turned off. It is pretty much impossible to debug without errors being displayed so I went rummaging around for ways around this and found the following code:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set(“display_errors”,1);

I turned this on and suddenly the code was spitting out warnings and messages all over the place. Some trivial but some really fixed issues that I didn’t know. Now I’ve got it turned on all the time in development and on internal systems.

As the ‘Practical PHP Programming’ manual says:
Always set your PHP error level to the most verbose level, E_ALL.… Read the rest

27 Aug

Site Stability Issues

We are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.

A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income.… Read the rest

21 Aug

Site Hangs Waiting for External Javascript

This applies to you if you use Google Analytics, or any other third part javascript and your site stops responding whenever the third party site goes down.

One of the main ways this affects users is the page does not display in their browser, and in the lower left of the browser window they see ‘Transfering data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com’

The problem is caused by the script tag being in the <head> section of your site. If you move it to just before the </body> the browser will render your entire page before waiting for the third party site to respond.… Read the rest

14 Aug

Return of Pages Indexed and Link Quality Tool

A popular tool on the old Eixir site was the pages indexed and link quality tool. When we changed sites we lost those tools but we have now recreated them with some more bells and whistles at http://www.semreportsonline.com/

This site is still in beta (or even alpha) but I wanted to open it up for people to play with and give feedback.

Main features:

  • Link quality assessment including graphs and history functionality
  • Pages indexed across all 3 major engines.
  • Ranking reports including capability to go back in time and compare ranking reports including how the top 30 looked at the time.
… Read the rest
15 Jul

Make WordPress Mobile Friendly

Following on my theme for this week, here are the steps to make WordPress mobile friendly. This assumes you are using a separate URL for your mobile friendly wordpress (such as sitename.mobi):

1 – Buy your domain and park it on your current WordPress site, so sitename.com and sitename.mobi are generating the same content

2 – Add (or modify) the file /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/functions.php and add the following lines:

<?php
remove_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);

function elixir_urlrewrite( $url ) {… Read the rest

08 Jul

Making Your Site Mobile Friendly – CSS

CSS is vitally important in making your site mobile ready. I ended up making 3 CSS media sections in one CSS file:

  • @media screen – contains all the CSS positioning informaiton, font sizes needed for the screen, etc.
  • @media handheld – the CSS for handhelds. This removed a lot of unneeded parts of the screen (footer text), and doesn’t include positioning information.
  • @media print – CSS for when the page is printed. This changes the font size for printing, labels links for printing, turns off unnecessary navigation (left hand menus, footer, etc) and anything else to make your site look good when printed.
… Read the rest