Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster

Take a look at your site load speed. How long do visitors need to wait before the whole page appears?

Whether site load speed affects SERP directly is still arguable. But there are more than enough reasons to believe that site load speed does influence your site’s popularity indirectly.

The larger your page is, the longer it takes to load and fewer people will stay and read the content. Less people know about your content, there’s going to be not uch left to spread the words on your writings by bookmarking, re-tweeting, linking, commenting or even subscribing to your feed.

With Google nowadays takes into account factors like feed subscribers, bookmarks and incoming link to decide a page’s position, it makes sense to optimize our site load speed in order to achieve higher ranking in SERPs.

Across the internet we can find hundreds of articles suggesting ways to minimize site load time. The popular ones are reducing images, third party scripts to eliminating uneccessary php requests.

On my Busby SEO Test entry, I tried to apply those techniques by having the unecessary parts for the competition thrown out and leave them intact for regular visitors. The modification was performed to the sidebar and footer area. If you compare the sidebar and footer between my Busby SEO Test entry and this one for example, you’ll see that the Busby SEO Test entry has no sidebar while the other one has.

Having no sidebar containing banner ads and scripts will increase load time and for the competition, I decide not to load them. I did that by executing a set of command when the blog fulfills a condition declared in the source code.

If you’re not on competition, you can display category based messages to your visitors or anything else you can think of. Interested?

There’s not going to be many programming involved. It’s no rocket science but you still need to make backups before.

Are you ready? Let’s proceed…

We’ll going to use the file sidebar.php for the example. What I’m going to do is adding some codes that will make the blog displays an empty sidebar when visitors are reading my Busby SEO Test page.

• Open the sidebar.php and put this code on the top or right after div id=”sidebar”

<?php if (is_single(‘17′)) { ?>

The above codes says that “if the visitor is reading post number 17 then…”. Here, you can make adjustment according to what condition youu want to check. It can be if a visitor is viewing the archives page, an article from a certain author, articles from category X, etc. They are called conditional tags in Wordpress. For more conditional tags, you can find them here.

• Right after the code, supply the command you want to be executed. In my case, nothing. So I’ll just write

<?php } ?>

• Or if you want to add something, you can do it this way

your codes here

<?php } ?>

• You can simply stop here and see the results. But in my case, there’s another condition I must anticipate. That is when people are reading pages other than the page specified above. So instead of the above code I’ll go with

your codes here

<?php } else {?>

your codes here

<? php } ?>

• So, the full code I use to display an empty sidebar when people are reading the Busby SEO Test page and display the full sidebar when they’re on the other pages is

<?php if (is_single(‘17′)) { ?>

<?php } else {?>

what needs to be done if other pages are shown

<? php } ?>

 

Pretty simple isn’t it? As alternatives to (is_single(‘17’), you can choose from the following:

• is_home() – blog is displaying the main page
• !in_category(1) – blog is displaying articles from categories other than category 1 (notice the exclamation mark)
• is_page() – blog is displaying a page
• is_archive() – blog is displaying the archive list
• (is_home() || !in_category(1) || is_page() || is_archive()) – blog is displaying either the main page or articles from categories other than category 1 or a page or an archive list

 

Any troubles? Shoot me a comment or review the article!

What do you think of this modification? Do you have any other ideas you can share to increase site load speed?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Quick Blog Comments Moderation from Your Desktop

Last night I stumbled upon a Wordpress plugin that allow you to moderate comments directly from your desktop, without having to go to your blog admin. It’s called Moderator. Moderator is built using Adobe AIR which you need to install prior to the plugin.

Athough Moderator is in its early release, standard features are already within reach, such as:

• Viewing unmoderated comments from your desktop.
• Dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.
• Accept, delete, and spam comments from within the desktop client.
• Close application window, or minimize it to the system tray while running.
• Shows the Gravatar icons for the user who posted the comment.

Moderator currently requires version 2.6+ of WordPress be installed. Also, you will need Adobe AIR 1.1, which runs on Mac, Windows, and is currently in beta on Linux. And as soon as Wordpress 2.7 is released, this application will support the comment moderation methods that will be included. That should eliminate the need to even install the WordPress plugin. All that would be needed would be the desktop client itself.

Being able to moderate comments without having to log in to the admin panel is helpful enough in my opinion. Another thing I’d like to see in the next release would be the ability to moderate several blogs. Thank you, Daniel!

WPThemesGallery.com – Broad WordPress Coverage Outside Your Dashboard

WPThemesGallery is a WordPress related blog, with lots of interesting tips, news and updates sometimes you don’t find on your WordPress dashboard. That’s the reason I subscribe to their feed, for extra information I can use to improve my Make Serious Income Online blog’s appearance.

Here’s a post grabbed my attention when I visit their page today:

Free RSS Feed Icon Set by FastIcon Designed Specially for Smashing Magazine

Maybe it has nothing to do with SEO, but those cute icons can work well catching your readers’ interest. Check’em out!

Technorati Tags: wordpress

Displaying Latest Posts Title from Certain Category Anywhere on Your Blog

A few days ago, this blog was reviewed by Noemi from BloggyAward.com. On the review, Noemi pointed out a cluttered impression on my blog. Then I looked around my blog and looking for some spots to free up. Finally, I came up with the idea to merge recent post list on the upper-right sidebar into a tabbed menu on the upper left sidebar, below the first tabbed menu.

Having that in mind, I also wanted to display the most recent posts according to their categories inside the tabs. The problem is, I didn’t know how . Then I emailed Andrew Rickmann from WPFun.co.uk about my problem. He replied (fast! and actually I asked one more person, but only Andrew replied) and suggested using the “query_posts” to assign the category ID or name to the following codes used to display the latest posts. He also provided two resources to refer to:

http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

Thanks to his replies, I’m can now display the latest post of any category on any page of this Make Money Online blog! And also, thank you to Noemi for precious suggestions and opinions!

Technorati Tags: wordpress,display latest post from a category

Blogging – Unwanted Theme Change Resolved?

It has been a couple of days since the last auto theme change on this blog and it hasn’t changing anymore since. What did I do? First I tried to erase the default theme which this blog reverted back automatically to, but it didn’t work. Then I sent emails to a couple of webmasters and Andrew Rickmann from WP-Fun said that he had the same problem some time ago. The solution he suggested was to re-copy the core files like he had done.

Firstly I chose to do it if I can’t find any other solutions that don’t have the risk crashing my blog or making the plugins don’t work. But once again when the theme reverted back, I decided to do as Andrew did because this caused uncomfortable browsing and navigation to my readers. I also found it as a good chance to upgrade my blog to the latest WordPress version. Of course, I made a backup to my database and blog system.

Thankfully, now after two days, nothing occured. The theme has been consistent and plug ins work as usual. I didn’t know whether the older version of WordPress causes this or something else. But re-copying the files solved the problem.

WordPress 2.3.2 Released!

taken from the original source

Newly released WordPress 2.3.2 has an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. WP 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

Technorati Tags: wordpress,blogging,blog