Blogging - Part 5

10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

This post is part of Saturday, Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers. You can contact me, if you have any questions.

Sridhar

Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down 🙁 Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.


# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.

Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:

Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

Good Reason(s) To Use Socialize Feature Of Feedburner – and a Caution!

There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly. We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.

Feedburner announced socialize feature some days back – i.e., Tweet Your New Blog Posts from Feedburner, automatically.

If you have not yet activated this feature, and you are using some plugin to do this for you – then take 20 seconds off and enable this little handy feature.

Plugin’s consume bandwidth and need to be updated whenever there is an update available. If you don’t take time to update, then you are at some security threat.

So do not think of doing it some day, do it now itself and save lot more time later.

How to enable socialize feature
Click on Publicize tab. On the left side, you can see list of features, and you can also see “Socialize Publish to the social web” option. Click on it and the rest is self explanatory

The interesting thing here is, Google has started using its own URL shortner. And this may be the only disadvantage, as you might already have your favorite URL shortner or built one for your custom use across all your network’s of sites.

Google may soon start showing stats for the click through rate and the performance of the shortened URL. You can get the clue about this on goo.gl.

Some benefits would be
1. Google will surly start displaying the click through rates of shortened URLs.
2. It may soon integrate goo.gl into its analytics and hence we can get a detailed report of the performance of the shortened URLs.
3. Reliability and Speed matters: We have seen some of the popular URL shortners being unreliable due to its downtime, so we can expect reliable service from Google.
4. Socialize feature comes with lot of option to customize the tweets according to our needs.

Select Account
Formatting Options
Post Content
Hash Tags
Additional Text
Item Limit
Keyword Filter
Preview

Interesting option
We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.
This feature will come in handy for those, who hesitate to promote their own content frequently and who do not want to tweet irrelevant tweets.

Caution!

Duplicate tweets — be aware! and avoid before embarrassment
There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly.
If you post only one article per day and you select the Item limit as 8, then the previously published articles will be tweeted again. i.e., you will be tweeting 7 articles published on your blog recently, other than the one you published on that day. This may annoy your followers. So be careful not to ignore this option.

Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers and nOobs

Being a blog concentrating on social media, blogging, it would be good to have some resources for newbie bloggers or people who are interested in knowing more about blogging, social media and online money making(basics).

Two years ago, I never knew the difference between a domain and hosting. Twitter and FaceBook were far from my thinking. Blogging was far from imagination. Never knew there will be so many people reading blogs more regularly than News Paper, and Tweet more often than they send a text message(SMS – texting) or Call to anyone!

Looking back those days, feels like great memories of ignorance 🙂 Unfortunately, I have many many and many friends who don’t know about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, web-publishing etc. They still think having a live website requires a great deal of knowledge, money and influence. Actually, a friend of mine asked me – how to get permission from BSNL to launch a website. hmm..I got confused for a while, so as to what he was asking. But soon realized, BSNL being a well known Internet service provider in India, many people think that the whole internet and all the websites and everything is controlled by them. Not a bad logic though. And some still think internet is owned by Google.
When I try to tell about the advantages of Twitter and tell them to start using it to their good – the last question they would ask me is, Is Twitter your website? lol…. how good, if it was 😉

Some years back, most news papers, tv News and some online publications tought us how internet is being used to scam people and for betrayal. It has so stuck in the minds of people that, they never dare to do an online transaction. And some people think Google too as a scam, because of various Google Cash Cow like scams. So I think writing about what to trust and what not to, would surly help many people in making right decision.

Not that I know many things. I am still learning and would love to share whatever I learn with like minded nOob friends!

So without hurting the regular readers, I have thought of writing about very basics of internet tools, blogging, Content Management System, how and why etc on this blog on Sundays.

So you got it — most of you may skip reading Technotip.org on Sunday and Saturday.

This post will be used as a document for later reference. Because I am sure, many people will ask what the hell I am writing on the blog. So I can point to this and can tell them that they can skip reading on Saturday and Sunday.

But it would be great, if you can come and help everyone with your valuable comments. Hope you remember your student days, where we learn a lot of complex things and we will be asked some questions related to basics of the subjects and we sometimes giggle to answer it. No one knows everything. So everyone’s comment will add value, even though its a basic thing.

And feel free to(actually I will be privileged) send any of your nOob friends to our blog.

Publish Guest Posts Under A Separate Username

Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense..

Create a user called Guest and then publish all the guest posts under that user name. This approach may help in multiple ways.

1. You can get all the guest posts from few clicks(under dashboard) — See all the posts published under the username Guest.
2. Visitors can see all the guest posts by clicking on the link Guest(if its clickable and displays all the articles published under the username Guest).
3. Visitors/readers confusion as to who wrote the article would be reduced to a certain extent.
Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense to your readers. This way you can eliminate a certain degree of confusion and add more clarity(and good usability). People will be knowing, whether its written by you or a guest writer – before clicking on the read more link.

Showing Authors Photo, Bio and a Link – using a smart plugin
Another nice way to show credit to guest writers is to show their bio, a small image and a link to their website/twitter a/c at the end of the article, in a well structured manner. Did you just say its a tedious job? No its not. There is a good plugin called Author Image, which can do the job for you. It creates a widget that you can insert in a sidebar, or much about anywhere and you can also add author’s description in addition to his/her image.

Who should care for it ?
If you are receiving 1 or 2 guest posts per month, then managing guest posts will not be a big challenge. But once your blog is out there for some more years and you blog consistently, you will start receiving a lot of guest post requests, so you will certainly need some strategy to manage them effectively. So keeping things organized from the beginning is smarter then messing up with things later.

What strategies do you follow to maintain/manage guest posts.

New “labs” feature for webmasters rescue – Google Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster tools has introduced new labs feature – Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.
With the introduction of labs in Google webmaster tools, they have brought up 2 useful things:

Google Webmaster tools has introduced new labs feature – Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.

With the introduction of labs in Google webmaster tools, they have brought up 2 useful things:
1. Fetch as Googlebot
2. Malware details

Fetch as Googlebot:
The Fetch As Googlebot tool lets you see a page as Googlebot sees it. This is particularly interesting tool. We can analyze poor performance in search engines and we can take certain steps to improve.
The cause for the poor performance may be that, your visitors may be seeing something and Googlebot something else. If you use rich media, by using Fetch As Googlebot, you can see how Googlebot see the same page – whether they are able to crawl it or not.
While using Fetch as Googlebot, you can simply click on the Fetch button to see homepage being fetched. Or enter the URL of the article(without homepage URL). Note that, you need to enter a /(slash) at the end of URL orelse the fetching will not complete successfully[Google should think of fixing this].
After few seconds of submitting the URL, refresh the page and click on Success link, to see the fetched codes.

fetch-as-googlebot-labs

Ex: Some months back we had a problem with our blog.
i.e.,
1. Search results started showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Pingback also started Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.

We had hard time figuring out what was the cause for all the duplicate title errors in our Webmaster tools.
Finally with the help of a tool called spider-test, we rectified and fixed the problem.
You can read the full story here – Problem with Pingback and Title tag – Its Solution.

Spider test is a tool similar to Fetch as Googlebot. Spider test is a search engine indexing simulator tool which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy.
Fetch as Googlebot is still in labs and we hope it will graduate with more power and usefulness.

Malware details:
This gives the details of the problem related to malware, which are affecting your web site. It gives the individual URLS and details such as the scripts/code that may be affecting the web site etc.
Now you know, where to look when you think that some malicious code has been injected into your website.

Use these tools and test your website, if you feel they are under performing in search engines, you may get to know what the culprit is.

You can access these tools:
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Labs, click Fetch as Googlebot or Malware details.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check(with a / at the end), and click Fetch.
Malware details will be listed automatically, if found any.

The Ideal way: Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Many people start the blog on a free blogging platform like blogger and WordPress. And after 6 months or 1 or 2 years time, if the person keeps on blogging, then he is almost certain to start feeling that he did a mistake! Mistake of starting the blog on a free blogging platform.

But do not think it as a mistake anymore. While starting a self hosted blog is a smart idea, but we know the fact that many blogs die within 1 to 6 months, so its good to start a blog on these blogging platform and invest some time to figure out whether blogging is for you or not. And it will be a good thing to learn the most basic things using those blogging platforms and then move or start a new self hosted blog.

Many people may advice to have a self hosted blog from day one, and we respect that idea too. If you can dedicate more time to learn and if you are commented enough for your blog and blogging, then either way you can start your blog.

Installing a self hosted WordPress is very easy and only takes minutes.

If you have a blog at blogger and want to transfer to your own self hosted WordPress blog, then here is a resource which will help you through the process.

For the text version of this tutorial you can follow this link labnol.org
And to be on safer side, do not forget to tell Google that you are moving your blog, at webmasters tool.

20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Everybody talks about optimizing the website as a whole, but it is of equal importance to optimize this single, most important page – HomePage (face of your website).

For almost all the websites, the most ranked and visited page is its homepage. So optimizing it makes a lot of sense. If you feel the same, then continue reading..

Here are some of the aspects that you can tweak, inorder to optimize your homepage:

1. Do not show full article on your homepage. If you are showing 10 full articles on your homepage, then it will take a lot of time to load.
And from users perspective, they may not have the patience to scroll down and digg your website looking for good content. Internet is full of information overload and they may just leave your website and go somewhere else.

On the downside, people need to do an extra click to get to the content, if you start showing post excerpts.

2. If you are showing only excerpts on your homepage, then try to limit it to 8 or 10 post excerpts. If you show 20 to 25 post excerpts on your homepage, then the user experience will again be bad.

3. Use less images on your homepage.: Images consume most of the bandwidth. Images can be used wisely to grab the attention, but if we do not take that extra care to optimize the image, then we will surely have to pay for that latter. It would be better to avoid more images on the homepage.

4. Use less advertisements on your homepage or no advertisement on your home page: The best example for this is Google. Google.com is the simplest and most used search engine in the world and still it doesn’t have a ad on its homepage. Get a clue from it.

5. Optimize all the images that you are showing on your homepage, using some image optimization tools.

6. As far as possible, try avoiding if-else programs on your homepage. Ex:- Showing one ad to facebook visitors and other for Search Engine visitors and another for people coming from Twitter!

7. Remove the widgets and badges from the homepage. Retain only the most important.

8. Avoid animated contents from your homepage, inorder to speedup the load time of your pages and to not divert the attention of your reader, from the beginning.

9. Choose a proper webhost, with good uptime, speed of servers and support.

10. Make use of custom Excerpt option in WordPress and make the excerpts on your homepage more meaningful. Create enthusiasm or the need to read more situation to someone who reads the excerpts on your homepage!

11. You can lessen the ads on the homepage and put link or banner to your own interesting articles or categories of articles. This will give the user more options to navigate. And you can engage your reader for more time, showcasing good articles.

12. Remove the digg, tweetmeme and other buttons from the article excerpts. Show them only on the full post, if necessary.

13. Use labels: Label all the things properly on your homepage. Ex: Recent articles, Popular posts etc, for better user experience. Visitors must not feel, as if they have landed in a wild forest!

14. Test your optimized homepage: Testing is the only way to go. Big internet companies like Google rely only on its continuous testing. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft has a lot of employees for testing. Now how can you do testing with your website/blog? Most of the times, owner of the blog gets blind to many components on the blog, like, the widgets, labeling, etc. So it is a good practice to arrange a party for your friends(who don’t know about your blog) and tell them to surf and give feed back about 2 or 3 websites(one of which is yours!). Keep doing it once in a while. Do not over do it. You may just endup in testing and may forget the main element of the blog, which is content.

15. Menu bar: Most surfers are used to the menu bar placed at the top, than on the sidebar. So it must be clearly placed in a prominent position and do not mix it with your categories and other stuffs.

16. Show navigation menu or main menu both in the header as well as in the footer.

17. Make sure to have “Popular Articles” or “Recommended Articles” list on the homepage. So that first time visitors know where to look at, for the best contents on your blog. And with the best content, they are more likely to stick to your blog.

18. Show your subscriber count or Twitter follower count as a social proof, if you have some significant numbers.

19. As far as possible avoid flash contents from homepage. You may annoy and drag your readers out of your blog even before they read any of your stuffs!

20. Make your website/blog logo clickable and link it to your homepage.

Please share your optimization tips with us. So that everyone of us can improve our website/blogs.

Assign Password to a Directory via cpanel

It is said that, no data online is safe. Someone can enter and see/use your online data. But we can always try our best to stay safe. Some of the things that we need to ensure is, a secure software (Ex:- like WordPress as a CSM) and a strong password. But at the end, backup of our website and database are the only hope for recovering the data(if some unfortunate things happen).

After receiving 3 to 4 emails with the same question, I thought of writing it on the blog. So here is the procedure for password protecting the directory through cpanel.

Log into your hosting account cpanel. Navigate to “Security” section. Click on the “Password Protect Directories” link.

Next a popup will appear, select the web root and click GO.

Select the directory that you want to password protect. This may be some what a puzzle! for first time user.

If you want to password protect a directory inside another directory, then click on the folder icon beside the link of main directory (see above image for better visualization).
Password-username-protect

Once you navigate to the directory that you want to password protect, click on the directory name and enter a name (any name), usename and password.

You can select and delete any of the older users by selecting the username and clicking on the Delete User button.

Why Password Protect ?
Password protect those folders which you want to secure.
For Example:- If you have a payment gateway, where you process your customers credit cards, then do not take chance or do not compromise with the security aspects. Its not your security, its your customers security, which is of prime importance!

Password protecting such sensitive directories is crucial. Customers would never feel comfortable to be your guest, if you are not serious about their security!