Sent from my iPhone
Looking through Google Webmaster tools, I discovered a warning about duplicate title tags coming from WordPress media attachment pages, like this one.
Here is a quick fix (place inside the
of header.php:
<?php if ( is_attachment() ) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
<?php } ?>
You can also adjust your title tag, to include some sort of prefix, like this:
<title>
<?php if ( is_attachment() ) { ?>Attachment: <?php } ?>
<!-- include your normal title stuff here -->
</title>
On the advice of Aaron Collegeman, I installed APC (Alternative PHP Cache) on my server and noticed an immediate performance boost.
Two days later, my MediaTemple DV was crashing — usually when I was in the WordPress admin. Turns out, APC’s default is 32Mb of memory.
Again following Aaron’s advice (and help), we doubled APC’s memory allocation to 64 Mb. APC is now holding steady around 60% of that new amount, and things are humming along.
Memory usage is up slightly for the server now, but CPU and Load are down. (Load spiked some when we increased the memory):
Still more performance work to do, according to Google Webmaster tools.
Hint: this is not the direction to go in, if you’re working on site performance:
There are many frustrating aspects to dealing with performance. For example:
Google Webmaster tools says one thing.
Google Page Test tool says something else.
And Yahoo, via YSlow, says something else (and more of it).
But my server tends to agree with Google Webmaster tools this week.
Next up:
Aldo sent me this video tonight. So proud of our tribe here in Winchester… an amazing group of people!
In 2004, I escaped the stress-fest known as the DC metro area and moved to the peaceful and beautiful Shenandoah Valley, effectively putting a mountain between DC and me.
By 2006, fully decompressed, I decided I’d made a terrible mistake and contracted a home builder in Austin, Texas. I was out of here!
The next part of the saga is a long story. The short version: the move didn’t happen.
I felt pretty stuck.
This was an exciting time in the world. Coworks were coming alive, Barcamps and Refresh meetups and hack weekends seemed to be taking place everywhere except Winchester. I was in a town without a single event like this, and I was pretty sure there weren’t any people who would attend such a thing around here anyway.
Thankfully, with Squidoo still very much in start-up mode, I worked a ton. But I spent my non-working hours moping around (and reading more stories about the cool stuff happening outside Winchester). I ended up driving back to DC a lot to attend some of the events there.
Finally, in 2008, I decided moping wasn’t a particularly good thing, and neither was all that driving. So I set out on a more positive and productive path to see what was possible.
The video starts with the story from that point on, where I discovered that I could use Twitter to search for people in the area, and include keyword searches for locating people with similar interests. Combining a search by zip code and the term “PHP” on Twitter helped me find Aaron Collegeman, who immediately became the symbol of hope for me in what might be possible.
After meeting Aaron and later watching him take an idea I had and build something beyond my expectations, I started dreaming again.
Bright Cowork came a short time later, after inspiring meeting with Marilyn Finnemore, who owned the coolest building in old town Winchester… designed for collaboration.
So here’s what happened:
Here are a few of the coworkers who were part of this video:
Aaron Collegeman: Lead developer at Squidoo, founder of Fat Panda, and one of the greatest developers I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with in my 16+ year web career.
Marilyn Finnemore: CEO of Mind & Media and owner of Bright Center, and the one who took a big chance on making Bright Cowork happen.
Aldo Bello: CCO of Mind & Media, documentary film wizard, a guy who reads as much as anyone I know, and one of the most likable people in this world.
Scot Lienke: Drummer and operations manager at Syscom Services, and all around nice guy with one of the best laughs around (though Aaron is in the same league).
Gannon Beck: author, illustrator and founder of OO-RAH.com. Gannon has taught me more about collaboration and learning than I thought possible.
There are many others who are part of this awesome community. If you’re here or find yourself visiting, please stop by and say hi.
So happy to share this… Aaron really built something remarkable. WordPress posts to Facebook walls, with a ton of attention to the details.
As I continue on my site performance kick, I’ve found an excellent resource for compressing files using Gzip, to speed up a site.
Check out How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression.
Thanks to Google Webmaster Tools, I discovered that WordPress was generating duplicate titles for my Category and Tag list pages. Not good.
Say you have a Category named “Videos”. The Category list page shows 10 posts in that category, with “previous” and “next” links to see 10 more.
and so on…
WordPress generates the exact same title for each page:
<title>Videos</title>
What it should be doing instead:
<title>Videos</title>
<title>Videos - Page 2</title>
<title>Videos - Page 3</title>
and so on…
Insert this in your title tag (header.php) of your WordPress theme, and you should be good to go:
<?php
if ($paged > 1) { // if the page is the category index, skip the rule
echo(' - Page '); // the prefix for the page number
echo($paged); // the page number
}
?>
I’ve been focusing a lot of attention on site performance research.
This is one of the best posts I’ve found on the subject:
Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess by Samuel Santos.
