Archive for May, 2007

• 05.29.07 Speeeeed posted in Web Design, Website Updates

  Did you notice? The blog is WAY faster than it was yesterday. I got my CSS compressed with Marco’s plugin, my javascript optimized, compressed and re-ordered, and my pages being served with gzip compression. Man, what a difference. My page load times cut in half. Read on for a few tricks I learned today…

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• 05.29.07 Wordpress Optimization posted in Web Design

  I’m going to take a “back-to-work” break after the long weekend and let my friend Marco do the blogging today. He’s got a great article on some things that anyone can do to optimize their Wordpress site (or any site), and it includes a few things I hadn’t heard before. Also included in the article is a great new plugin that he wrote, called WP-CSS-Streamliner, which will take all of the CSS files linked in each page, combine them in the order they were linked, optimize them, gzip-compress them and serve them up before any javascript is loaded. This is especially great if you’re running anything like Extended Live Archives or WP-Lightbox, which stick their own CSS files into the head. It’s running right now on the main C6 site, and although it comes with no guarantees, it’s working great. Check it out: On a quest for the ultimate website performance.

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• 05.28.07 Waiting posted in Movies
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• 05.28.07 Ajax Usability: Tab History posted in Web Design

  Today’s tip gleaned from my experience in building the latest Circle Six Design website is more of a hint, or suggestion, than a how-to. It’s mostly about javascript, and my javascript is pretty crazy for this, mostly because I’m not very experienced with javascript and it’s kind of hacked. However, what I got working is worth sharing…

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• 05.27.07 Tongue Tied posted in Movies
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• 05.26.07 Storing a Query posted in Web Design

  I’ve finally “finished” the C6 website to my satisfaction and am ready to start blogging a little more regularly. I thought I’d kick it off with a new series on “how I did it” and reveal a few techniques I learned/developed in the process of making the new site. Today I’m going to go over the last one I figured out: Storing a Wordpress database query while you run a second one on a page…

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• 05.24.07 Finally Finished, Almost posted in Web Design, Website Updates

  I finally went live with the new version of the Circle Six Design site. It’s pretty heavy on the prototype.js with a lot of custom effects, but it’s completely valid and works just fine if you turn off javascript ;). It’s pretty much custom code from the ground up, still based on Wordpress, of course. I had a lot of fun doing this one and I’d love to know what you think!

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• 05.22.07 Pathway: Wiki Breadcrumbs posted in Geekery

  Pathway is an amazing little OS X tool for surfing Wikipedia. It lets you see a map view of the pages surrounding your search and then creates a breadcrumb trail of your path through the pages. You can add multiple start points, track notes and files for each page, download and preview images and re-arrange the maps by dragging. It’s a sweet tool for research, and great fun for downtime!

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• 05.21.07 To Whom It May Concern posted in General

  I thought I’d jot a quick post tonight. I’ve sorely neglected the blog for a few days now, having become obsessed with a complete overhaul of the main Circle Six Design site. It’s going very well, a Victorian/Noir design with a touch of javascript and a few maneuvers that I pulled out of thin air to impress the ladies. I also fixed the link on 30Cal so if you haven’t tried it yet, check it out. One of my visitors sent me an enhancement for the Wordpress Theme Bundle, so look for an updated release of that very soon. I’m seriously considering doing all of the more advanced tags and still planning to get it up-to-date with the new codex. All this and more, as soon as I get the new site online. Oh, and I’m building the new site on WP 2.2, so it’s giving me a chance to test my plugins and bundles for errors, which I’ll report/update soon.

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• 05.17.07 iFreeMem: Free Up Some RAM posted in Geekery

  iFreeMem from Activata is a utility that I’ve been testing out lately with excellent results. It reconfigures your available RAM to speed up access times. The benchmarks are impressive, but more importantly, so are the results. Read through the information page for a rundown on how and why it works. The dock icon gives you a pie chart of your wired/active/inactive/free memory that lets you keep track of resources easily and run iFreeMem when necessary. It takes about a minute to optimize my 3 Gigs in my Macbook and after it runs there is a significant speed increase and a decrease in spinning beach balls. Which is great, because I hate beach balls. You can download a 15 day trial of iFreeMem and registration is only $8.00.

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