W3 Total Cache
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 23, 2010
One day last week my blog finally crossed the top 100,000 mark per Alexa. Since I write these posts in advance, I’m not sure what it’s sitting at today, but the day after reaching that one goal it was back over 100,000 the next day; c’est la vie.
 by Jared Smith |
Anyway, one of the things it had evaluated my site on was its loading speed, and it said my speed was less than 90% of the websites out there. Now I’m debating that one, but I do know that images can make a site load slower, as well as javascript things. So, based on a recommendation that was retweeted in a post from Kristi, I decided to try another one of these WordPress plugins to see if it would speed my site up some.
A long time ago I’d tried WP Super Cache and had nothing but problems from it, so I didn’t want to go that route again. This time I decided to try W3 Total Cache, the recommended plugin. As with all WordPress plugins, it was easy to load and activate; after that, well, easy isn’t part of the deal.
I’ll get this out of the way first; the plugin has yet to speed my blog up. I’m not going to say it’s loading slower, but I’m not seeing close the the type of results I thought I would. But I’m not sure why, and that’s my issue.
Like many other plugins, it comes with all these options of things you can do, but without any explanations of what all this stuff actually means. If you follow the link to the plugin site, you’ll see it lists all this stuff that the plugin can do; it doesn’t tell you what any of it means, or whether you should activate this or that and what the stuff that’s already checked means. I don’t consider myself a dumb guy, but sometimes this stuff is really confusing, and if it’s busting my brain then what’s it supposed to do to someone who knows nothing about technology?
I’m probably going to run it another week, and if it improves then I’ll be happy. If not, then I don’t see the point in keeping it around. Has anyone else worked with this and had really great results?
Follow up: a representative of the plugin saw this post on Twitter and sen me this link to another blog for instructions.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Easy Admin Color Schemes
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 10, 2010
Anyone with a WordPress blog knows that when you’re in the administrative area you have that one basic color, that color being gray. With one of my administrative tips, I showed you how you can go into the Users area and change the color to blue if you prefer.
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For someone like me, that’s still pretty boring. I like changing things up a bit more than that, and don’t always like having to stick to the colors a program is offering me. I’ve shown you what I did to some of the websites I visit with Stylish and Firefox in the past.
I decided to search for something that would allow me to make changes to the colors, and I came across a plugin called Easy Admin Color Schemes. It was highly rated by many other users, and it seemed to be the way to go.
Once you load it, you go into the settings of the plugin through your plugin area and it comes up with a menu with lots of different things you can do. There are 4 initial choices at the top, and I decided to go with the last one, which is kind of red. The picture you see above is a screen print of what my Admin area looks like now. This works for me, but of course I did have to experiment some before coming back to it.
You’ll see you have two choices for other color alterations you can do. You can create your own, which is what I did to play around some, or you can import other color schemes. The thing about a scheme is that all the colors will be somewhat similar, which isn’t a bad thing, based on what I went with. However, you might want to diversify things a bit, and if that’s what you want then creating your own scheme makes sense. I’ll probably end up doing that one of these days.
I’m not sure if you notice it from the picture, but I love how it’s highlighting all the different areas better than either the gray or blue were doing. Being able to see everything easier works for me. Colorizing things makes it fun as well. I’m such a big kid. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell
Four Things I’ve Noticed Lately
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 5, 2010
I love visiting a lot of blogs and leaving comments where I can. Because I’m all over the place, I tend to start noticing some things that maybe others hadn’t noticed. There are 4 things in particular I’m going to mention today.
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The first is that I’ve noticed on many blogs this thing at the bottom of the comment area asking me to click the box to prove I’m not a spammer. I thought that was a little odd until it hit me that it’s come about because of a new plugin called the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, created by Gail Gardner and Andy Bailey. This is in response to problems they and others have had with Akismet, something I don’t have a problem with but I understand the issue. Many people have said they haven’t had a single bit of spam since adding it; a couple of people said they’re still getting some. Still, it might be a nice addition for some of you to check out.
The second is that I’ve noticed that WordPress.com blogs aren’t sending me email asking me to subscribe to comments anymore. Man, that was greatly irritating to me, as you know if you’ve read this blog, because that’s the reason I was hesitant to leave comments on those blogs, just as I still am with Disqus blogs. I also noticed that I haven’t gotten that message from the last two Intense Debate blogs I wrote a comment on as well. Now, here’s the other side of that. To date, I’ve only gotten two notifications from blogs I’ve left a comment on as it pertains to any of these, and both were WordPress blogs. This tells me that either the owners of the blogs have to go in and select to send notifications to people they respond to or it just doesn’t work for everyone for some reason. I’ve tested this by going back to see if people have responded to a comment of mine, and if they have then I know I never got the notification. I’ll just ask those of you who have WordPress blogs on their site to check out your settings.
The third thing I’ve noticed seems to be happening only to me, unless other Firefox users have seen it but haven’t said anything. This is in relation to the CommentLuv plugin, which I absolutely love. Lately it seems I visit some blogs, write a comment, and the CommentLuv thing doesn’t see my blog. I thought that was wonky and decided to write the folks about it. However, I closed my blog once, popped it back up, went to the same site and put my information in and suddenly it was working again. This tells me the problem is with Firefox and not CommentLuv. I have absolutely no idea what that’s about or how to fix it. I do know that I went through the last update for Firefox and maybe it’s related to that somehow. But I haven’t been able to find on the search engines where anyone else has complained about this.
The fourth thing is that it seems that Twitter Tools isn’t fully working properly. In this case, if I write a post in advance, when it posts Twitter Tools doesn’t show it. It probably took me a couple of weeks to notice this, and it seems to be holding true for all 3 of my blogs. If I post immediately, it goes there, but otherwise, it’s a no-show. This is problematic because I write most of my posts beforehand and schedule them, and if I have to go back and post the link manually it defeats the purpose of having the plugin to begin with. On this one I’ve seen other people complain, but to date there’s been no real fix for the issue, though many think it’s related to the Twitter oAuth thing we all had to do back in August.
That’s all I have. If you’ve noticed anything odd, or wish to comment on any of the above, please share.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Count Per Day Plugin
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 20, 2010
One of the people I write for had this WordPress plugin on his site that I hadn’t noticed until relatively recently, and I thought it would be interesting to run it at least for a little while to compare it to Google Analytics.
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It’s called Count Per Day, and it’s creator, I believe, must be German, since you initially will see German on the site, but if you scroll down you’ll see it in English as well. Anyway, what it does is give you all sorts of stats about your blog, similar to Analytics, except it’s real time. In other words, if I left the blog for 3 hours and came back to look at the stats, they’d be different, even if only slightly. Well, that’s assuming I had visitors of course.
I wanted to see if the numbers I got from Count Per Day would be much different than what I get from Analytics. Strange as it always seems to me, you get different numbers from different places even though they’re supposedly looking at the same thing. I stopped looking at the numbers from my host because they just seemed, well, overwhelming when compared to that Feedburner box you see on the right side there. Analytics seems to make more sense, but every once in awhile it goes wonky; no idea why.
Since I installed it on September 9th, I decided to do a comparison from that point. Since it’s a live plugin, I know the numbers won’t match totally, but if they’re close then it’s all good. Count Per Day, which I’m now going to call CPD, shows I’ve had 6,211 visitors since September 9th; Analytics says I’ve had 1,119. I’m thinking that’s a pretty drastic difference. CPD shows I had 516 visits yesterday, Sunday; Analytics says 80. Already this isn’t going all that well.
Let’s look at some individual posts. Both show that my post on cleavage is still my most visited post, but CPD says it’s been visited 845 times since the 9th, while Analytics says it’s been visited 460 times. After that there’s no agreement on the rest of the top 10 at all, and I mean which posts have been visited the most by whom.
Am I confused? Absolutely! But who do I believe, and what to make of it? Man, I wish I knew. My mind tends to believe Analytics more than CPD. I keep thinking if I were actually getting the number of visitors the plugin tells me I’m getting that I’d almost have to be generating more income from this blog than I do. At the very least I should have way more subscribers to my RSS feed than I have with those kinds of numbers.
I’m not sure how long I’ll keep the plugin, especially if I’m not believing the numbers. My ego loves them, but the logical part of my mind doesn’t trust them. If you want to give it a try and see if your numbers are closer to reality, go for it.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2012 Mitch Mitchell
Setting Up Twitter Tools
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 24, 2010
As some of you know, I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools for almost a year. I found it to be a great program to set up how I wanted it to send my blog posts to Twitter, and it was the only plugin I could find at the time that would let me post-date my posts and still automatically go out.
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Then some of you saw my post a few days ago talking about twitter plugin changes that are on the way, that actually have been on the way for months but most of us hadn’t heard a lot about it. As it pertained to Twitter Tools at least, suddenly you had to go into Twitter and set yourself up as a developer, each individual blog, and get these codes for the program to continue working. I had written the WordPress people about it and they didn’t offer enough help for me to be able to get it right.
Well, if you paid attention to the comments on that post, you’ll see that my friend Chris, a super techie, offered instructions on how to get it done. Man, talk about nick of time type of stuff! However, it might be difficult following along with the comments. I’ve now done it 3 times for my 3 blogs; I can tell you what you need to do to get it done right.
First, go to your Twitter page, then go to Settings. Once in Settings go to Connections. After that, look to the right of the page where it says Developers, and click on the link at the end of that little paragraph. You might not have anything on this next page, but you’ll see a link at the bottom left that says “Register a new application ยป”; click on that.
Now you’re on the page where you’ll register your blog as a new application. By the way, I’m not sure if you’ll have other plugins you use with Twitter than you’ll have to do the same thing for, but for Twitter Tools, this is definitely how you go about it all.
The first thing is asks for is an image; you don’t have to do this ever, since you’re the only one who’s going to see it, but you can if you want.
Next it says Application Name. This should be the name of your blog, but it can be anything. With one of my blogs it said someone was already using the name, so I had to modify it slightly.
Next is the Description box. Just write something short and sweet in there on what your blog is about.
Next is Application Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Organization; I left this empty.
Next is Website; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Application Type, and it should be defaulted to “Browser”; if not, that what you want to select.
Next is Callback URL; type the entire URL of your website in there, including the “http://” part.
Next is Default Application Type; this one is important because it’s defaulted to “read only”, and you want “read and write” instead.
Next, you want to check the box next to “Use Twitter for Login“.
Finally the captcha; get it right, although it will let you do it again if you get it wrong; I hate those things!
Once you hit save, if it’s acceptable you’ll see a message telling you so. You’ll be on a new page, and you’ll have your first bit of information to put into your Twitter Tools settings on your blog. If you’ve updated it, open it up under Settings in your control panel on your blog. Once you have it open, you’ll see it asks you for a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. Both of those are on the Twitter page you’ve just been taken do. It’s best to copy and paste it in so you don’t mess it up.
After that, you’ll see you need information to fill in for Access Token and Access Token Secret. To get that, you go to this link, http://dev.twitter.com/apps and it will take you to a page where you’ll see the “application” you just registered, which will be your website. Click on it and you’ll go to another page where you’ll see a list of items to the right. Click on the one that says My Access Token and it’ll take you to the page with the information you need for the two items above.
Once you’ve put that in click Save, and if the plugin says it connected to Twitter you’re done with all the hard stuff, and just need to customize your settings based on what you want to do.
And there you go; whew! It turns out to look a lot more difficult than it really was. And I can’t think Chris enough for the help; you da man!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
