I'm Just Sharing

There’s a plugin for WordPress called WP Super Cache that I’ve been experimenting with lately. The main purpose of it is to helps speed your WordPress blog up by creating a series of HTML files out of your PHP files, and thus it speeds up your site because PHP can be a heavy load. I’m not going to get into all of the science of it, because frankly I don’t quite get how it works, so instead I’m going to talk about what I’ve seen thus far.

First off, you have to remember to do a little bit of configuring before the plugin works. I’ve noticed that the first time I ran the program, then the second time I’ve decided to run the program (I inactivated it once; I’ll come back to that), I forgot to enable the cache, which it mentions on the plugins page. If you forget to do that, your blog will hang, and it’ll take you forever to get back into it; anyone else, for that matter. Also, there are other choices and recommendations for things to do after you’ve enabled the cache; some I’ve activated, some I haven’t. For instance, you can enable the compression of files, which helps things move faster, and I’ve done that, although it does warn that some ISPs might not work well if you do that; so far, so good. At the same time, I didn’t enable something called Lockdown, which is supposed to protect you against a spike in comments. Trust me, I’ll feel elated with a spike in comments, at least the first time around.

The first time I inactivated the program because my blog started running really slow, and it was the last thing I’d remembered adding at the time. Later on, I thought about the javascript, which I wrote about here, and of course it did turn out to be the javascript issue all along. So, I brought the program back, and things have gone along pretty well.

I did have one more issue, though, which led to my forgetting to enable the cache again. This morning I tried to update my blog to 2.6.5 because of more security flaws, and this blog just wouldn’t load using the WP Automatic Update program. I wondered what was wrong, so I went and updated my other blog, which is also WP, and it worked just fine. I then figured it had to be this plugin, so I inactivated it, and voila. I then reactivated it after the update, and, of course, just now went through that problem of not being able to get to the blog until I enabled the cache; ugh. I wonder how many people tried to come to the blog and couldn’t because of that idiotic mistake. Oh well,…

Right now, the jury is still out on this plugin, but the blog does seem to be moving pretty fast right now. Unfortunately, using this plugin didn’t affect the bad performance of the javascript in any fashion, which was disappointing. However, I’m doing some research on that issue, and if it works out I’ll write about it here, so stay tuned.