My site isn’t super popular – I only get between 460 and 490 page views a month; my reports from Google Analytics tell me that. Most of my readers are from North America – about 30 or so a month from Canada and about 170 or so from the United States. I have about 100 readers from Europe each month and close to 40 readers from Asia and the Australian/New Zealand region.
I don’t write much on the site. I write when I’m bored or when I have something important to say. Occasionally, I’ll come up with some genius and write something intellectual. And once in a while I write a review of something. I think I touch almost all topic, too. One, in particular, has turned out to be my most popular topic which gives me 70% or more of my traffic: my Newton’s Law of Porn article.
It should probably come as no surprise. Porn is a huge business. Its considered one of the vices that generate the most tax revenue for states. Other vices include alcohol and tobacco products and you can see how much money they generate – billions to the companies that sell them and millions (possibly billions) to the states; some places like New York City have a state and a city tax that could be 60% of the pack of cigarette’s cost!
Anyway, for some reason, people like my article on PornoTube; it’s the most popular outbound link! I think I should get some of their ad reveue (if they make any) for referring so many viewers. Now that I think about it, I should come up with a porn site for people to contribute videos to. It would be a crowded market, though, I’m sure.
I’m proud of that article – its a law of society that, I think, is almost as the universal truths of physics and chemistry. But I wish I could come up with other articles that got that kind of attention without the easy porn angle to attract visitors. Don’t get me wrong, I like the visits and I like people reading my article… I just wish I could write some other cool post that got similar views on a topic other than one of the popular vices in the world.
I think I have a performance problem with PHP and Javascript in Firefox running on my Ubuntu computer. I just recently reinstalled Ubuntu and got the 64-bit version to work (after fixing the video driver problem) and the speed difference is amazing! I never thought I’d see such an increase in loading times. But I run a few blogs and two photo galleries on my host, DreamHost – which, by the way, did work out their performance issues and things are way better than they used to be. But I still think there is something going on and I think its my choice of browser/OS.
I first noticed in on my photo site. I have a Gallery2 for my pictures and the theme I installed uses AJAX to load pictures that you click on to view (you know, the full size pictures – not the thumbnails). On my Ubuntu/Firefox setup, the picture would not load when you clicked on it for the first time. On a refresh, however, the picture drew very fast – the way I expect it to. Then I asked a friend to log on to the site and tell me how his performance was. Perfect – and he runs Vista RC1 (or 2) with Firefox 1.5.7. Then, on a hunch, I broke out my laptop, fired up The Fox and went to my site. PERFECT! My only conclusion was it must be a combination of my OS or the build of Firefox.
Thinking it could be the OS, I went to my wife’s Mac where she has Firefox 1.5.5 installed. Same problem. I had to refresh the page just to see the image. Now I thought it was the browser but wondered why it happened on all but my Windows computer. Could it be that because OS X is based on Linux/Unix that was the problem. I tried updating my Java code from Sun’s website but I only find the JRE.
Its not a hardware issue. Like I said, my Ubuntu PC suffers from this performance issue. So does my wife’s Mac. But my laptop doesn’t. And my Windows latop is a POS by today’s standards. Its a 1.6Ghz processor – single core and one of the first Centrino based setups by IBM/Lenovo. It has 512MB of RAM (like my wife’s Mac running OS X 10.4.7) but minuscule to the 4GB I have on my AMD X64 2 box that is suffering from this problem. I’ve maxed out the hardware on my Ubuntu PC and there isn’t anything faster. The connection isn’t a problem either because the laptop is using WiFi and the others are hard wired.
I don’t even know for sure if its a Javascript issue. It could be a PHP problem or even a MySQL thing but the site’s performance has been great all things considering. I can see it in the site reports I have generated; the response time has improved by 200%. I also see this issue with the new K2 theme which has that AJAX scroller thing for past posts. Since AJAX is just Javascript, it doesn’t appear anything other than that kind of performance issue.
But I don’t know how to track down the core problem or how to fix it. Anyone out there have an idea on how to make things faster?
This one has to be quick. I’ve got lots of work to do today.
I’m changing the theme again because I want to add a little more color to the site – make it more energetic. I still want to keep it light and image free so I downloaded K2 and installed it. So far, it looks ok but it looks like every other K2 theme out there. I’ve got to come up with a new color scheme for it and then, I think, it will look good. To do that, I’m using two sites that help web developers get the right color combos.
The first one is an old favorite of mine and it’s a free offering from VisiBone called Color Lab. VisiBone sells ‘cheat sheets’ for HTML, CSS, javascript, fonts, and other website related topics so when coding, one doesn’t always have to look at a large book or toggle between windows to find information. And while I haven’t purchased their books or cards (but tempted to), I have used their free tool. That tool shows you a 216 color pallet that displays the hex, RGB, and CMKY values for any color you select. As you select other colors, it shows how the previous color looks next to the newly selected color and you can view up to 8 color sections at any one time. You also see how each color would look as a background and foreground color so you can pick 8 colors and see how they look as text, links, hovers, background, and headers together. You can do all this without even having to code yourself – it takes the trial and error out of the color selection process.
The other site I am using is the Color Palette Generator from DeGraeve.com. Steve DeGraeve has created a wonderful set of tools that anyone can use. There are too many to list but check them out here. The palette generator, however, lets you take an image on the web and create hex values of the colors in that image. If you like a company logo, for example, point to it and let his code tell you what the colors’ hex translations are. I’m tempted to take some color swatches from Home Depot, scanning them in and posting them to this site and use Steve’s tool to do its thing. I’m even thinking of taking screen shots of other websites and using those colors for inspiration.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what I’ll do color wise, but these two websites are going to help me. If you are into HTML, CSS, and design. These two offerings may help you pick the right colors.
I’m in the process of changing hosts. Sorry, DreamHost… you seem to be going through too much for me to use you.
But the change will not be immediate. I want to organize my other sites at the same time and get them all on one registrar. Then I want to look for a new host. It will take some time to do that and once I find one that seems to have a decent reputation and has no problems, I’ll begin migrating all my blogs over starting with my development blog where I test out my code.
In the meantime, I changed the theme yet again to test out a few things. Sorry for all the change-up but its what I feel I need to do to get this blog done right.
Well, it seems like DreamHost did fix most of their problems and the speed in which my sites are loading are more in line with what I want them to be. I still think there is room for improvement but I’m not convinced its a hosting issue. Rather, I think, it’s a MySQL or PHP configuration problem and the DB queries aren’t running as fast as they should be. If anyone knows how to tweak a MySQL/PHP/WordPress server system (and can speak in a way that novices like me can understand), I would appreciate the help.
The new theme is really growing on me. The theme I choose, blog.txt by Scott Allan Wallick at plaintxt.org, is perfect for my new found sense of minimalism. I ran into some trouble with the theme and widgets and Scott was very helpful and solved my problem within minutes of me showing him what was going wrong. I really can’t thank him enough – for creating the theme in the first place and helping me work through that problem; I’ll be sure to make a donation as soon as I get a new job (I promise). I haven’t added any widgets yet but I will – soon – when I figure out what minimal amount of information I want displayed on the sidebar.
Tomorrow is the first big cleaning day for the junk that I marked for the trash. Some of that stuff is already in piles on the floor waiting for Oscar the Grouch to take it away. And since I’ll have time (and more space) tomorrow, I’ll find even more to toss. I’m going to be good about the clothes, though, and donate what I don’t want to a local charity.
Once I free myself of all the physical clutter, I promise to get to that informational mess that is my hard drive. I’ll delete those files and I’m sure to free up gigabytes worth of space. Its not that I need the space, I just can’t find anything in the endless ‘To-Sort’ directories I’ve created from files that littered my ‘Desktop’ and ‘My Documents’ folders.
And once that’s all done, I’m going to retool the blog a bit. I want to clean up the categories and create a tree structure to better organize the posts. And then, I hope to be more prepared to write the way I want to.
If anyone has tips on how to de-clutter and transition into a mess-free life, please, let me know.