Chris K Designs

In the current web-traffic economy, it’s widely believed that the number of links back to your site, the better your ‘Google Juice’.

Just as your mom always told you, “The crowd you hang out with gives a first impression.” Having your links on sites that are seen as using “BlackHat SEO Methods” may hurt your ranking. Keep that in mind while building links…so how do you maintain your internet rep? I’m curious to see how you all build your back links.

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Recently I posted about how to clean house on your tag taxonomy in WordPress. I thought I might also suggest two plugins that will help you keep your WordPress MySQL database a little cleaner and a little faster. With the introduction of WordPress’ revision system, each time you edit a post or page, an entry is made into the database. While this can be helpful during the editing/revision process, after the post is live and no longer in review, the list of rows in the database can grow to the 100′s for each post depending on how many time it was edited. This leaves us with what is called ‘Overhead’.  Here’s what the fine people over at Stackoverflow had to say about overhead:

Every database will, over time, require some form of maintenance to keep it at an optimalperformance level. Purging deleted rows, resequencing, compressing, managing index paths, defragmenting, etc. is what is known as OPTIMIZATION in mysql and other terms in other databases. For example, IBM DB2/400 calls it REORGANIZE PHYSICAL FILE MEMBER.

It’s kind of like changing the oil in your car or getting a tune-up. You may think you really don’t have to, but by doing so your car runs much better, you get better gas mileage, etc. A car that gets lots of mileage requires tune-ups more often. A database that gets heavy use requires the same. If you are doing a lot of UPDATE and/or DELETE operations, and especially if your tables have variable length columns (VARCHAR, TEXT, etc), you need to keep ‘er tuned up.

So how can we keep this to a minimum? There two plugins I recommend and use to keep my overhead to a minimum.

Delete-Revision – Download

Alright, apart from a little translation issue in some of the buttons, this plugin has done it’s job for me. Heck, even in the less than 30 minutes I’ve spent writing this, I already have 2 revisions just for this post.

Delete Pesky and unwanted revisions from old posts.

I’m not going to delete these revisions just yet, I would never delete a revision from an article I’m currently working on. But just yesterday I removed about 100 revisions from the database. That’s 100 rows in the posts table I don’t have to worry about. I strongly recomend that if you are going to be deleting things from the database, that you make a backup. I use a Cron script to optimize and backup. If you are a multi-author blog with quite a few posts going on at the same time, I might suggest that you coordinate a time for this action, when no one is in the middle of authoring. Just setup a time of about 20 minutes each week that you can go in and clean house on revisions. After you delete them, I then recommend the next plugin.

Optimize DB – Download

This plugin shows up in your ‘Tools’ menu and gives you a snapshot of the size of your database, as well as the amount of overhead that currently exists. With the click of a button that says ‘Optimize’ you can reduce the overhead and clean up those nasty bits of data left over.

The main screen of Optimize DB

You might be saying at this point that 7.1 KB of overhead isn’t that bad right? Well keep in mind that I run a few automated Cron scripts to optimize my databases every Sunday evening. At times, depending on the work I’ve done throughout the week, this can be an overhead of up to 512kb which in the scheme of things, is about 1/3 of my total database in overhead. Yikes!

Hopefully these two plugins will give you a little more control over the mess that can become your WordPress database. I wish you happy optimization and low overheads .

Cheers!

One of the least commonly used features of WordPress that I didn’t start using until way too late in the game is the ability to schedule posts. That’s right, you don’t have to publish immediately or leave a post as a draft. You can specify the exact date and time a post will go live. Why would you want to do this? I’m glad you asked.

Free your mind…
It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of blogging is typically coming up with content. Some days it flows out of you like, well, you get the idea. Other days you sit there with a blank compose screen just waiting for the words to come to you. When you are having a day like the former, write up as many posts as you can, and schedule them to come out later. This way you aren’t blasting a ton of content at once, and you know you will have content coming to your visitors later. It really takes the load off when you get another chance to sit down and write.

Consistency is key
Once you have built up a few posts ahead of yourself, you now have a consistent stream of content coming to your users. The more often you post, the more viewers will come back to read your content as you are now a reliable source. What would have been a struggle to write, edit, and post all at once, is now a continuous set of posts coming out a day or two after you have written them, without you having to remember to publish them. There is something satisfying about hitting that ‘Schedule’ button on the post and knowing that you will have a post go live while on your drive to work, or while you are still sleeping even.

Continue reading “3 Reasons to Schedule Blog Posts” »

The battle at hand (plugins versus performance) doesn’t usually become a concern until it’s too late. However, with a little preparation, research, and knowledge you can have the functionality you want out of your WordPress site, with as little impact to performance as possible. With the ability to extend the functionality of your WordPress site at a moment’s notice using plugins, it’s no mystery why WordPress and it’s plugins have become so popular. From the perspective of a publisher, using the platform is a dream come true. Unfortunately, as with all things, the more complexity you put into the mix, the greater possibility of complications.

How Does a WordPress Plugin Work?
You may have quite a few plugins already installed on your current WordPress site. But, do you know what exactly is happening for those plugins to work? Breaking it down into the simplest form, a plugin for WordPress works by taking advantage of what are called “Hooks.” A Hook is a predetermined point in the WordPress framework at which a plugin developer can add new functionality or modify and remove current WordPress functionality. Some WordPress plugins use settings to determine the output it creates. These settings are stored in the database table, containing all of the settings for WordPress, called wp_options (or in a multisite environment wp_sitenumber_options). As WordPress goes through it’s standard process to deliver content, it stops at each one of these Hooks and checks to see if a function has been associated with it, and if so, runs the function.
Continue reading “Plugins vs. Performance: Fight!” »

If you have been using WordPress for quite some time, no doubt that you have built up quite a collection of tags and categories. If you’ve ever wanted to clean a little house with your tags, you can do it quick and easy if given access to your MySQL command line interface. The following command will remove all tags that have a post count of “0″ (meaning no posts are using these tags).

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count = "0";

Want to remove any tags that are only being used in 1 post or less? Simple, use the following:

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count < "2";

Now go to your Post Tags management screen and look on in amazement as you now have a manageable number of tags. Keep in mind that this is irreversible, once you run this query...those tags are long gone and will have to be recreated.