Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Folks, I’ve made the move to my own domain. It’s a little rough right now, but as I do a little more housekeeping and decorating, it will feel much more like home!
My friends, it has come to my attention that WordPress offers a much better product to fit with the style I want this blog to evolve into. Entries will continue as often as possible, but with a much nicer interface. I am also combining this blog with my personal blog under a common domain, http://airbornesurfer.wordpress.com
It is my hope that you enjoy my ramblings in addition to other sorts of geekery that my blog will continue to provide.
Could it possibly be that I’ve succumb to the social media craze du jour that is Twitter?
Possibly.
It would seem that Twitter is a little more than an–excuse the expression–fly-by-night social media site. Yeah, it’s been around for a while now and everybody and their sibling, cousin, and grandparent uses it, so I figured I should get in on the act. At least as far as the blogging goes. Simply put, I’m giving it a trial run. Now that everything has become so intertwined (Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc.), it’s easy for me to update one on the run via the good ol’ Tweet.
So here’s the plan:
WordPress already updates Facebook with new blog posts, so Twitter updates will go directly into WordPress. Granted, this may mean that WordPress will show some odd musings in 149 characters or less, but I think being off-topic and random is more in line with the spirit of this blog. At least, it’s more in line with my character.
Let me know what you think.
I’ve got a major organizational project underway, going through my archives and building new websites for old projects to migrate everything under the AirborneSurfer.com domain. As such, I started to build a new website for the old Afterburn podcast, but I couldn’t upload the 15MB MP3 files because of the silly 2MB WordPress max upload size.
I started by digging through the plugin “store”, trying a few “upload enhancer” plugins that only gave lip service to the larger upload size. To actually increase WordPress max upload size, you’ll need to do a little editing on the back end. Open a text editor and create a file named php.ini, then add the following lines of code:
memory_limit = 100M
upload_max_filesize = xxM
post_max_size = xxM
file_uploads = On
Where xx denotes your desired file size in MB. 100 is a safe number in most cases, but note that your max_post_size value must be larger than your upload_max_filesize value otherwise you’ll have some heartache when you try to publish a post with one of those large files embedded in it! Save the file and upload it to your the wp-admin folder in your WordPress directory. It couldn’t be much simpler.
I’ve been on a bit of a cleaning kick the past few days–probably because the new year is always a good excuse to declutter as much as possible. As such, I have taken to cleaning up and optimizing my website here. I’ll be fixing a few things as the year progresses, piecemeal as always. I’ll be cleaning up broken links as much as possible, removing posts that aren’t relevant anymore, and generally working to optimize WordPress as much as I can.
To start to optimize WordPress, I would start with deleting any database tables left behind from plugins that you have since uninstalled. There is a great plugin that will take care of most of the heavy lifting for you in this regard: Plugins Garbage Collector.
Once installed and activated, you’ll find the plugin under the “Tools” menu on the WordPress admin panel. Make sure the “Search none-WP tables” radio button is selected, then click “Scan Database”.
The plugin will present a list of all the non-Wordpress database tables, but do exercise caution here. You absolutely should back up your database before proceeding. Check the box by each of the tables you don’t need and click the delete button.
Now that all the unnecessary database tables are cleared up, the next step to optimize WordPress is cleaning up all the ancillary junk that gets bogged down in your website–orphaned metadata, automatic drafts of posts, etc. The WP-Optimize plugin scans the most common sources of junk files in your website and deletes them, speeding up caching, prefetching, and other behind-the-scenes functions that make a WordPress site run smoothly.
Lastly, I need to clean up the unused images that I’ve uploaded. Not only do I have images scattered about that I have not used for any articles, but WordPress make four copies of each image for use in various areas! For this, I’m going to use DNUI (Delete Not Used Images) to scan my site and remove all the unused files. This isn’t so much an optimization, but a way to recover a significant amount of space on my server.
DNUI also lives in the Tools menu on the WordPress admin panel, so you should see it conveniently located next to the Garbage Collector. The first thing to do is click the “Options” tab, then click to create a backup folder and enable backups–just in case. (Un)Check any other options you wish, and click the “Images” tab to run the scan. The plugin will list any unused image files it finds in your library. All you have to do is click to delete them. A word of caution here: DNUI will list images from draft posts as “not used”, so please verify the images before deleting them.
For the interim, until I get all my drafts fleshed-out and posted, I’ll stick to manually deleting unused images. To do this, click the “Library” link under the “Media” menu on the WordPress admin panel. In the drop-down menu where it says “All media items”, click “Unattached” to show all the images that aren’t attached to a post. This is also not foolproof as it will list featured images and header images that are not already attached to a post, so err on the side of caution here. My suggestion would be to make a post with all your featured and header images, then set it to private.
That’s really all there is to easily optimize WordPress! Run these steps every few months and you’ll have a faster, more efficient website!