I can't believe I've kept this blog alive for six years. I wish I was posting more often, and I hope I can get back in that routine again soon.
I still spend occasional time tinkering with the blog software and performance. Let's call it a hobby. I've done a few things recently that have had a fairly major impact behind the scenes.
I updated my meta-robots tag to force Google to re-index the whole site. It was indexing the pages by date, which by default was returning an entire year's worth of posts for many searches. That's not a big deal for recent years, but older posts would cause ugly search results. Google now indexes article links directly. It was interesting to watch the search queries on the Google Webmaster Tools site plummet over the course of 8 weeks (!) while Google performed the indexing.
I noticed that several searches were for the Sony Qualia. I have a picture of the Qualia 005 in an older post. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I posted the raw JPG from my camera, which was a 1.2MB file. I've since scaled it down, but it turns out that some Qualia enthusiast sites were leeching the image and embedding it in their own pages while still being served from this site. So I updated the .htaccess settings in my images path to load a tiny GIF if the referrer isn't my site or the feedburner feed.
Also while fixing the Google search results, I noticed that the site was loading a lot slower than I expected. I discovered that the "moreentries" blosxom plugin was a major bottleneck. I used it to limit the number of posts per page and show a "previous/next" button. I never bothered to take a look at the code before, and I now I can't believe I had it in the pipeline for this long. I yanked it and replaced it with the much faster (and 1/10th smaller) paginate_simple plugin.
While I use Disqus for new comments, the older "writeback" comments are still available to read. However, they were a bit hidden, so now older posts with writeback comments have a "2 writebacks and 1 comment" link below the article.
Finally, I took some inspiration from Brian Cantoni's site optimization post and sped up the basic delivery of the site. It turned out that I was only GZIPing the article text but nothing else. Now everything is compressed by default thanks to mod_deflate, including all CSS and JavaScript. I also forced the Cache-Control max-age to be 10 days for all images, CSS, and JavaScript. The only thing that really slows the site down now is the Disqus comment system. Maybe I'll code a native plugin for it some day, but I'm fine with it for now.
