Website Optimization Measures, Part III

Published on Mar 17, 2008 (updated Feb 5, 2024), filed under development, optimization. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

This and 133 other posts are also available as a well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, here’s a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).

The last weeks meant a lot of work on this site despite being busy in Oldenburg and catching a neat cold. Apart from inspiration to publish a more “generic” optimization guide it suggested to write another part for this optimization series, which had a nice start with parts I and II.

• Featuring more articles on home and archive pages. Thanks to SEO considerations, no, inspiration by Jared Spool, I opted for higher link density on my website. Although I am looking for load time and performance optimization almost everywhere, a handful more teasers didn’t mean a problem—instead, featuring 10 instead of 5 publications per homepage or archive page is helping user orientation.

• Checking and updating ping service lists. If I were a traffic-generating machine, I’d probably make a different article from that, but I don’t not now. Browsing hypertext I found a few sites that advertised ping services I didn’t include in my WordPress config yet, so I thought it might be useful to check those services as well as the ones that I have pinged before. I ended up with a new list eventually helpful for you, too (comment otherwise, please):

  http://ping.bitacoras.com/
  http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
  http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
  http://coreblog.org/ping/
  http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2F
  http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2Fen%2F
  http://api.feedster.com/ping
  http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
  http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2F
  http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmeiert.com%2Fen%2F
  http://ping.myblog.jp/
  http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
  http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
  http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
  http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
  http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
  http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
  http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
  http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
  http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
  http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

• Fixing WordPress and WordPress plugins. My favorite. I noticed problems with blockquote element nesting and finally managed to fix that by patching functions-formatting.php (WordPress connaisseurs will notice that this is a file from a former WP release). I also fixed the del/ins element handling in xhtml-strict-10.php of Jamie Talbot’s X-Valid plugin. (If you’re using an earlier WordPress 2.x release or Jamie’s plugin and want to get rid of these problems, drop me a line.)

• Checking and improving WordPress blog security, which must be something every WordPress blog owner loves to do. Now that I still haven’t updated my WordPress installation, I instead watched out for additional information on WordPress security and felt inspired by Frank Bültge’s WordPress security tips (in German).

• Trying to fix the layout grid (when it was broken). Mine was, and still is, so feel free to name this point pointless 😉 I failed fixing this site’s grid because I didn’t take enough time to plan it upfront. I stopped efforts to repair it because it wasn’t “too broken,” you barely notice the problem. Lazy as I sometimes seem to be I end this attempt at documenting a bugfix with a quick reference to a “layout grid” search.

• Playing with types. I played with certain fonts and decided to switch to Cambria as the main type. Skipping the reasons that led me to Cambria I am instead referring to this order of fonts I now feed meiert.com visitors’ user-agents with: cambria, palatino, georgia, 'bitstream vera serif', serif;. For what it’s worth.

• Adding more prominent update information. Discovering a few sites that concluded that some of my articles must be outdated just because the URI contained an older date suggested me to display update information at the top of pages, too. Thus, “last update” is not just mentioned at the end of the page but also in the “intro” element below the heading, when appropriate, for example “Jens Meiert, April 1, 2007 / March 17, 2008”.

  Adding “[…], updated March 17, 2008” appeared to be even more clear, but a quick usability test showed that people understood regardless. While additional tests should help, I’ll monitor whether people notice that I take care of older articles. I do, and I do add notes when publications get “deprecated.”

This has been quick again, especially since I changed many other things as well—and found so much additional evidence that the best weapon to improve maintainability is to remove complexity. But, we already covered that.

This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other optimization posts!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)