As a tech guy, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes.  Worse than these mistakes was the time I ignorantly spent on technical tasks that didn’t produce results.  So, I figured I’d help out those searching for what to do next.  Here are 5 things you can do on the frontend of your blog to increase its performance.

1. Cache your pages: First off, what does cache mean?  Simply enough, it means that your blog or site saves a version of a certain page for faster delivery to viewers.  For example, check out Bostinnovation’s About Page, which is cached.  Instead of different viewers asking Bostinnovation’s server for the same text and the same images, Bostinnovation delivers a saved version of this page which makes the page load more quickly.  If you are using WordPress, there is an awesome plugin called WP Super Cache, which I highly recommend
2. Compress your CSS:  The less lines of CSS the better.  With this in mind, check out Icyboard’s CSS Compressor tool.  Simply copy-and-paste your CSS and it will reduce the size of your CSS.  A couple of notes: First is to keep an uncompressed version of your CSS somewhere as well.  Making changes to compressed CSS is not pretty.  Second, always check out your site in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.  CSS is handled a little differently by these browsers, so it is best to check all of them right after a compression
3. Reduce the Amount of External Javascript:  Google Analytics, Facebook plugins and Twitter follower widgets all use javascript code inserted into your blog’s code.  For example, check out the Yadda Blog’s Google Analytics and Disqus source code here.  These plugins can be extremely useful and quite necessary, but they can also degrade the speed of your site.  When Twitter is down, it’s javascript code in your blog can stall, thus affecting your readership’s ability to use your site.  If you must use these external javascript calls, be sure to place them in the <footer> of your blog.  This ensures that the rest of your site loads properly before getting to these external plugins.
4. Compress your images: Like CSS, a compressed image is quicker to load than an uncompressed one.  An uncompressed image usually looks better, but if you can withstand a little image degradtion, then definitely compress the image.  Here is a pretty decent tutorial on how to compress an image
5. Add forward slashes to your internal links: Believe it or not, clicking “http://blog.pinyadda.com/” is actually faster than “http://blog.pinyadda.com“.  Basically, the forward slash clarifies that the current link is the end of the road and doesn’t look for more stuff.  Notice how links without a “/” will redirect to the same link but with a “/” appended. It’s a small change, but a professional one.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment, where I’ll go into server-side changes you can make to open-source languages like PHP and MySQL as well as must-use tools to monitor your site’s performance.

After learning my lesson last week about asking Austin to write an introduction, I decided to go with a more standard intro:  Call me Ishmael.  Here is a data post about paywalls.

Here are the amount of articles that mention “paywall” or “paid content” in the title since June 1st, 2010:

(click image to enlarge)

• The massive peak around July 1st and thereafter has to do with 3 Gannett papers throwing up a paywall

(more…)

Investigative journalism might be the most important type of content on the internet.  It transmits the most important information and this takes time, critical thinking and courage to investigate large and very powerful institutions.  So when ProPublica, the investigative journalism beacon, agreed to speak with us, we jumped at the opportunity.

YaddaBlog: So what is ProPublica?

ProPublica: ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

(more…)

*Author’s update:  the Compete.com data should be dismissed.  Darren Rowse of Problogger states that his site receives upwards of 500,000 uniques, not the 28,000 uniques as reported by Compete.com.  Shame on me for trusting Compete.com.  Anyone have a (much) better public web traffic tool?

There are many, many sites that produce helpful content for bloggers.  How does a blogger determine which blog is right for them?  To help out our readers who blog themselves, I figured I’d dive deep into two blogs that have been indexed by Pinyadda for over 6 months: ProBlogger.net (PB) and Copyblogger.com (CB).

Since June 1st, here is some data for both PB and CB:

(more…)