Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
TimThumb: Improved Speed and Other Changes
Recently, when I haven't been working on WPAdvent, I have been tweaking and improving TimThumb. In fact there's been a couple of cool new features added that make it a much more useful peice of kit.
The big changes boil down to speed, simplicity, and Youtube!
SpeedI've always been very conscious of the speed of TimThumb. I know that resizing images is slow and uses a lot of memory, so caching has been in there from the start. However I ...
WordPress Advent – Seasonal WordPress Savings
In January or February this year I had the idea of making some sort of advent calendar website for christmas. I wanted to share something with the online community - I just wasn't sure what.
In mid October I started thinking about it again. I decided that WordPress was the obvious candidate and so the idea behind my latest project, WPAdvent, was born.
WPAdvent is my attempt to bring some awesome special offers to the WordPress community and to help promote ...
How I Increased Daily Twitter Followers by 300% in 10 minutes
I'm not by nature a particularly jealous person, but seeing other people get loads and loads of Twitter followers I can't help but be a little envious. It's human nature - we all want to be more popular or more successful than we are. That said, I am also rather introverted and this makes growing my followers a lot harder than it could be. So what I want to do is increase my Twitter followers without seeming like I am ...
The best way to use TimThumb with a CDN (and why Amazon S3 is not so good)
Speeding up a websites loading time is so good for so many reasons, so it's understandable that people want to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve their images, however in the case of TimThumb there's a right way and a wrong way. Below I am going to explain how I use a CDN to speed up TimThumb on Binary Moon.
Content Delivery Network?A CDN or Content Delivery Network, is a method ...
TimThumb Troubleshooting Secrets
I often get asked questions about TimThumb and why it doesn't work in certain situations. I can generally tell what is wrong with the script within about 60 seconds of being sent a demo url. Below are my top tips for debugging TimThumb issues.
Keep TimThumb up to DateThis is super important. TimThumb should always be kept up to date. I regularly publish bug fixes and improvements and often the problems ...
Spring Cleaning in Autumn
It's no longer spring but it's always worth spending some time tidying up your website. In this article I am going to show an easy way to clean up the dead articles on your site which will increase the overall quality of your posts, and stop any SEO leakage you might have.
Recently I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and it has helped me tidy my site up quite nicely. It ...
Hub Pages – the Center of your SEO Universe
In my never-ending quest to improve Binary Moon I have investigated hub pages, an easy way to link relevant content.
Hub pages are a single page on your site that is targeted to one specific keyword or key phrase. This keyword should be something you want to rank well in, and that you have written about a lot.
In my case I decided to target TimThumb. Since I have taken the development reins from Darren I thought it would be good ...
Unexpected Benefits of A/B Testing
I am currently beta testing a new website called Optimizely - a super simple A/B testing product... and it's gotten me thinking.
A/B testing is a process that allows you to optimize your website for your users. You create one or more variations of a page and then measure and compare the interactions on the new page against the old.
The bit that got me thinking was creating the variations.
When you design the tests ...
