5tags

I recently installed K2 because I was getting very sick and tired of my old theme. I have used K2 before, and went all out with the AJAX that is included in the package. I simply took out all of the javascript includes for the live searching, live commenting, and rolling archives, and these simple tasks made the main page load about 300% faster. I then took out all of the icons, and optimized some recent blog post images and got the total size of the main page to 610 Kb. These new tweaks make it well over 400% faster than the original k2 theme.I like to measure the speed with websiteoptimization.com’s tool.To set a benchmark I like to check the load time on a 14.4K connection. It originally took 250 seconds and now it takes 63 seconds for the main page and 30 seconds for the ‘archives” page to load.All in all I am very, very happy with the results and I believe that I can cut it down even more. A few other factors affected these results such as wp-cache, and the new server setup. Once I get everything down even more I will be sure to share all of my results, tips, and tricks.

After a few hours of DNS propagation this site, along with most of my others, are now on Media Temple’s grid server service. If you spot any errors please contact me or comment. I have spotted a few errors already.My thought after installing is that the 1000 GPUs is not a lot. I have already used 0.5/1000 and all I have done is imported my databases for Wordpress and Mint. We’ll have to see how it handles my load. Lately I have been getting 600 - 1200 unique visitors per day and 800 - 1900 hits. I will be sure to note everything.

For those of you that have read my blog for the past year you have heard my thoughts on Media Temple’s web hosting. When I was on a (ss) shared server it was great but when they moved to the new (gs) grid server I had major problems.It was very tough to have my site down every few hours. The actual web server (Apache) was fine but the database was constantly down. They have now completely changed their MySQL setup and they now use containers. With the (mt) coupon “kirupa05″ you can get 15% off your order. We’ll see how it works out and I will definitely tell me honest opinion of their new service.I used Media Temple for this website from August 2006 to about December 2006. Their original shared server was great but I decided to upgrade to their new grid server, which was very innovative but not very reliable. I am sure they are a lot better now.

I am currently making a brand new theme based on K2. K2 is a very solid theme and makes it very easy to create a design around it. I have been very busy with my new company and am only working on it in my off time which is usually 2-3AM. Look for it in the next couple of weeks. I may do slow changes so that you can see the progress as I work on it.

The current theme is about 90% complete. Over the past two days I have been browsing the website from different browsers and devices and have noticed a few things that are not working correctly. These include:

• Link Styles in posts are incorrect
• Random hovers appear due to incorrect CSS

I still have to go through each post and change the images to fit but all in all the new style is working well with the content. Right now I am working on a mobile version of the website that is make especially for the Nintendo DS web browser. If I have some time to make the plugin “good”, I will release it for the public, again.