Just Who Do You Think You Are?

Posted by & filed under Blogging.

Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Ll...
Image via Wikipedia

Reason Not To Blog:Just Who Do I Think I Am?

Today I started to write and this started to come out. A bunch of reasons not to blog again. This time, instead of analyzing each one separately with an article for this series, I just kept going.

  • With time I do know that I know myself better. And I actually think at times that in knowing myself better, I like myself less.
  • I know that I am a slacker a lot and many times if I can get away with something I will.

Friday Links

Posted by & filed under Findings.

Image representing Magento as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
  • If you have a Magento site and slow loading configurable products pages, download and use the extension listed here. The same concept of caching applies to any html block in Magento. Setting this up reloads a copy of the block the second time and does not call the database. Blocks can be cached until edited.

    This change actually sped up the configurable products page almost 1000%. Our configurable products were based off of over 1000 underlying skus so needless to say, the page loaded slow before this and now loads at a decent speed. But Magento is never really “fast”. It’s just such a change, that comparing it to the one minute load times it was having, it seems fast, below 3 seconds.

    But I do plan on going on with it, finding the bottlenecks in the code and applying block caching. The next target is the category products lists. The worst I think is the layered navigation but a default installation of Magento already has caching built in for the layered navigation.

    tags: magento, product, view, cache, html, block, sml

It is Hard to Write

Posted by & filed under Blogging, Writing.

Day 20 (September 30th): Documentary
Image by blythe_d via Flickr

Reason Not To Blog: It is too hard to write

Then don’t. That’s the simple solution. Stop driving yourself crazy and beating your head against the wall.

And if you can’t. Then deal with it. You will have to find a way.

Writing and blogging is a bitch. There are times when you are in the groove.

I had been slowly writing a post a day for a few weeks when I wrote this post. Today I edited about 7 to get them ready for publishing, wrote another 3 and came up with about 20 new ideas for articles.

How to Host Your Own Blog in 5 Minutes for $10 a Year

Posted by & filed under Blogging, Software, Wordpress.

A few weeks ago, I just happened on a really cheap hosting company called NearlyFreeSpeech and nearly free is right. To host the average WordPress blog, it will cost you about 2 cents a day. Beat that GoDaddy. There is no billing. You fill your account up and you get that amount of hosting. $10 may last you longer than a year. I threw $5 in my account just to play around. It should last me until the end of summer and I have 8 domains there I am setting up. As they get traffic, I will move them away to VPS hosting for more power, but for now it works and it is very low cost.
NearlyFreeSpeech has some idiosyncrasies like you can’t set up cron jobs. But you do get SSH access to your accounts and that is about all you get. No Fantastico. No One Click Installs.
I had been doing a lot of SSH work lately installing Magento sites, so I figured I could find out a way to speed up the process for WordPress. I made a video which I will break down here first because it does not have the first three steps:
  1. Get a NearlyFreeSpeech account