• Magento block caching | Inchoo

  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

• 5 Things True Social Media Experts Do Online » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg

  With everyone and his brother claiming to be a social media expert, it helps to know what true social media experts actually do.

  tags: social, media, expert, sml

• Magento – Wiki – Block Cache and HTML Ouput

  I will no longer develop sites in Magento because when you use the community version for what it is supposed to be used for or what you chose the platform for, like attributes and configurable products, it slows the f down to a crawl. But I still have a few sites in the wild that have issues, so I look for solutions. The slowest page we have on any site is a set of configurable products that have four attributes and about 1000 options a piece. This block caching is one last thing I am going to try, the only thing I haven’t and I have tried everything I found with some success. But if this does not work, one site may be going to another shopping cart.

  Note: I found this bookmark before the one above, but will leave my notes as is because it shows how frustrating dealing with this beast can be. This is a good reference page for Magento page caching in general which, like I said, I will be using in more areas of the shopping cart.

  tags: magento, block, html, output, cache, sml

• Optimizing a VPS for Getting Dugg | Hopeless Geek

  After being on shared servers for a while, I have a VPS in the mix also. Since I am in total control, I am looking for the best ways to make the site run faster. This one covers a lot.

  tags: vps, optimization, sml

• WordPress Optimization Bible

  There is more than one way to optimize WordPress. It is a topic I have been returning too often, learning more each time. With Google’s Caffiene update, site speed matters even more. This post covers a lot of ways to speed up WordPress.

  tags: wordpress, optimization, sml

• How to resolve the file permissions error in Magento Connect Manager

  I have run into this issue about 4 or 5 times with Magento. And without the Connect Manager, you can’t install new extensions and themes on the fly. And believe me, installing these manually can take some time.

  tags: magento, permissions, downloader, sml

• After the Deadline – Check Spelling, Style, and Grammar in WordPress and TinyMCE

  A new technology from Automattic, you know the people that brought us WordPress and Akismet. This tool goes beyond spell checking and checks grammar and style. It is available as a bookmarklet, Firefox plugin and a WordPress plugin. It is also available as a TinyMCE addon for any platform that uses this WYSIWYG editor.

  tags: grammar, spell, wordpress, checker, plugin, tool, firefox, addon, sml

• Project SIKULI

  Awesome new tool helps you script macros visually using screenshots and the same technology works on Mac or Windows. If you ever wanted to automate some things on your computer but never wanted to jump into programming, this is the tool for you and it’s free.\n\nI wrote three scripts with it in the first hour. One cleaned about 2000 messages out of my Facebook inbox that I just let pile up. It does seem to quickly suck memory. At one point, sikuli was taking 1.3 gigs of memory while it was running.

  tags: gui, programming, automation, macro, sml

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.