Improved, If Not Quite New—Yet
January 9, 2008
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Blogging, Technical Functions : Trackback,
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Veteran readers should notice a couple differences at Cerulean Sanctum:
- The site should be faster. Let me know if that’s not the case for you.
- The links in the sidebar are all menu-driven. That wasn’t by choice, though. The latest upgrade of WordPress broke the plugin I was using to manage all my sidebar links, so I had to switch to a less capable manager.
That’s the trouble with open source. - The Essential Reads sidebar item that listed my recommended books has now been converted to a page at the top left of the site within the banner frame. It’s now called Godly Reads and contains more info on the books mentioned. I’ll also be expanding the list of books in the days ahead.
I’m also considering changing the WordPress theme. I’m looking for a tight, fast theme with good SEO and an easily customized CSS stylesheet that will allow me to tailor the color scheme to include that lovely shade known as cerulean. If you have recommendations, I’m listening. High on the wish list would be better comment management and built-in comment threading within the theme. I really like the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin that gives Cerulean Sanctum its easy to follow comment threads, but the nature of that plugin thwarts all attempts at adding services for readers to better manage their own comments on the blog. A theme with built-in comment threading would be fantastic. So far, I’ve not found that theme.
As always, thanks for being a reader. And if you have any suggestions on what additions/changes you’d like to see me make to the blog (besides getting a better writer, ha, ha), please let me know. I want this site to continue to grow and improve.
Tune in tomorrow when I hope to post my Best of Cerulean Sanctum 2007.
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• The blog seemed to load slower for me, but the connection at the office is slower than it used to be, so I wouldn’t really go by that.
• It’d take a long time to convert, I guess, but if you used WP’s Bookmark/Blogroll system, you could set the sidebar links to do stuff like display five random links, or the three most-recently updated sites, etc. Maybe you already considered that, but man, do I hate drop-down menus for navigation!
• I like what you’ve done with your book recommendations, Dan! My only suggestion there is that you could keep things “sticky” by providing links to related Sanctum posts along with your mini-reviews.
Travis,
My MySQL query time is down from an average of 1.25 seconds to about 0.75. The number of queries is down from about 45 to about 18, on average. I’m also loading fewer graphics. I now have some object caching going on, but I’m not using a static page cache because I continue to run into problems with WP-Cache, 1 Blog Cacher, and Super Cache (failing to auto-delete expired cache files, choking on comments, not refreshing pages correctly, etc.)
As for links, I was using an awesome set of plugins under the “King _____” moniker (King Links, King Categories, etc.), but the plugin author is not updating them after I built this blog around them (WordPress User Nightmare #1), and the plugins are failing to work with recent updates of WordPress (WordPress User Nightmare #2). I spent a whole day over the Christmas holiday trying to find adequate replacements and nothing will replace those King plugins adequately. My category list is enormous and my links lists are getting there also. I can’t find a better way to keep things small on the page yet totally accessible. Ideas?
As to “sticky,” I’ve been reading a few of the “pro blogger” sites and all of them are saying the same thing: too many internal links within a blog only loses you points with Google. It used to be the opposite case that the more a blog referenced itself, the better its page rank. But the tide has turned. Too many internal links mean too much redundancy and Google does not like redundancy anymore. So I’m not going to try to link those books to posts.
Any insights on a WordPress theme selection?
Thanks, Travis!
“Too many internal links mean too much redundancy and Google does not like redundancy anymore.”
I guess I didn’t think you were all that bothered with Google, given that now they don’t like blogrolls, either. It’s a shame, because it really would be relevant (and helpful to new readers). Oh well.
No thoughts on the WordPress theme at this time. I’m thinking of going fully-customized with my own blog next time around…
Travis,
I don’t do AdSense or have any other kinds of advertising here, but 70 percent of the hits on this site come from Google searches. If I want the blog to be read, then I need to be sensitive to how Google works. What’s the point of writing if no one reads? And let’s face it, Google is the means by which most people read on the Web.
I’m never going to be astute enough to game Google’s system. Plus, I understand why they need to make modifications to their algorithm. But I’m certainly not going to be slothful and ultimately harm this blog’s Google ranking, either. Again, if no one reads, what’s the point?
Dan:
When you log into your WP admin station. Look at the bottom of the Dashboard page under “Other WordPress News”. There is usually an article every three days highlighting new themes.
Also
http://themes.wordpress.net/
is an interesting source for new themes.
“That’s the trouble with open source.”
Well, it’s the trouble with open source products like WordPress that don’t pay enough attention to making themselves backward compatible. They are always changing their database schema, which breaks stuff all the time.
I’ve had my times of irritation with them on a website I support - the upgrade/which breaks stuff/hours to fix cycle gets old
It’s great software, in general, but you’d think by now they’d have arrived at a database schema that didn’t change much. Not so.