Posts Tagged ‘WordPress Plugins’

The WordPress WP Super Cache Plugin

Monday, September 1st, 2008

For me, it seems that the WordPress WP Super Cache Plugin is a very necessary plugin to have for blogs that have a lot of traffic. Many people fail to understand that running a WordPress blog is much different than running a typical or standard static HTML web site.

Running WordPress on a server is very demanding on system resources. Granted, WordPress by itself is very efficient; however, when you go adding things to it such as traffic, pictures, text, categories, tags, and a mile long list of other plugins, you can end up killing your blog real quick.

The WordPress WP Super Cache plugin helps reduce the amount of server system resources used by you WordPress blog simply by making static HTML copies of everything rather than allowing the program to pull queries direct from your MySQL database.

To me, this can indeed be a life saver for bloggers who have tons of traffic or even for bloggers who get the every once in awhile “Burst Fire” traffic caused from submitting content into social networks such as StumbleUpon.com or Digg.com.

The only issue I have with the Plugin is that it doesn’t work very well with advertisement serving WordPress Plugins such as OIO and MaxBannerAds.

This is simply due to the fact that these programs are designed to rotate ads while the WP Super Cache plugin is designed to keep things static and not dynamic. What happens when you run the WP Super Cache plugin when you are also displaying rotating banner advertisements is that they no longer rotate.

To learn more about the WordPress WP Super Cache Plugin and download it, click here.

Prevent Your WordPress Blog From Getting Hacked

Friday, August 29th, 2008

WordPress hacking isn’t always done by someone with superman programming skills who trolls into your blog through security holes and glitches in the system. In fact, a lot of hackers are just people who are more observant than others. When you write your username and password down somewhere you put yourself at risk of having someone find it. Really a lot of hackers aren’t what you think they are. They are just people who are sometimes pretty capable of scoring a username and password.

With that said, Alex King is in my opinion one of the best WordPress Plugin developers on the planet. A few months ago, June 27th 2008, he released a WordPress Plugin called, Phone Factor. This plugin is really cool for the fact that it protects your admin login.

The plugin is very simple. When you have Phone Factor installed and attempt to login to your admin dashboard, you will receive a phone call and will have to answer it and press the # symbol before you will be granted access.

So you see, if for some reason someone is able to attain your username and password, it is useless to them unless they also have access to the telephone number you have configured with the plugin. Pretty cool huh?

You can learn more about Phone Factor and download it here.

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

In May of 2008 I was running into a lot of trouble with my WordPress blog. Traffic was on the rise and my blog was loading very slowly and at times would even crash. Later after I fixed my WordPress blog and talked about how the damage came from overloading my MySQL database with too many WordPress Plugins. Also, while I am thinking about it, it might not be a bad idea to make sure that you are running the most recent version of WordPress. Here is another article that I wrote that will show you how to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

While not all plugins modify the database, there are quite a few that do. I suggest that you keep your WordPress MySQL database as original as possible. WordPress docs offers a page that shows you exactly how your WordPress MySQL database should look like in its original state.

Aside from running your WordPress blog with a very healthy database, there are still some things that you can do to help speed the load time of your blog, especially if your blog gets a lot of day to day traffic. (more…)