Lazy Man and Money

Starting a Blog: Step [X] – Optimization for Speed

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A little while back I started a series titled “Starting a Blog.” I need to pull together a few pieces, but you can get started with the important Step 1. I’ve written a couple more steps, but today I wanted to cover something that can be done almost any time. (That’s why I went with Step [X] in the title.)

Generally, successful blogs focus on writing great content and networking with other bloggers to get it viewed.

However one of the most overlooked areas is making your blog fast. This is important because people will leave if the blog takes too long to load. Google also favors websites that load quickly… and Google can be one of the best gateway to getting more readers.

1&1 Hosting has a great guide to making your WordPress blog fast.

I like to say, “You have to know where you before you can get to where you are going.” The 1&1 guide writes about a few tools to measure the performance of your website. I actually prefer one tool they didn’t mention… Pingdom’s Website Speed Test. They cover one tool that I haven’t looked at, P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).

So once you know how fast or how slow your blog is, the guide covers the basics giving tools for each step. Specifically:

  • Shrink Image Size – They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, it can take a lot longer to download an image than to display a thousand words. There are ways to make images look the same on a website at a fraction of the size. This might be the best thing you can do to speed up your blog
  • Shrink CSS and Javascript – This is similar to using a “.zip” file converter and can reduce time drastically. However, the best thing is to eliminate any javascript that you don’t need.
  • Caching – WordPress builds a page from a lot of different places. This assembly takes some time which adds up if you have a lot of visitors. You can “cache” pages which simply amounts to saving the assembled page for the next user. It’s the difference between spending two hours building Ikea furniture and having someone deliver you an already assembled piece.
  • Clean the Database – Over time WordPress databases get “junked up” with data. The guide gives some good tools for cleaning things up.
  • Eliminate Plugins – The more plugins your WordPress site has, the longer it typically takes to build pages. To use my Ikea analogy above, it is like building a piece of furniture with 72 pieces vs. building one with 20 pieces. All things being equal, the 20 piece model is going to be faster to build.

What’s not covered in the 1&1 guide? They don’t mention using a Content Distribution Network (CDN) or using CSS Sprites (which is fairly complicated). Also, sometimes just reviewing your basic design can help you eliminate elements that slow things down.

Are you a blogger with a website? How do you optimize it for speed? Let me know in the comments.

Starting a Blog: Step 1

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A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I started a new blog. I’m not quite ready to tell you about the blog I started. It needs a lot more work to be “ready.” You only get one chance to make a great first impression, right?

While I was going through the process, I thought to myself, maybe people would be interested in this? Maybe readers would like to read why some starts a blog. (Hint: If it’s just money you are probably not going to be successful.) Maybe readers would like to read how to start a blog. In any case, I’m sure there are people out there who find this stuff interesting.

Why Start a Blog?

The answer to this is most easily found in my Ten Reasons Why You Should be a Personal Finance Blogger. I learned a lot about the subject (personal finance), the technology, web design, the business of running a blog (including negotiating advertising), and how the Internet works. You can substitute a topic of your own interest and you’ll likely learn more than you ever imagined possible. It can even get to be a bit like Brewster’s Millions where you get too much of good thing.

How to Start a Blog

Keep in mind that this is step 1 of starting a blog. Starting a blog isn’t exactly rocket science, but it isn’t something that comes naturally either. There are a lot of little steps. Don’t worry, most of them are very easy. I’m going to start at a high level. We can drill into the details later.

Choose a Topic

If you are thinking of starting of a blog, you probably already know the topic you want to write about. That’s a great first step. However, depending on your goals, it’s not enough to be successful. Before I start a blog, I ask myself two basic questions:

1. Am I Passionate About my Topic?

There’s a lot of nonsense on the internet about “following your passion.” It sounds great, but as I turn 40, I realize that you need more than passion. For example, being quarterback of the New England Patriots is not in the cards for me. I would say that “passion” is just one ingredient in the “Success Cake.” It isn’t the “Success Cake” itself.

2. What Are My Reasons for Starting this Blog?

When I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 it was about learning how to manage money, compound interest, and reaching financial freedom. I also wanted to connect with other people looking to make the most of their investing dollar. I was seriously considering a Condohotel at the time and it was obviously a very bad idea. To understand how bad an idea it was, this is the W Las Vegas that I was looking into.

(It’s worth taking a moment to laugh at how bad my first Condotel article was. It may only be surpassed by my second article on Condohotels.)

We all make mistakes, right?

I created Lazy Man and Money in hopes that I could find a community of people who could help expand my ideas of expressing a goal of achieving financial freedom.

I never expected to make money. In fact, after 6 months of writing, another personal finance writer wrote in a forum that you can make a $100 a month blogging. I was amazed. Who doesn’t want an extra $100 a month? That’s a utility bill for what I was doing anyway. So instead of watching reruns of Seinfeld, I put some time into learning how to add advertising and get to $100 a month. As it was 2006, blogging was very different… which means that making money with a blog was very different.

You should start a blog to learn more about the topic or connect with people of similar interests. If someone wants to throw money at you (like they did to me) to add advertisements, that’s awesome!

How Do I Get Started?

Once you have a topic, there are three basic steps:

  • Pick a Domain Name – In hindsight, LazyManAndMoney.com was probably not the best choice, but it worked. I usually go to InstantDomainSearch.com to see if what I want is available.
  • Find a Hosting Service – I recommend Bluehost and used them for my new blog
  • Install WordPress – WordPress probably powers 99% of all blogs and 25% of all websites. Bluehost makes it really easy

I should probably be more verbose in explaining these steps. If you agree, tell me in the comments, and I’ll work on another post fleshing these details out.

Mohu Leaf Winner Announced, More WordPress Cloud, and Links

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It’s time to announce the winner of the Mohu Leaf that I reviewed last week. I was pleasantly surprised by not just the number, but the quality of the comments. Many giveaways lead to quick comments, that are almost borderline spam. However, nearly everyone wrote about their situation or their set-up. They offered some great suggestions too.

Let’s get all the drama out the way. There can only be one winner. The virtual ping pong balls ended on Mike with the comment of

“I’ve gone with OTA for almost 10 months. Initially it was tough to cut back to only the local channels, but not having to pay that $75 a month is worth it. I’m using an antenna that came with the house, but it is not getting all the channels so I’d like to try a new antenna. Also, I’m using a Hauppauge 2250 TV tuner card in an PC as my DVR. No cable bill, no DVR fee, and I can still watch one show and record another.”

I’m thinking of looking into that Hauppauge tuner card myself as it is one of the few that has two tuners. As Mike points out that is necessary to watch one show and record another. Going to a single tuner solution would be a downgrade that wouldn’t sit well with my wife.

Congrats, Mike. You have an email in your in-box. If you get me back your name and address, I’ll be putting one of these in the mail for you.

More WordPress Cloud

My experiment with hosting this site on Amazon Web Services EC2 continues. I have been extremely happy with the performance for the price about 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time, I’m wishing I had access to a Linux server guru who could do a little audit and tell me what I can do to prevent segmentation faults and the like. I may go searching for some such person.

The other thing that I’ve come to realize is that there are a ton of things out there to improve the performance of a WordPress blog. Sure there are the standard tips, and most everyone knows them. However, there were a lot of small things like not loading Jquery javascript library by default that I could cut out. I was able to cut the load time of some of my pages from 14 seconds to 4 seconds. My hope is that gives some of you the incentive to click around the site a little more.

One of the more difficult things to solve was email since many spammers have tainted the Amazon cloud (like all cloud services). I’ve got a patch in place that seems to be working well with Gmail’s SMTP server, but I may need to upgrade to something a little more robust, the cost of which should be minimal.

And if you didn’t understand that last paragraph, because you are not a webmaster, don’t feel bad. I’ve got links, lots of links:

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