Well as some of you may notice – and some of you may not – I have changed the site a bit again. First thing you might notice is the different theme. I decided to drop the graphics-intensive theme (as fast as it was) and went with a more minimalistic theme, which should speed up the place.
I have also implemented 2 new plugins that help in saving your bandwidth (as well as mine) First off, all content is now GZIP-ed before it is sent to your browser. A conserved estimate indicates that this will decrease bandwidth-consumption by 70% or more (Source: http://ismyblogworking.com/www.majoraap.com)
The second plug-in to be installed is one that enables HTTP header 304 support. This means that the site now accurately relays to your browser (FireFox, Internet Explorer, Chrome etc.) or feed-reader (such as Google Reader) whether or not the page or feed has been altered. If it hasn’t your program will not initiate a download of the content (only the header is sent/received)
304 Not Modified
Indicates the resource has not been modified since last requested.[2] Typically, the HTTP client provides a header like the If-Modified-Since header to provide a time against which to compare. Utilizing this saves bandwidth and reprocessing on both the server and client, as only the header data must be sent and received in comparison to the entirety of the page being re-processed by the server, then resent using more bandwidth of the server and client.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_304#3xx_Redirection
With both of these in place I hope to make the place a bit faster and easier for all of you.
Apart from all of these I have also implemented a new archiving structure, so old posts might give a 404 error (in case it does, you will be automatically redirected to the front page) The new structure will make it a lot more clear what the posts is about (for example: /archives/245 versus /optimize-your-site-for-google-245) This will also help the search-engines better understand the website and index it correctly.
Speaking of which; even though I still use Google Analytics on this site, I have programmed my own (based on the one provided by Microsoft, altered by W3C HTML Tidy) Bing search box.
However Bing has not yet indexed my site correctly. Seeing as Google’s current index of my site is also broken, I really had no alternative. The WordPress default widget is not XHTML 1.1 transitional compliant – however the rest of MajorAap.com is (Source: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.majoraap.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.767)
I hope that this ‘small’ changes will help in making the site a bit more enjoyable for all of us.
Links of interest;
Microsoft / Bing
http://webmaster.bing.com – Bing’s Webmaster program. Submit your site and optimize it for Bing (and other search-engines)
http://www.microsoft.com/search/Tools/default.aspx – Microsoft Research tool to test HTTP Compression and Conditional get-requests on your site (GZIP and HTTP 304 support)
Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf – A great starter on SEO tips.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools – Google’s Webmaster program. Submit your site to Google, analysis and other helpful tips.