Overhauling the site – again

One of the things that I kept bumping into is the exceedingly slow response-times of my website. At times it took over 2 seconds to display a page, which quite frankly is unacceptable.

The past few days I have been fiddling with the plugins of the site; installing and uninstalling them. One of the things that has gone out the window, as you can see is Bing search. I have also dropped the Tag Cloud, WordPress statistics (which only were shown to me) and the Twitter plugin. The graphical theme of the site has also had a bit of an overhauling, as I dropped some of the images – and optimized the CSS-file.

I have also disabled the smileys, disabled (most of) the comments (which allowed me to disable quite a few other items as well) and have implemented another plugin that caches the pages. Having done this has now dropped the average response time of the site from 1.7 seconds to the 0.7 seconds. Keep in mind that this is measured on a global scale. For those interested I use PingDom.com (which I highly recommend – even their free account!) to keep tabs on the response- and up-time.

Another thing I also noticed is the increase of traffic coming from Google on one of my posts here regarding the HTC HD2 and how to sync it with Google (for Google Mail, contacts etc.) I guess I stroke a chord there with people. I’ll try to focus a bit more on those kind of posts ;-)

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SPF-record now in place for MajorAap.com

I just finished implementing the SPF-record for the domain MajorAap.com. This means that from now on, it will be harder for spammers and other miscreants to ‘spoof’ the domain MajorAap.com. Keep in mind that this will not eliminate spam, it will just help a bit.

A SPF-record is basically an entry that tells mail-servers which mail-server is authorized to send emails from the domain majoraap.com. If a server is not on that list, it will not accept it (provided the receiving mail-server uses SPF-records which now-a-days pretty much all of them do)

If you want to know more about SPF, please visit the Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework.

As a note;
This site does not send out any emails unless you opt-in to them (subscribing to a post for example)

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The Problem is Not Information Overload

A great article by David Allen (the creator of the Getting Things Done methodology) which I highly recommend.

E-mail overload has gotten a lot of press lately – the quantity, the distraction it creates, and our inability to do much about it. There was even a recent debate in a global newspaper between readers voting for keeping e-mail at zero vs. those who use the digital in-basket as a giant library keeping useful information at hand with no concern for the volume. The issue is tied closely with the popular concern about our always-on culture – that we seem to never unhook from the incessant demands of being in touch, put upon us by our clients, our bosses and ourselves.

Source:
The Problem is Not Information Overload | GTD Times.

I couldn’t agree more. The perceived problem is not the sheer amount of information we see and collect every day; it’s the pressure we put upon ourselves to find the meaning of it, if any.

Having a set of guidelines (rules anyone?) that help you process this information, and by banishing information flows you do not need nor want you are in the the better position to give the information you want or need the attention it deserves.

It’s not about sorting things out. It’s about filtering the ‘junk’ out and then sorting the meaningful items.

So in case anyone wonders how I keep my in box at work empty? See above. I process the email (based on subject-line, sender, the placement of my email-address in To, CC or BCC) and action it accordingly. That’s how I processed nearly 5 to 6000 emails a month. Over time I managed to cut this down to a more manageable number of 2 to 3000 a month (give or take a 100 a day). And that number will dwindle further. Yet I still have the same amount of time.

So, think about it. 6000 emails a month, versus 2000 emails a month. In which scenario of the 2 do you think I can spend the most time and attention on something that deserves it?

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Need a good screen protector for HTC HD2?

Ever since I bought my HD2 I have been concerned that I might scratch the screen (… I know myself well enough ;-)) Let alone the constant finger-smear that appears.

I found (and use) an incredibly cheap – and good quality screen protector on Amazon.

FX-CLEAR screen protector for HTC HD2: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo.

Note; I am not affiliated with Amazon – nor do I get any kind of endorsement or anything from the manufacturer. Just a happy consumer :-)

Just thought I’d share this find.

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