You might have also noticed that this site is experiencing slower then usual response-times and an occasional outage (21 hours this running month) I am looking at resolving this, but until then please endure with me. I hope to have this all sorted shortly, and the last few glitches sorted out.

I should be able to post a few updates somewhere this week so – no worries!

More on later…

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 ;-)

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)

In short; please be patient as I continue to try and get the Bing Search to work.

I am quite sure that some of you are wondering why I would use Bing Search as opposed to Google Search. Well, simply put – Google has more then enough of my data already. It’s time to split some of it up. Bing in itself is quite a nice engine, be it a bit picky. I’m sure we’ll get that sorted though :-)

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

PS: Don’t forget to subscribe using RSS to keep up-to-date on the news here.

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.

Just thought I’d pass it along :-)

On a personal note, I am doing good at the moment. Enjoying a 2 long overdue 2 week vacation spent visiting friends, family and well – shopping. One of the items I bought is a Samsung PL50 – a digital camera. It’s good to be shooting photos again, only this time with a small(er) one then what I already own. I’ll let you know how it works for me.

So all in all – life has been going good at the moment. Sorry for keeping it short, but well – back to the vacation for me!

I modified the 404 page to automatically give you a Google search pending on what you were looking for, amongst other things.

You can try the 404 plugin by typing in whatever you want after my URL; http://www.majoraap.com/. For example, you can add monkey-style and the 404 page kicks in and shows you my standard page with the Google Search results for monkey-style on my site.

Read more, including links to 20 highly recommended WordPress plugins after the break

As an additional side note I updated the theme a bit, was in dire need of doing that. I also relayed the RSS feeds via www.feedburner.com.

I also did some backend work which should clean up the place a bit. I hope to enable a few other cool things in the upcoming days (bit of database- and speed-optimization)

If you have your own WordPress site, I highly recommend the following plugins:

1. 404 notifier
   This plugin will log 404 hits on your site and can notify you via e-mail or you can subscribe to the generated RSS feed of 404 events.
2. Adsense Deluxe
   Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts.
3. AskApache Google 404
   Adds Intelligent SEO Ajax-powered Google Search to 404 pages.
4. Comment License
   Show license terms for your comments form.
5. External Links
   Adds a class=”external” to all outbound links, with various effects that are configurable under Options / External Links.
6. Feedburner Feedsmith
   This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
7. Get Recent Comments
   Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
8. Google Analytics
   Adds Google analytics to your blog, including outbound link tracking.
9. Google XML Sitemaps
   This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
10. MyMooMus
    Adds a current mood,music or tv tag line to your posts.
    
11. Official Statcounter plugin
    Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog.
12. Old Post Alert
    Show a potential commentor a note if a post is old.
13. Random Posts
    Displays a highly configurable list of randomly selected posts.
14. Search Everything
    Adds search functionality with little setup. Including options to search pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments, tags and custom fields (metadata). Also offers the ability to exclude specific pages and posts. Does not search password-protected content.
15. ShareThis
    Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
16. Subscribe to Comments
    Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
17. WordPress database Backup
    On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
18. WordPress GRAvatars
    Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section. Uses the comment authors email to display their Gravatar. It also gives the user an Author Profile picture, based on his or hers Gravatar.
19. WordPress mobile edition
    Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.
20. WP Grins
    A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress

There, that should get you started :mrgreen:

Yes I know I promised more frequent updates a while back, but let’s just pretend I did and that you all enjoyed the posts a lot. Anycase, I have been enjoying a lot of videos from George Carlin, Jeff Dunham, Dennis Leary and Russel Peters. If you want to have your daily dose of good laughs – go check them on Youtube :D