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.

During and after the move I no longer tracked or kept track of all of those infometrics. Why would I? It has served it’s purpose; I am aware that I need to watch the amount of sugar I consume, I stopped drinking caffeine completely – and well, my sleep is what it is. I learned a lot from tracking all of it though.

Throughout the last few months I have begun to shift my focus away from trivial matters and started focussing more on the things and people I care about. I have become more protective of those important items, and dropped anything that wasn’t important or mattered.

One of the other ‘casualties’ that I no longer use, is Google Reader. I have un-subscribed from all of my feeds (par my friends) and am quite happy with it. Why would I need to know everything that happens all the time? I stopped watching news and reading newspapers a long time ago but yet was still reading it via RSS. Granted, it was news from sources that I found interesting – but still.

In this hectic life with information, data and charts flowing around us all the time I stepped out of the noise – and into the calm. What I see, read and watch is about what I want to – when I want to. And it’s not backlogged, saved or stored. I jump into the stream of information when and how I want, and get out – when I want.

If anything, I am more happy and content with what I have, get and give. And about what I don’t see, hear or get in my inbox.

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 ;-)

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 :-)

Lately I’ve been dabbing into personal infometrics; statistics on a personal level. Two of the things I track are the amount of caffeine I consume, and the hours I sleep. See the correlation already? Now normally speaking you would say: less caffeine during the day means better sleep at night. I now have proof that this not the case. What the cause of my lack of sleep is, is a completely different subject altogether.

However, since I track both I can correlate these 2 together and come to amazing conclusions;

As long as I consume no more then 3 cups of caffeine-holding drinks (cola, coffee etc.) a day my sleep is pretty much the same as without consuming any caffeine. I also seem to sleep more on a Tuesday-evening – opposed to a Saturday- or Friday-evening (remember; I have the Wednesday’s off)

This combined with my Positivity Ratio tracking has led to some interesting finds about my life and insights I might not have had before.

In the future I want to also start tracking my sugar-intake (in terms of cubes or spoons I consume in my decaf coffee, tea etc.) to see if there is a correlation there.

Now, if you are interested in finding out more about personal infometrics, feel free to check out these sites;
For Positivity Ratio scoring; http://www.positivityratio.com (I highly recommend the book!)
For all other types of tracking; http://www.zealog.com (in case you need an invite; please let me know in the comments as I got a few to hand out)

Just like someone I know says; if you don’t track it – you will never know the full depth and truth of it.

And my life (and insights into it) have been changed, and are changing because of it.

Keep in mind; filling in these items literally takes me 2 minutes or less a day. I used to spend (a lot!) more time on other trivial items.

Now ask yourself; what insights might it give you? Does all that working out help your weight? Do you really drink just a few cups of coffee a week? How much water do you drink a day? A week?

You never know, until you track it.

Take care, and be safe