WordPress, W3 Total Cache, and MaxCDN

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache

Two great tastes that taste great together.

A match made in heaven.  For a long while using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) was something only the big boys did.  The CDN market was pioneered by Akamai who remain one of the major players, and companies like Akamai tend to want to deal with other big companies.

For a long time this type of arrangement put the use of a CDN out of reach for the average net user. But these days there are numerous CDNs for every conceivable type of content.  Video, images, CSS and JS files, you name it, it’s out there.  Still though using a CDN is sort of a pain, you have to either upload all your content to the network, or configure the network to pull it automatically from you but then you have to go and change each and everyone of your URLs.

Luckily, WordPress users have an elegant CDN solution in the form of W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN.  Let’s dig in a little and see what exactly a CDN is, how you can set one up, and how you can make it work for you.

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Claiming Your WordPress Blog on Technocrati

April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Technocrati Logo

Attach your Technocrati Profile to Your Blog

Technocrati used to have a link that embedded a particular code.  These days they ask you to put a claim code, like this J5VQXYV57DWC, in a blog post after you request the initial claim.  Claiming the blog is a fairly easy process where you tell Technocrati a bit about your blog like it’s feed url and what the blog is about and I strongly suggest you consider it for your own blog.

After you’ve submitted your blog info you’ll get an email telling you how to get the Technocrati code.  Once you’ve embedded this code into a blog post you’ll return to your Technocrati account page and go into the Claim Blog section once more.  In there you’ll see a button asking you to verify your Technocrati claim and you just click that.  Shortly afterwards you should receive an email telling you that Technocrati successfully found the code on your blog and then it’ll go into a queue for verification.

And that is pretty much it!  And if you suspect I’m doing this process right now you would be correct.  Rather than just having a cryptic code on my blog I thought I’d explain a bit about the process.

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WordPress 3.1 Post Format Support in Prose Child Theme for Studiopress Genesis

April 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

Post Formats in Prose

WP 3.1 Post Formats in Prose

I’m new to StudioPress’ Genesis theme so I was looking for a small project to help familiarize myself with it. When I purchased it I decided I would also purchase a child theme. Since my personal tastes trend toward minimalism I ended up choosing the Prose theme which this blog is using. Then all that was left was trying to figure out what useful thing I could do to tip my toe into the world of Genesis framework development.

I didn’t have to wait too long luckily when I saw that Studiopress had already released the Tapestry theme: a tumblr style child theme using the new post format feature in WordPress 3.1. I thought it would be nice to have a microblog on my own site that was separate from this one for the quick and silly stuff. So this little project was born.
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Hosting Your Own Services

March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Service Hosting

Hosting your own services has lots of benefits.

Hosting your own services is becoming increasingly anachronistic as time goes on.  When you have huge players like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo providing everything under the sun there doesn’t seem to be much point in it. However, there are some unique benefits to hosting your own email, your own blog, your own web applications, your own whatever.

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