I just got another ticket off someone that is using a cache plugin and experiencing issues with a plugin.

BTW – Do you recommend NOT using W3TC? And, if so, is there a better one?

Here’s my response, maybe if you read it here then I wont have to type it again in a ticket!

oh that is a biggie! w3 total cache by definition will serve old copies of pages. That is what all cache plugins are designed to do.

it is quicker to serve a html copy than to generate one with php which is why they make sites faster.

unfortunately, blogs are dynamic sites with plugins that require freshly created content which don’t really work well with copies of pages that were made hours or even days ago.

static business sites that are there for information work really well with cache plugins because they rarely change but blogs with new posts and comments and ‘real time’ plugins installed don’t do so well.

w3 total cache is not yet final. That is why it is not showing as version 1.0 yet. You and me and all the others that use it are test subjects!

you have to decide if you want a fast broken blog or a working one.

there are blogs (including mine) that have w3 working with everything else but each blog is different and has different plugins active so you will have to find your own set of settings that works for you.

unforunately, w3 is the best (or the least bad) of the cache plugins but like I said, cache plugins are designed to serve old content and blogs are designed to serve fresh content. that’s the issue that comes up again and again with any cache plugin and a blog.

sorry I can’t help more but w3 is a beast of a plugin and the author keeps changing the core code so I can’t add things to commentluv to work with it, the last time I tried it worked but as soon as he updated his code it broke every commentluv blog so I don’t try any more.

the best advice I can give is to optimize your site first before considering a cache plugin, you’d be surprised at how much that can help.

and if you do decide on a cache plugin, test test test!

• If you do not know what a cache plugin does then you do not need one!
• If you have a slow broken site, a cache plugin will not fix it!
• If minifying breaks one script, it breaks them all!
• Scripts that are already minified (jquery.min.js) do not need to be minified!
• You should optimize your site before you try to speed it up with cache plugins!
• test test test .. experiment with settings to see what gets you a working site and then test test test again!
• Switching every option to MAX and then expecting it just to work is not really gonna happen on shared hosting with a free theme and a bazillion free plugins.

It’s about bloody time! The new CommentLuv plugin is out there and getting lots and lots of downloads. Over 5000 in the first week actually which is a pretty big number!

The plugin is now standalone which means it will no longer require my expensive dedicated server to work which also means there’ll be no registering to my site to add a feed url or buy additional urls and static links.

Hurray! do you know what that will do to my support tickets? it’ll virtually decimate them! No more pointing people to the member page, no more spoon feeding them their feed urls or explaining how www.something.com is different to something.com . Oh, and no more crashed server in the middle of the night due to excessive load.

Actually, it’s the excessive server load and regular crashes that motivated me to turn the whole CommentLuv thing on it’s head and make it standalone. Once I do that, I can move away from dedicated hosting and put all my sites on a VPS that is scalable, a VPS that’s a bit closer to the majority of visitors to my sites. USA! USA! USA! lol

What’s next?

Well according to the stats at WordPress.org, it takes about a month for most people to update their plugin when they get the notification in their dashboard and so when the end of the month comes around, I’ll switch off the CommentLuv API for the wordpress plugin and set it to send back a message about having to upgrade to the latest plugin.

That’s sure to piss off a few people but, seriously, I can’t keep paying for this server out of my own pocket and I just don’t have the time to maintain the server. I just wanna make plugins!

I’m itching to do a cool facebook plugin, multi author blog plugin, the premium version of CommentLuv plugin and much much more but so far, I’ve been stuck fire fighting the bloody server! time to say goodbye and within this month!

But, before that can happen

I have to transfer all my existing minor sites to the new VPS

And then, design a new theme for comluv.com which is still going to be an awesome guest blogger site with oodles of pagerank and traffic and then move that to the VPS and then code the premium commentluv and then design the site to handle the purchases and then I have to launch the premium plugin and to do that I have to make the videos and to do that….. arrrrggh!

I’ve had a blast launching the new free version of CommentLuv and it occurred to me that I haven’t actually put a feature list out there so people know what’s changed in this new version.

So, here’s what’s new :

phew! that took a while…

just you wait until you see what’s coming in CommentLuv premium!

You can Download CommentLuv here

I finally got a good nights sleep!!

Nope, they’re not replacement day-glow nipples! they’re a set of comfortable silicone ear plugs that fit nice and deep in your ear to drown out external noise. I finally had a proper sleep without being woken up by the over sensitive car alarm or the too-fast drivers who scrape their under carriage when they speed over the speed bumps outside my window.

Cheap as chips (and better for your ears)

I got 10 pairs for less than a fiver and because they’re reusable, I think they’ll last a long time! (a lot longer than sticking chips in your ears anyway)

They have a small plastic rod inside which help to insert them in your ear, which you have to do with two hands.. one hand that reaches around the back of your head to pull your lobe and the other inserts the plug. You can remove the rod if you want, I just pulled it out a bit and left it in while I slept.

It’s like being dead

Seriously, I thought I was dead it was so quiet! My missus has to stay up later than me some nights and normally ends up going into another room that’s cold just so she can do some accounts but no more! Once I have these little blighters in my ears, she can watch TV, count coins or talk on the phone and I’m fast asleep just a metre or so away.

I’m so much happier in the morning if I’ve had a good sleep.

Am I asleep dreaming I am awake?

Neo.. wake up

I’ve been working bloody hard for the past 13 weeks on something that still isn’t even close to being finished. It’s invaded my brain so much that even whilst on holiday, every time I closed my eyes I would wake up in a sweat thinking about it.

Seriously, almost every time I fall asleep I dream about it. Even my ever faithful friend – the afternoon nap has been compromised!

The Value of Giving

That’s it, that’s the mistress my missus has become increasingly jealous over. Mrs. VoG has been driving me crazy or filling me with joy over the past few months as I try and get her to play nice with amember and pap4 (two other saucy code maidens that I’m bending to my will(y))

Click the image to see if it’s ready, if it’s not just enter your details in the form and you’ll be notified when it is. Be prepared!, this has been a mammoth task to put together and will be a brand new way to do things.. oops, I nearly let the cat out of the bag.. you’ll just have to wait and see, I’m still under a non-disclosure agreement until it’s launch time.

Tens of thousands of lines

Nope, I’m not talking about a night out with Keith Moon from The Rolling Stones! .. I’m talking about the reason this will be so good , why it’s gonna blow everyone away and also why I’m going slightly doo-lally every time I close my eyes. It’s because I’ve written over 10,000 lines of code in custom plugins, modifications and additions to existing plugins.

I’ve needed to do this because even though we’ve spent thousands of dollars on commercial scripts and 3rd party engines, they just weren’t designed to do what we wanted to do. Close, but not quite and the ‘not quite’ bit has required hours and hours and hours of discussions over skype, conference calls, sketches and ultimately hundreds and hundreds of hours at my keyboard.

BIG PROJECTS SUCK ARE COOL

Haha! it’s been a duplicitous wench of a project so far, I’ve never sworn so much at inanimate objects. I’ve torn my hair out, freaked up/down/sideways and out until , as one of the partners, Mark says, “I’ve spent all my freak”

But, it’s also been hugely fun and satisfying to venture into unknown realms of WordPress, affiliate systems, membership packages, payment gateways and PayPal IPN scripts.

I’ve learned new things about WordPress that I never knew existed, things have gone in my head that can be used forever more on a metric tonne of future ‘what if?’ projects that I’m just gagging to get started on (yes, I really am a sucker for punishment!).

This is most definitely the biggest coding project I’ve ever worked on and as much as it is painful, it’s also fun. I’m really hoping that we can get to the open the doors stage soon because, if I don’t start seeing some action and if I can’t stop saying ,”not yet” when my missus asks if it’s ready then I might just get chucked out onto the street and honestly folks, without her, no tappy tappy code monkey.

Stick with me boyshz and galshz

Stick around, keep checking in and coming back to find out more because this is one huge momma of a site and well, it’ll rock the online business / hobby / charity / social and WordPress world. If you’ve ever had a business or a website or both, you’ll see the Value of Giving on day 1.

It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

Take a look at this server load graph showing how much the server was working (on ComLuv.com) for 24 hours..

Seems normal right? that’s right! because my UKFast host detected a spike of 70,000 or so hits coming in to the comluv signup page from an Amazon cloud server and within 30 seconds added their IP to my firewall so it can appear normal again but, look at the next pic after the ad break to see what a difference the banning made..

Can you frickin believe that difference? All because one IP from Amazon cloud was banned!

It seems that savvy hackers no longer need a bot network, they just get themselves some Amazon Web Services for pennies and use it to hack other peoples websites. Ridiculous!

Luckily, due to the sponsored post previous to this one about boobies and liposuction (thanks Dr. Alexander!), I was able to upgrade the server to use pro protection and fancy backups with lasers on it so this problem will hopefully never happen again.

The past month and the next month coming is, was and will be bloody hectic!

I have some major changes happening and I’m going to bookend it with a new hair style, gym membership and new hours of operation. I have to do something! I can’t keep going on like this, I need to knuckle down and focus on one thing and get it done and the only way I can do that is passing off some of the stuff that keeps me tied to the laptop every morning.

Staff!

We’ve had a member of staff down all month and she’ll be away until the UK skies get clearance from the volcano ash from Iceland so that’s been pretty awesome for making me cry day after day chopping onions It’s been ok though, I got to work side by side with my missus and I saw more sunlight than normal which has had a strange effect on making me want to get into better shape.

oodles of doodles

I’ve been going through the cartoonists workbook and it suggests lots of things that I’ve been trying. My notebook is always on hand and I’ve been scribbling like made to get myself up to a keyhole ken level of comic making.

It’s been going well, my doodles now only resemble that of a teenager! here’s my first effort

Comic blog!

Come and visit my comic blog and leave a comment, it’s got commentluv. woot!

I’ve been reading xkcd and Explosm for ages and I’ve always dreamed of having a comic blog. Well, more specifically, being able to draw well enough to have a comic blog!

Now, I’m not gonna let a little thing like not being able to do something to stop from doing something. I mean, how hard can it be?

Any stick will do

I have seen some literally LaughOutLoud good comics that are nothing more than a few straight lines on my stumbleupon sessions and I can’t help but think that it should be a breeze to do the same. oo-er, famous last words eh?

Check out this strip, it’s simply drawn and it made larf for ages. I sent it to 3 people!

I tried to make one in this style and it was hard! I did manage to make a simple comic once before on this blog, I used an online stickman comic maker which made things easier..

I wonder if it’ll be easier this time?

Comicpress wooot!

Enter in Comicpress which is a fantastic bit of WordPress shennanigans that enables anyone to create and update a comic based blog without worrying about ftp and specific filenames.

It’s currently powering a huge number of comic blogs and has helped a lot of regular folks create gorgeous comics like Starship Moonhawk or Dakota McFadzeans’ Blog and I want in!

It wont be able to help your drawing skills or your humour bone tuning but it will leave you to only worry about the drawing, all the rest will be handled by the system. It can handle graphic novels, simple strip comics, multi columns, custom colours, fancy pagination and a whole lot more!

It’s mildly overwhelming how many options there are to choose from so I think my best approach will be to start with a simple default layout and get creating and publishing. As I get used to the system, I’ll know what I need to change or update.

Learn me and you some learns

I’m all set up to start doing some more screencasts on my super fast PC and the weather is getting nice enough for me to be able to stay at the main pc without my fingers becoming frozen so I think it’s time to make some tutorial videos!

What better way to generate blog fodder than to start a tutorial series! and.. what better platform to do it on than ComLuv? (and it means I can use it as a legitimate ‘work’ activity)

ComicLuv

I have done some testing and I am fairly confident that it will work just as well on the live server. So, over the next few days I will be installing it to the ComLuv site as a supporter only feature. Anyone with a fiver a month can have a comic blog too!

I will be creating the comic blog and using the blogging side of it for tutorials and tales of my progress as I figure out what I use to draw the comics and other important stuff like how to draw or what is funny?

Freebies!

I’d really like to hear from you if you’ve ever considered making a comic blog, It’d be awesome to be able to have someone to compare notes with and share the journey.

What do you think? fancy making a comic on the ComLuv site? In exchange for taking the plunge with me and being someone who can chat with me about comic making, I’ll give you a full supporter account with access to all the themes and comicpress addons and a bunch of credits to get things like extra URLs on your comluv account.

It goes without saying that your new comic blog will get plenty of promotion and be mentioned along with mine in as many places as I can fit it

What an interesting week. Not content with crashing hard drives and losing data, I went through a round of Ubuntu weirdness that meant I had to change the monitor to one with a larger default resolution.

Fixed that and just got used to the mammoth monitor that now looms over the counter and Ubuntu decided it wouldn’t play nice with vmware any more. I need that vwmare to run the ancient Win98 system that handles the delivery orders.

All I can say is welcome back XP. Spent bloody ages installing an old OEM version that was lying about and even longer taking it through SP1, SP2 and SP3 updates. At last though, it all plays nice with my virtual image and USB serial adapter (for caller ID). I had to take off the webserver though which I use to serve the new order pages. I need that to work, we have new drivers who need maps!!

Home Pc plays it too

Windows 7. RC1. Finished.

New Windows 7 Ulitmate installed and functioning with a VMware image of Ubuntu which is now serving the pages to all the PC’s on the shop and home network…. just in time for my Sky router to start playing up. Now a direct cable connection spazzes it out and the wireless keeps dropping off . bwahhhh!

Work..WORK

I had lots of fun things planned for ComLuv and other pet projects these past two weeks but it’s all been put aside so I can fix these real life, gotta work or we dont get paid, things. I think I am on top of most of it (except the sky router) but I’m so knackered from doing all the fire fighting that all I wanna do now is watch some movies and pretend I don’t have a PC (for a little while).