Posts Tagged Wordpress
A WordPress Plugin that may slow down your site for some users.
Posted by Ryan in Technology on April 20, 2011
Ever since I switched to Bluehost a few months back, I found that my WordPress site had started loading extremely slow. I would have to wait about 30 seconds before the homepage would load and just as long for any other page within the WordPress application. At first I thought it was Bluehost, but then it would load a lot faster at the university that I attend. In January my internet provider had switched us to their Fiber To the Premises service, so even though that service is much faster, I thought maybe it was the cause and since I couldn’t do anything about it I left it alone.
After dealing with this for about 4 -5 months, I decided that it was time to investigate the issue again. So for starters, I decided that I would blame the WordPress application first and work my way from there. So for starters, I disabled all of the plugins that I had installed. Amazingly, that showed some results. RyChannel.com was loading instantly again!!! NICE! Now, the question became, which plugin was causing it? I went through and activated the plugins that I absolutely “had” to have. Ok, WP didn’t slowdown again. I started activating the other plugins one by one until the problem started again.
Okay, so which plugin was it? WP-Ban. WP-Ban is a WordPress plugin that allows you to block visitors by IP address, IP range, etc. I’m not quite sure why I had it installed, but now that it is gone, RyChannel.com’s WordPress application works fantastic.
Rychannel.com Development
Posted by Ryan in Site Development on March 8, 2009
Rychannel.com has grown a little since its initial deployment after Christmas 08. It has gone from a totally homemade HTML site to something a little more professional looking. I’m not quite sure where I want my site to go. So I guess I will just have to start with me. Not that I have an ego or anything. I’m just not as creative when it comes to the web development experience that is required when setting up an HTML site. Before switching to the current WordPress install, I was considering Joomla.
So I made up my mind on whether to use Joomla or WordPress. To me, joomla just seemed a bit on the complicated side. Joomla is a great piece of software, if you want to take the time to learn it. I know some people that have created great looking sites, using joomla. If you think otherwise, I’m sorry. So far the wordpress setup process has been really easy. I’m not sure if I’m set on the current theme though. It seems with the current two column theme I will be filling the right column with widgets in no time. Readers will be scrolling way down to the bottom of the page just to see some of my other links. This isn’t my first wordpress blog that I’ve setup but it probably has the most effort put into it. My last wordpress has a very “Vistaish” look to it. Being a mac user, I didn’t think that was appropriate. Some of you may be familier with the featured WordPress “Pixed.” I very neat theme but like I said before, too vistaish.
Maybe I can figure out how to create my own theme. However I am not an artist by any means and much rather have someone else do the creative work. 
If there are other Widgets that you can recommend I would be more than happy to try them out.