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Archives for July 2010

Change in site organization

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Implemented a change in how my site is laid out today. Where posts used to be /year/month/day/postname/, they are now just /postname/. I think this makes the site a lot more logical, and certainly shortens the URLs. I’ve also removed the “category” “directory” for all my categories. So rather than my reviews being /category/reviews/, they’re now just at /reviews/.

All previous links should work, and will get a 301 redirect to the new location.

I’ll expect my pagerank to drop a bit until google reindexes everything.

Thanks go to two pages:

Thanks. Hope it isn’t too traumatizing. =P

New Optimize Prime!

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So, thanks to a friend, I’ve started plugging away at my site again to make things run faster, take less bandwidth, and score higher on YSlow and Google Pagespeed (oh, and webpagetest.org, which I’ll get to later).

So, first thing I did was get some baselines. I ran my site through Yslow and Pagespeed again, and got a 84/100 and 94/100 respectively. When looking at Pagespeed, there was really nothing that wrong (or at least, nothing Google was telling me was egregious). Yslow, on the other hand, had a lot to say. The main thing, and something I’d wrestled with before, was CSS and JS minification (combining all of them, stripping out whitespace/comments, and compressing). So, I went back to work on getting that working. Turns out, in the theme I use (the seemingly wildly popular iNove) doesn’t load CSS or JS in the proper way. It would load them with normal HTML, and a PHP call to fill in there location. This is not correct. What SHOULD be done is a wp_enqueue_style or wp_enqueue_script to add the style/script to a queue, so that they can all be added by WordPress. This was preventing WP-Minify (a minifying plugin for WordPress) from intercepting the stylesheets and scripts, and minifying them. So, some hacking of my theme later, and viola! it works.

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Adventures in Home Electricity

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Yesterday, Tara and I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years (since we bought the house)… replace the old “round” electrical receptacles with newer “rectangular” ones. All and all, it was easy work, but somewhat stressful as we only had about an hour to do them all before the sun went down and made that part of the house too dark to work. In that time, we did about 15 receptacles, and 5 switches. 2 of those switches being 3-ways. And that’s where the fun began.

So, I removed the old 3-way switches, and made mental note of which wires went where. But, upon putting the new ones on, I couldn’t get them to work right. One of them would work correctly only if the other way turned on. If the other one was turned off, the first switch wouldn’t work at all. Now, this could have been an early sign that the first switch was bad (as it did stop working at all later that night), but at the time, I really couldn’t figure it out.

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