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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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My energy use

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Because this is an ongoing “post” that I will be re-visiting from time to time, I’m going to make a page that will be visible on the top navigation that will serve as a space for this “meta-topic”.

The main goal of this is to hopefully provide an overview of how from the time I really became aware of my energy use (with regards to electricity, gasoline, natural gas, etc), I have been trying to lower that total usage anytime I see easily trim-able amounts.

Now, please, don’t misunderstand. I am NOT saying I’m going to lower my footprint to zero (at least, not anytime soon), and I’m not saying I’m going to give up comforts for the sake of energy use. What I am saying is that with very little extra work, the average person could probably cut a non-trivial amount of energy use from their day to day life, and afterword be no less comfortable in their home (in some cases, more comfortable). What this does take is some time, and in many cases, money. But, in my mind, this money isn’t wasted. It will pay for itself in comforts, or just in long term savings.

The page will be up and running in the next few weeks. At this point, consider what you have around your home that could be replaced/upgrade that would save your money throughout the year, and would have little to no negative impact on your comfort.