Converting WordPress to a Static Site

I’m having some strong considerations regarding converting one of my two sites to a static file website running on Ghost hosted at Digital Ocean.

I’ve always been intrigued about performance and removing the fat that comes with WordPress. Don’t get me wrong. I love WordPress for all that it is, but I’m thinking that for one of my own personal websites, it’s time to get this thing fast and furious!

Come back to this site for a HOWTO I’ll put together about this process and some potential snags you may run into.

Brave Browser So Far and WordPress Innovations

I was just about to write a quick little blog post about how I think the Brave browser is nice and fast, but then I tired to get into Google Sheets to look something up and it didn’t work in Brave.

Neither did logging into my WordPress (self-hosted) site. I had to switch to Safari so that I could write this pots.

The thing I was going to post about Brave was this image of the ad replacement that Brave is supposed to be one of its main features.

Brave

Regardless of the grief, after all, this IS a beta, I am pretty excited about Brave. I just hope it doesn’t turn into an Opera browser… had lots of promise, but never really “took off” as far as I’m concerned. Maybe others felt differently about that, but not me.

What’s even more exciting, as I write this, is that I was able to log into WordPress.com to post to my self-hosted sites… not only that, WordPress.com now has desktop apps that I can’t wait to get my fast-fingers all over!!!

Speaking on Synthetic Mobile Performance Testing and Monitoring

CTaRVTpUYAAo5uFI gave a presentation on Synthetic Mobile Performance Testing and Monitoring last night as part of Mobile Monday Detroit at OU Inc. I talked about:

  • Mobile Web Monitoring Challenges
  • Website Performance: What is it?
  • Mobile Testing
  • 3rd party calls
  • Summary

I discussed some key benchmarks to look for in mobile performance testing:

  • End to end load time
  • Time to first paint
  • Time to interactive
  • Element count
  • Page size

It was a great turnout with great questions from the audience. I’d like to thank those that gave me the opportunity to speak.

Look here for the presentation deck when it becomes publicly available.

Been a while…

Thanks to Alex, been working on some new projects. Working with Heroku (had always been curious about their services) to install a node.js application called Telescope for some exciting things I can’t disclose yet.

Also planning to work with another node.js application, but not Telescope, in the coming days.

Doing my first speaking engagement on Monday to talk about Mobile Performance Monitoring at a Mobile Mondays event at Oakland University. The event is titled: Mobile Web/App Performance Testing and Monitoring.

I’ll be talking, at a high level, about synthetic testing/monitoring of mobile websites.

GM Heritage Collection

So maybe it’s re-post Ars Technica article day for me, but I found it interesting to see this as a featured article.

I’ve been to the Heritage Collection for a holiday party and found the place to be very well curated and manicured. If you like GM history, then this is definitely a must see in the Detroit area.

GM’s Heritage Collection – Ars Technica (Cars Technica) article

 

Amiga 500

Of all the computers I’ve owned in my life, none were more exhilarating and exciting as the Commodore Amiga 500. Sure, the short time with the Vic-20 and then the long tenure with the Commodore 64 were very forming of my being, but the sheer innovation and wow-factor of the Amiga were legendary!

Ars Technica has a great blast from the past with their new article on the Amiga 500.

The Amiga just turned 30 years old this week. It’s amazing how time flies. I can still remembering playing all those awesome Psygnosis games in my basement!

Give it a read, you’ll really enjoy it if you are or were an Amiga fan or even if you want a little history lesson.

Getting SpeedFan to start in Windows 7/8.x

I have been a big fan of Almico’s SpeedFan for probably as many years as it’s been out. I used to be in love with the app because I overclocked the heck out of my computers and wanted to keep track of various temperatures: CPU, GPU, Chipset, Case, and others. I also wanted to keep track of the RPMs of the fans associated with those components.

As I have grown up (some say I haven’t – I say I haven’t), I’ve shifted my love of SpeedFan to be more of a sanity-app. I want to slow the speed of my various fans so it doesn’t sound like I work and play in a wind tunnel. SpeedFan does a great job with this function, really, it does!

The one that has plagued me ever since moving to Windows 7, however, has been that I could never get SpeedFan to start on its own. Whether it be via placing a shortcut in the Startup group or making a scheduled task, it just never worked. I had to manually start it every time I start up my computer. Pain in the ass if you ask me.

That all changed today when I stumbled upon this simple YouTube video that pointed out that I needed to set a delay before it started. Wallah. Lo and behold. It works.

 

Speed up your Android’s Chrome Browser

I’m not normally looking to make changes like this… who am I kidding? Of course I am. I’m a speed freak. I love pushing my technology to the limit.

Thanks to reddit user erythrocytes64, you can make a simple change to a Chrome flag.

Go into Chrome and surf to chrome://flags/#max-tiles-for-interest-area. Set that to 512 instead of the default (default is usually 128). At the bottom, it will have a Relaunch Now button. Click that.

So, was my real-world performance that much better on my Nexus 5? I’m not really that sure. I don’t do a TON of browsing using my Chrome browser. I usually digest most of my news and information via Twitter, with an occasional click-through to a web page that is referenced.

Well, I clicked through to an article and scrolled down as a test. Wow, very very fast. I did a test between Chrome and Chrome Beta on my phone and found that the Chrome browser that I made the changes on scrolled much faster.