Categories
Technology World Wide Web

Moving your WordPress blog from Apache to Cherokee in 30 minutes

In my post on VPS Hosting experiences, I had mentioned that inspite of doing server configuration tweaking, I found that load times were gradually increasing and I was experimenting with an alternative server named Cherokee.

The whole migration took less than half a day – including learning Cherokee, trying out locally and then using it in my blog. So what are the steps I followed to move to Cherokee?

I use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as my dev system as well as on the production server – so one of the things that I am confident about is that, if something works in my dev environment, it is bound to work in the production setup, with minimal pains during deployment. So I wanted to first try out the entire setup – make sure everything is fine, and then replicate the setup on the production server.

I started by installing Cherokee from the PPA and also php5-cgi:

add-apt-repository ppa:cherokee-webserver/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install cherokee
apt-get install php5-cgi

Categories
Technology World Wide Web

Optimizing website bandwidth consumption

Since the time I have hosted this blog on WordPress, I am looking for patterns and tweaks to optimize my bandwidth consumption. Most hosting providers charge you for your bandwidth, so it is always a good idea to see where you can cut down on bandwidth consumption.

When I say optimize I don’t mean reducing size unnecessarily. A good theme with good content in it is definitely going to add to the user experience of visitors to your site and that shouldn’t come in the way of bandwidth optimization. A lot of these points are closely related to the SEO of your site.

So here are some things you can do to optimize the bandwidth.

Categories
My Updates

A painful adieu to Livejournal

So finally I took the plunge. I have migrated my site to WordPress and hosted my blog here. I am planning to permanently move from Livejournal to here.

Considering that I have been blogging in Livejournal since 2004, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. However I had to take the plunge some day, and I thought the time has come.

So what have the major painpoints been?

  • LJ does not allow script inclusions. In this world of Web 2.0, it is almost impossible to not have widgets in your pages.
  • Analytics: You have absolutely no idea how many people reached your site and via which sources or keywords and why your blog is valued the most.
  • Very limited customization – frankly the themes seem very Web 1.0’ish.

Things were not easy. Exporting my Livejournal blog posts and importing them to WordPress was one thing. Setting up WordPress as my primary hosting, while allowing the rest of the site to function smoothly was another.

Once these were done, the rest was easy and the results are fascinating. I was able to setup my photo albums, analytics, Feedburner and integrate widgets for Friendfeed, Twitter in no time.

There are still some minor issues here and there, especially with migrating my content from the old site to the new one – I will work on them as and when I find time.

So, feel free to browse my site and let me know what you think!