Geekality » Blogging

SQL for listing all WordPress tags

Torleif — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:47:17 +0000

When writing a post I sometimes find it difficult to choose what I should tag it with. I try reuse tags I already have to prevent a total mess, and sometimes I just don’t really remember what tags I have used so far. When writing a post in WordPress you can get a list of the most used ones, but once in a while I write a post on subject I haven’t written a lot about. So, instead of going to the Post Tags page and look through all the pages of tags, I decided to just connect to my blog database and run a query.

SELECT name, slug, description, COUNT FROM wp_terms
NATURAL JOIN wp_term_taxonomy
WHERE taxonomy="post_tag"
ORDER BY name

Lists all your tags, sorted by name

Some speedy WordPress fixes

Torleif — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:41:51 +0000

Used Page Speed for FireFox the other day to analyze my blog. Found a couple of issues and a couple were very simple to fix. If these will work for you, depends a bit on where your WordPress site is hosted and what your web server does already. So, be brave and analyze your own site. Look through the results and see if you can fix some of it without too much hassle

Missing expiration date and unnecessary ETag

The browser caches stuff, and to do that it needs some information. When we have stuff that doesn’t change very often (if ever) we should tell the browser that, once you’ve downloaded this, you don’t really need to check back for a new version for a while. To do this we add an expiration date. In addition you have two headers called Last-Modified and one called ETag. you can read more about that and all the rest of this in the link earlier in this paragraph, but the short story is you should have one. Having both is just not necessary. When I checked the headers sent with my images, I found that both were sent. So I decided to turn off the FileETag. To do all of this, for images, javascript files and stylesheets, I added the following lines to the .htaccess file in the root of my WordPress blog:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 weeks"
FileETag none

More info

Enable Compression

Compressing stuff means less data has to go across the wire between the browser and the web server. Which is generally a nice thing. And as long as the web server supports it, enabling it is pretty simple. Just add the following line to your .htaccess file.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript text/css application/javascript

More info

Don’t touch the default stuff

Just to make it less likely that someone messes up their WordPress installation after reading this: Make sure you add the above stuff. Do not just replace the .htaccess file. WordPress comes with an .htaccess file, and what’s in there needs to be there. Here is how the default stuff looks in mine:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s probably a good idea to not touch any of that And if you do end up messing up your WordPress blog after reading this blog post, don’t blame me

New blog!

Torleif — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:19:56 +0000

Alright, we are doing this again. After having watched a very inspiring session with Scott Hanselman called Making Your Blog Suck Less: Social Networking and Your Personal Brand Online at the Norwegian Developer Conference 2009, I figured I should have a go at this thing again. I have had various websites before and a couple of blogs, however they all suffered from me wanting to program more than I wanted to write. That means I usually ended up programming my own stuff, having loads of fun designing, putting things together, forcing some text about myself and what I do out there, and then… well, then they pretty much died.

So, now I am going for WordPress and is hoping that I will manage to stick with it for a while. And hopefully get some stuff out here too. Will try out Scott’s advice on using drafts in Live Writer, etc.

Aaaaanyways, have a look around, drop me an email if you want, comment on stuff, subscribe to my feed, et cetera. Or just ignore me. That is fine by me too

By the way if you are interested in seeing that very good session, you can find them here. I recommend downloading it using the BitTorrent file you find there. If you think it is a bit much, just use a decent BitTorrent client like µTorrent and you can select just that file. However I really do recommend that you download the whole thing cause it is a lot of really great stuff there. For example some very good introduction sections to Test-Driven Development with Roy Osherove.