Argus, Payperpost and Tracking Codes: What’s going on?

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One of my visitors recently noted some interesting problems on my blog, writing in response to my recent post on how to speed up my blog:

I just noticed something very strange on your blog. Whenever I click on a link with my middle mouse button, which should open it in a new tab, it not only opens the new tab, but also redirects to that link in the same tab your blog is.

I suspect it has something to do with your payperpost tracker, because whenever I click with any of the mouse buttons the page starts loading and in the status bar it says: Waiting for tracker.payperpost.com…

Have fun correcting this problem 😀

Well, it is time to come clean on the oddities. I was helping the Payperpost team test the statistics side of their new Argus system for managing the Payperpost Websites. While the system is under wraps for the time being, there are some general tips on what Argus is/will be:

The focus now though is well and truly on Argus. We have just 2 months to get together the most amazing overhaul you’ve ever seen and bind in a bunch of new technology we have that we feel you guys desperately need. For everyone this is a fantastic opportunity to right wrongs, and to make PayPerPost.com everything we always dreamed it would be. …

…The end result will be a fast, highly scalable application that can cope with massive growth of the user-base. The resulting application will also be highly maintainable, and uses an architectural design we’ve come up with that will also allow us to scale up and down the dev team on demand without suffering a productivity hit.

We’re talking here about a system that is free of bugs, that is snappy to use, that does pretty much everything most of you have asked for it to do, and then some. …

… Above all else though, we’ve listened to you. You want hundreds of opps. You want a higher quality network. You want more opportunities to get your brand out (if you’re an advertiser) and more ways to make money (if you’re a postie). Argus addresses those desires.

You can read more about the ongoing testing process here, what Argus might be here, and generally search for information on the boards here. The original announcement was in October.

Since few people are giving much actual information away, I’m not sure what preparations are needed, or if Payperpost in its current form will continue alongside or be merged into ‘Argus’. Well, its coming next month so we’ll see…

In the meantime, I had to remove the new tracking code that Payperpost provides and re-add the old one. Behavior is now back to normal. I also offed an email talking about the problems to Daniel explaining the problem. Let’s see what he says.

…. I must admit that I have removed the code temporarily because of the strange behavior that it exhibits on my blog.

For example, it is continually contacting Argus for almost EVERY reason, including screen scrolls, clicks on a word, clicks on anywhere on the blog, and worst of all, right and middle clicking buttons have had their function curtailed to opening the link. This behavior is too obtrusive as a form of tracking, and I’m not sure at the moment if it’s worth it to inconvenience my visitors so much.

One visitor wrote and said: … (as above)

While I might be willing to try this out on a smaller blog, with fewer visitors, it is causing problems as it is. So I have removed the tracking code for the time being. I’d appreciate your comments.

Best Wishes
Kenneth

BuzzFEST #1 – Investing Adventures.com

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The first person to take me up on my buzzfest for October is Jorge who runs a cool looking financial news blog with a cow big bull on the front page, much better than the design for my pages! It’s a visually attractive website with very nice layout material, doesn’t look at all generic, despite the fact the CSS is free. And the URL is a great one: Investing Adventures dot com.

investingadventures

I don’t know how he finds the time to write such a blog because in the third quarter, he made a portfolio gain of over 50%. That’s quite impressive.

I do like the way Jorge handles category pages, but I don’t think the drop down menu for page categories is a good idea. It hides the category links away from visitors, and makes categories seem very unimportant. Also, it would be a good idea to have an archive page, too, so that readers can find your previous posts easily.

Great blog, I already signed up for the newsletter! I’m sure I’ll be following your tips, too!

Techniques: 5 ways to speed up Wordpress

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The last few weeks haven’t been the happiest time for my blog because of hosting issues, network problems, and server problems. But with them out of the way, I came across an interesting article on Lorelle on speeding up your WP installation. So I’m putting this in my ‘Sunday Projects’ category:

The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
So, in the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 articles hit the front page of Digg. Let me just tell you, the onslaught of traffic can bring a server to it’s knees. Over the last many months I’ve learned a thing or two about tweaking WordPress, and while this is not meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on how to survive a Digg, it will give you some tips that can definitely improve your blog’s performance for all of your visitors.

OK, what have I done? Let’s see, I’ve done five things to speed things along.

1. Unused Plugins: Or what do you do when you have more than 30 plugins?

On Lorelle’s advice, I moved ALL my unused plugins to a separate folder in my root folder, out of the way of the Wordpress Software. If I need them, I can move them back. If not, why are they are there? She noted that they will slow down a WP installation.

2. Unused Themes: 49ers?

I also moved my 49 unused themes (some of them quite hideous) to the same location. I don’t know if it made any difference or not, but finding the theme should be much quicker when there is one in the theme presentation folder!

3. My Sidebar

I cut down, removed, and converted elements in my sidebar. I cut down on useless stuff such as Javascripts to online services (I only kept Payperpost, Google Adsense and Analytics, and Alexa). I trimmed my comments and recent posts to only five items each to see how that would fare. Also, I decided only to have twelve categories after all. I simply copied the text from the front page, pasted it into a new post, switched to code view, retrieved that new HTML code, and pasted it into an already used widget. You can’t tell, can you? I also did the same thing to the blogroll. Still can’t tell, can you?

4. Maximum number of posts per page

I trimmed the number of posts on each page to three. Most people have five or even ten, but I can’t at the moment. It slows the server down too much. So I opted for three. It’s not ideal, but…

5. Standard PHP Code

I am slowly thinking of following another of her suggestions: switching ‘static’ php code to its html equivalent to speed up things. For example, in this theme, a PHP call for the blog URL and title and so on would require three separate routines for the same information (ie. the same everytime it’s called). I’ve kind of already done it with the sidebar itself. I’m thinking of switching to HTML from PHP for some of the plugins that I use or use to have: such as using a real robots.txt file instead of a plugin, re-adding my signature as HTML with local hosted images, and so on. I already removed the footer PHP for that reason and the Archives page has become static HTML, too.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jorge at Investing Adventures dot com for keeping an eye on things and giving me feedback when my blog is slow. It was taking 20 seconds or more for a page to load, right now as I type this pages are loading in under 10 seconds. But I’ll keep an eye on the load, speed and traffic over the next few days to make sure things are ‘normal’.