Lopez Family blog

As I took the time to get the blog back up and running I remembered how slow it was. Considering I make my living by telling people that performance matters and consult with them on how to improve their site’s performance I thought this a bit embarrassing.

Of course I’d known for a long time that this blog was slow and heavy but never had dedicated the time to improving it because I was too busy helping others improve theirs.

This past week I made some changes to make the site faster. The first thing I did was to move the videos off to Vimeo instead of hosting them on our site. I did the same thing with our pictures, all our new albums are on Picasa. By moving all this heavy content off the blog, the size of the pages was reduced and thus the response time dropped. The last change was actually the one that made the biggest difference. I installed a WordPress plug-in called “WP Super Cache” which makes static files from the dynamically created WordPress pages. My colleague Stephen Pierzchala actually measured the performance difference when he switched to using WP Super Cache.

The result is an average response time of about 2 seconds for the US and about 5 to 6 seconds in Europe and sadly 12 seconds in China. Not too concerned about that last one since I’m pretty sure we have no readers in China or anywhere in Asia for that matter.

My favorite part of all this is that our blog is now also available on your mobile phone.

For the few of you who have visited the blog in the past month or so I’m happy to say that I’ve taken the time to fix it. It still doesn’t solve the problem of writing posts more frequently, but I’m taking it one problem at a time.

The other change is the photo albums. Apparently I took too long to fix the blog so Lisa decided to starte creating her photo albums in Picasa (Google is everywhere). You can reach these albums via our blog by clicking on the picasa albums link. The older photos are still available under the link photo albums. From now on, all new photos will be in picasa albums.

It seems I only blog when I’m away from home. That’s probably due to not having any time to do so when I’m home. In any case this time I’m in Mexico… Mexico City to be exact. We got here on Monday evening and went straight to the hotel. On the ride to the hotel I had more than enough time to get to know the cab driver. I found out that there are about 20 million people living in the Mexico City metro area. Now that I think about it, that was the only interesting fact that came out of our converstaion. Not a very good return if you think that I spent about one hour talking to this guy. In any case we made it to the hotel which was in a very posh part of town. You know when people think of Mexico they usually think of barefoot kids with a punctured soccer ball playing on a dirt road (well that’s how they show it on TV anyway). I’m sure that still exists but the area we were in was rather nice, there were mostly new buildings with very cool architecture. Another thing I noticed was that the polution didn’t seem to do much to me. I didn’t really notice it and haven’t felt any of the symptoms that people say they experience. The work bit was, well, work. The most exciting part were the cab rides to the office because both days the driver was convinced we wanted to go somewhere other than were we wanted to be. I don’t know how it would have worked out if I hadn’t been able to speak Spanish. Because of work scheduling I get to spend the weekend in Mexico before heading out to San Francisco to see another client. At this point you’re probably feeling really bad for me I’m sure. As exciting as Mexico City seems to be, I’m escaping to a town called Queretaro. I’ll meet up with some friends and see what happens. I can’t remember the last time I had a weekend where I could just wing it. Should be fun!