Members of the TayloeGray team went to Raleigh today and Andrew presented at a conference on the Wordpress publishing framework. Wordpress is one of the open0source frameworks, that we use to build client sites. The conference includes three tracks of Wordpress content and plenty of networking.

Andrew spoke about improving the performance of Wordpress based sites using the built in tools.

Here is the abstract:

“Speed Up Your Site Using Transient API for Caching”

Transient API is a great way to cache sidebar items and other fragments (HTML sections) of your site that don’t need to be created on every page load.

With a simple change to your template, you can dramatically reduce the load on your database and still have a dynamic site.

The presentation will include a basic overview of the transient API and how to use it in your template. Examples will include caching the tag cloud, most commented posts, and other side bar items.

To download the slides, transient API presentation

Web Development

We just wanted to say hello to the thousands of Hip2save.com readers who have come to our website since we launched the new version of Hip2Save.com

For those who do not read the site, you should check it out.  Collin lists great deals on consumer products and has fun doing it.  Her site gets about 1.2 million people reading it per month.

TayloeGray started working with Collin about two months ago and was planning on launching the new version of the site after the first of the year.  She had been on Blogger, using the free blogspot domain.  Without warning, her site was deactivated for some unknown violation of a term of service.  To this day, the site is still of and there has been no response from Google (Blogger’s owner).  The old site was hosted at hip2save.blogspot.com so it was totally offline.

We had built the new site, exported her 5,000 posts and 90,000+ comments from Blogger, but had to call all-hands-on-deck over the weekend to finish it up.  The day of the outage, we put out announcements of the temporary website across Feedburner, Twitter and via other blogs.  By Tuesday (four days later), the new site was up and taking the traffic.

After all the dust settled, here is the post mortum.

• Traffic is only down 5% over the previous week, and not counting that it is a holiday week.
• Banner ad impressions and click throughs are up.
• Her Facebook page got over 2,500 fans and Twitter page got 400 followers in four days
• We migrated the site from hip2save.blogspot.com to hip2save.com without loosing Google page rank.

Overall it was quite a project, but because of the hard work of our team and the dedication of her readers, the site made it though.  In the new year, we plan on adding more features, improving the site and adding Facebook and iPhone apps.

Web Development