Lately I seem to be totally obsessed with speed and tonight I have made two fantastic advances in my quest for online speed:
- I installed a wireless N network card on my computer which finally grants me access to super-fast speeds of 30 meg broadband. The old wireless usb stick could only handle wireless g and maxed out at 5-10 meg. I disabled the option on the router to broadcast in wireless n and wireless g/b because I was only getting the same as if I had wireless g i.e. slow slow slow.
- I have finished optimising my blog (hopefully soon I will turn my whole website into a wordpress driven website) using the W3 Total Cache plugin, and some excellent online tutorials because it's not very easy to get the plugin working properly. I had big problems with the minification of css and javascript files and this fantastic tutorial. I am now getting scores (with the Firefox addon PageSpeed) 97-99% ratings.
Future
Now I have achieved success in the optimisation of my blog, what is next on the list of things that I want to do? First of all I have started to learn how to use Git. If you don't know what it is then here's a quick explanation. For a group of developers to work on the same code at the same time, to track what they have done, we need a version control system and git is one of the excellent alternatives out there, as well as Mercurial and SVN (both of which I use at work). I had a basic introduction earlier this month when I was doing the Chiron Transformation Website but beyond that I knew very little how to do more than the most basic of functions, so I want to learn more! Otherwise I want to turn my website big-andy.co.uk fully into a wordpress website, improve this blog and add some more features (e.g. HTML5 to the form), and write more often on this blog about what I am doing. I also want to add a portfolio section where I document which websites I have made and how I did them.
Weekend
This weekend I am going to Buxton in Derbyshire walking with the entire Pidgeon (my mum's side of the family) clan. I really can't wait!