WildSnow Website Performance — Tips

All, we made some minor tweaks to our webserver. We hope these are transparent to you, but we did change one setting that could cause problems if you’re on a slow connection or the website is acting slow.

Basically, take all the time you need to type a comment. But after you hit the “submit comment” button, and if it takes more than 30 seconds for things to work (indicated by a screen refresh) your comment could be lost.

This sort of thing can always happen with any blog or web forum to varying degrees, but we’ve tightened things up so it might be a bit more likely.

The idea with our tweaks is that WildSnow.com will be much less likely to slow down and cause the above, but I wanted to give you all a word about it.

As with any blog or forum, we recommend making a clipboard copy of any comment before you hit the “submit” button, that way if a glitch nukes your prose, you can simply paste it into another comment window and try again (or at the worst, email it to me). For those not familiar with Windows cut/paste, just drag your mouse over your comment text so it’s all highlighted, then either click edit/copy from your browser menu, or Ctrl-c on your keyboard. Paste by using the same edit menu on your browser, or hitting Ctrl-v.

Most importantly, the only way we’ll know how all this is working, or not, is if we get feedback from you WildSnow readers and commenters out there, so please don’t hesitate to leave feedback on this post or email me by using contact link in nav menu to left.

6 Responses to “WildSnow Website Performance — Tips”

1. David G August 22nd, 2008 12:11 pm

   Hey Lou,

   Been reading your blog for about a year now.. Love it.. Awesome coverage, and is really expanding my mind on what to do in the backcountry. 🙂

   Having said that I’ve noticed a few things from your site that could use some improvement.. I’m not spamming or trying to sell anything..

   For starters.. If you upgrade WP you can then turn on caching, which should greatly improve the performance of your site, plus making less hits the to DB..

   Also, perhaps more of a nitpiky thing but you can change your URL names so that instead of /?p=1193 it’s an actual title of your post. Helps a lot with search ranking, and also when people link to your posts they have an idea what it’s about before even clicking on it..

   Anyways.. That’s a few quick hits.. Get in touch if you’d like a hand. 🙂

   Cheers,
   David

2. Lou August 22nd, 2008 12:26 pm

   David, thanks, appreciate the thoughts. Both those things are indeed in the works! We’re combining a site re-design with software upgrade. Getting the new server and doing all the tweaks was the first step in that process.

3. JW August 22nd, 2008 8:45 pm

   testing…hope it works this time

4. JW August 22nd, 2008 8:46 pm

   success! I’m in Lou, thanks
   jw

5. vacuum in the brain November 17th, 2009 3:30 am

   good idea

6. Lou August 26th, 2013 9:00 am

   All, apologies if the website is extra slow, anyone having problems with it loading slower than normal? Thanks, Lou