Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Designing any website, as well as WordPress Themes, the smallest detail in the layout and design can send even the most expert web page designer into fits. Since you probably aren’t a top-notch CSS and HTML expert, how about I show you the tricks they use for finding their CSS styles and tweaking those little bits and pieces into shape.

A web page is generated using a combination of HTML tags which basically hold the structural frame work of the web page, and a style sheet which provides instructions to those tags on how to look and where to put themselves. Going through a style sheet to find the solution to your problem isn’t as easy as it looks. But tracking down the style sheet reference inside of the web page and HTML tags is actually easier than you think. It’s a matter of tracking down the culprit by narrowing the suspects.

View Source of Web Page CodeView the trouble causing page in your browser. Look closely where the trouble maker is and note any text near the problem area. From the browser menu, choose View > Page Source. This will bring up a new window with the code behind your web page. Now, using your “find” (CTRL+F), search for the key text you spotted nearest your problem.

Photoblog

Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPressBecause it is very simple to upload images with WordPress soon users started to regularly post photos, using WordPress as a photoblog. Until the release of WP2.5 photobloggers had to use the custom fields to upload thumbnails for the archive or to create a filmstrip in the footer. With the new media uploader in WP2.5 this is not longer needed. WP now automatically generates a medium sized and a small thumbnail. Thumbnail sizes can be specified in the settings and used for the archives display or a filmstrip.

There aren’t many photolog themes for Wp and even less generate the photolog feeling with only one picture on the mainpage and a click on the picture goes to the previous entry. With the arrival of the Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPress theming in this area soon make become more popular. AFAIK Monotone officially is only released for WordPress.com, but can be retrieved from the SVN Directory.

Tumblelog

T1 Tumbletheme for WordPressTumblr is a popular platform, perfect for quick blogging items people stumble upon. I mentioned in my previous entry that Chyrp a great self-hosted platform is for your own tumblog (?!), but also WordPress can be used as tumble-engine.

Using WordPress as a tumblelog is not difficult: there are several themes to make your Wp blog more tumblr-alike and there’s even a Quick Post plugin for WordPress, providing the blogger with bookmarklets to easily submit content to their WordPress powered tumblelog.

If you are hosting large files such as videos, podcasts, or large photo archives is transfer overages. Hosting services often provide a fixed amount of overall transfer with their hosting plans. A plan may include only so many MB of transferred data. After your account has reached that amount, you will be charged for any extra data that is transferred. Depending on the host, this could be as much as $1/MB.

At that rate, a single download of a 20MB file after you’ve reached your limit could cost you $20 extra on your hosting bill!

Usually, the higher the transfer limit, the more costly your hosting plan will be. Some hosting services offer plans with no transfer limitations, which can be quite costly, but certainly less costly than paying for transfer overages on a high-traffic site.

To determine why the bandwidth of the connection is important to a high-traffic site, let’s look at the math.

Assume your site receives 100,000 hits in a day. For the purpose of this computation, we will say that one “hit” is a single data transfer, whether that is a single file or a whole page and its supporting files. Averaged out, 100,000 hits in a day equates to 1.16 hits every second.

Also assume the average hit generates 160KB of transferred data; HTML, images, CSS, downloaded files, etc. Every second, your site is transferring 190KB of data (160KB/hit * 1.16 hits/s). The total, 190KB/s, equals about 1.5Mb/s of sustained throughput. (Note that KB = Kilobytes and Mb = Megabits. Most network speeds are rated in bits per second, whereas file sizes are measured in bytes.) Many network providers cap the transfer rate of a site to about this level; some higher, some lower. However, only if each user visits in a nice succession will this steady rate be maintained.

Usually, more than one user at a time will access your site. Sometimes during the day, nobody might access your site at all. If 10 people hit the site simultaneously per second, and that hit rate is sustained over a lengthy period — not uncommon for a high-traffic site — then you would need a 15Mb/s connection just to keep up with the simultaneous connections.

If your network adapters maximum theoretical speed is only 10Mb/s, your demand has already exceeded your capacity. WordPress had nothing to do with it.

It is not necessary to receive 100,000 hits to cause this problem. Sustaining this rate of connectivity for a mere hour generates only 36,000 hits. If visitors concentrate their access to a certain time of day (or an automated comment spam script attempts to access your system multiple concurrent times while posting comments) then you could be left with many dropped requests.

A 100Mb/s connection could handle up to 70 simultaneous connections at the same rate of download, but it is not likely that your network provider would offer the bandwidth that could fully use this speed without paying a premium. This is generally not something you can get with current shared hosting plans.

Depending on the quality of your server’s connection to the Internet, you may not be able to serve as many pages as you want to as fast as you want to serve them.

Your server’s network provider (your host or ISP) will usually connect your server to their internal network via an ethernet adapter. Adapters typically operate at certain standard maximum speeds, usually 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s, or 1Gb/s. Your server is physically incapable of transferring files of any kind in excess of this speed. There are additional barriers to your transfer rate that will likely reduce your server’s speed even more.

First, it is important to note that many of these numbers (especially the speed of your server’s network adapter) are theoretical. In practice, your server will never transfer files at the maximum rate specified by the adapter, because in addition to the actual data being transferred, the server is also sending and receiving routing information of different kinds that the internet requires to get data to your site visitors. Because of this “network overhead”, only a fraction of the full bandwidth is available for actually transferring files.

Second, your server is likely connected to various devices in your network provider’s facilities that will limit your transfer rates more than the limits on your server’s network adapter. These devices are in place because your network provider has to fraction out its limited bandwidth to many servers at its location, and all of the bandwidth must be shared.

Certain network providers allow you to “burst” data — temporarily exceed a pre-set transfer speed limit — in special cases when demand for your site content is high. The network provider’s hardware is specially designed to know when this is required. Some providers charge extra for this feature, some do not, and others do not offer this feature at all. It’s up to you to find out.

WordPress is a web-server-neutral application, meaning that it can run on many different platforms. Apache and Linux are the most robust platforms for running WordPress, but any server that supports PHP and MySQL will do.

Make sure your host features the most up-to-date and stable version of these platforms to create a strong environment in which to run WordPress.

Choosing the best method to run PHP, the language that interprets the WordPress code, can also affect your server’s performance. In CGI mode, the server creates a new instance of the PHP program for every PHP file that a visitor requests. In shared module mode (or ISAPI), a single library instance is used for each PHP hit. There are advantages and drawbacks to each method - while choosing the method for your server, be sure to keep in mind traffic and its demands on the server.

WordPress, as with many blogging and web applications, depends on MySQL to store data for producing output. Every request that WordPress makes to MySQL for reading or writing data puts load on the server.

WordPress is continuously optimized to reduce the transactions required to perform its functions; However, in high-traffic situations, many simultaneous connections to the database can cause excessive load on the server. In this case, connections to the server may not complete, causing the typical “Connection timed out” response in the visitor’s browser.

In most cases, MySQL connection rates can be improved by either adjusting settings for MySQL, or providing more memory and processing power to the overworked server.

To serve high-traffic web sites, you will have to contend with the demand that high traffic puts on your server’s internal resources. Be sure that the general demand on your server is met by sufficient processor power and memory resources.

There can be more dependencies than what follows for publishing your WordPress site, however these are the ones that WordPress requires by default.

Have you wondered whether WordPress can handle high-volume traffic? Think of creating a high-traffic site or generating volumes of writing? Think that something you write might get enough attention to get “slashdotted” or dugg by digg, or some other high-traffic-generating site. Wonder if WordPress can handle the sheer volume of traffic or fail. Can WordPress handle all these situations?

The simple answer is “Yes,” but this is a conditional yes. There is a lot you need to consider and understand before you decide on WordPress as your publishing platform, and if you expect high traffic volumes. Running WordPress on basic shared hosting will not be sufficient for truly high-traffic sites.

Before selecting WordPress for your high-traffic site, you will need to check the following to ensure your site is ready for the anticipated traffic: The site server and it’s software, upon which WordPress is dependent, needs to be sufficient for the traffic you anticipate and expect.

In one of my recent posts I wrote about the duplicate content issue. This topic is especially important to me since my blog uses the WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.