When creating a blog there are two things that separate a good blog from a great blog: a focus and a good design. A blog needs to be focused on a specific subject, unless it is a personal diary, and it also needs to have an easy to follow navigational design.
For this week’s review I will look at a blog that contains a long description, but short posts, and all the elements of a good design. The author has chosen to talk about many subjects, but can they all be tied together under a single focus? Let’s have a look at Blog with Ric.
In the past few weeks I have written a few posts about plugins I have installed to assist with administering Technically Easy. I find it very important to perform regular maintenance on both the WordPress database and the files to ensure my blog is constantly running. One thing I haven’t touched on is the importance of securing my WordPress blog.
There are many web sites and blogs that provide great tips on how you can secure your WordPress blog, and I may repeat some of those in the future. In this post, however, I will discuss a problem that is evident in many WordPress blogs. This problem is the ability of a visitor to browse the contents of the WordPress directories on your host. If you are unsure if a visitor is able to browse a directory, then I’ll show you how you can test it, and also show you an easy fix to correct the problem.
If you have read my posts recently you get the idea that I hate spam. In fact, I don’t know anyone that likes getting spam. Whether through e-mail, blogs, forums, or Web sites, spam is very annoying to receive and deal with.
I have implemented several measures to prevent spam from appearing on Technically Easy through the use of plugins. About 99.99% of the spam comments I receive get discovered and sent into the spam list. Recently, however, I have joined an online project that has been around for a few years called Project Honey Pot. I’m still learning about it, but this post will explain what I have discovered.
I recently experienced some performance issues on this blog and changed the template to more of a basic look and feel. By doing so I reduced the number of requests for all the pages on my blog, as well as the number of bytes that was transferred. In an effort to increase the performance even further, I signed up with an online free service.
While I was on Twitter several months ago I noticed a tweet from Michael Aulia from Craving Tech regarding a service he just started using called CloudFlare. This site talks about increasing a web site’s performance while also making the site safer. I have been using their service over the past few months, and so far I have been impressed.
You may run into an issue where your router’s configuration pages may not display properly, or fully, in your web browser. I have recently seen this issue with a wired router after connecting the router from one computer to another. I reset the router a few times, but the configuration pages in the browser window never completely rendered – the lower part of each web page was missing.
While I haven’t seen this before, I wasn’t sure if there was a problem with the router or the local computer I was working on. I had used this router in the past, and never experienced any problems with it, so I decided to look at the computer for the problem.
Hiring a web application design company is pretty difficult if you aren’t an experienced web app developer yourself. Since computer code might be Greek to you, you could hire a 3rd party consultant to help you sort through various freelancers and companies. Regardless of how you proceed, here’s what you need to look out for before you hire anyone to work on your application.
The website that has the most web visitors wins the online competition. Web traffic is dependent on how engaging your site is to web surfers. It is advisable that you update your web content on a regular basis yet don’t miss the opportunity to interact with your visitors. The more you make them feel they are valuable to you and to your business the higher the guarantee that they will return to your site.
By installing a chat widget, you are providing visitors with an avenue where they can express their concerns, thoughts and sentiments about the things you are offering them.
The main Web browser that I use frequently is Google Chrome. I have been using this browser most of the time for almost a year, and I have enjoyed using it. I find it quicker that the other browsers, the addition of the sandbox for security is great, and the fact that Google provides a new version each month is fantastic.
As with many of the major browsers that are used today, Google Chrome now supports graphics hardware acceleration. What this does is move most of the Web page graphics processing to the graphics card instead of the CPU. This reduces the CPU usage, while making the rendering of Web pages much quicker. I thought that the Chrome browser had enabled this feature by default, but to my surprise it wasn’t enabled. It is very easy to enable hardware acceleration and I outline the steps to enable the hardware acceleration, as well as some comparisons below.
Enabling Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome
To enable the graphics hardware acceleration in Google’s Chrome Web browser, use the following steps:
Open the Chrome Web browser.
In the address bar, enter “about:flags” (without the quotes), and then press Enter. A list of experimental features should be displayed.
Google Chrome – About:Flags (Click to enlarge)
Search for “GPU Accelerated Compositing”, and then click the “Enable” link.
Next, search for “GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D” and click the “Enable” link.
Google Chrome – Hardware Acceleration Options (Click to enlarge)
Close and restart the Chrome Web browser.
When the browser is restarted, the hardware acceleration is now enabled. You won’t be able to tell that is enabled unless you view something that can make use of the graphics hardware on your computer. Below I show you the difference between disabling and enabling this feature.
Results of Hardware Acceleration
Once you enable hardware acceleration, you can search for web sites that provide test that you can run in your browser. Once such site is used by Microsoft to test Internet Explorer’s graphics hardware acceleration capabilities. This site is called Internet Explorer Test Drive and is what I used to test Chrome’s hardware acceleration capability.
For the purposes of this test, I ran it on my home desktop with the following specifications:
To test the acceleration feature, I used the FishIE tank demo under “Speed Demos” from the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Test Drive site.
I chose to use 1000 fish to display in the demo to really test out the graphics capability of the browser. The tests were run at full screen (1920×1080), but with the browser tabs and Windows taskbar, the actual test area was 1920×979. The results of the setting disabled and then enabled are shown below.
Google Chrome – FishIE Tank – No Hardware Acceleration (Click to enlarge)
As you can see in the above image, with 1000 fish being rendered, and no hardware acceleration enabled, the CPU is pumping out only 3 FPS (frames per second). While the test was running the fish barely moved on the screen, so everything looked choppy. I then enabled hardware acceleration, the result is shown below.
Google Chrome – FishIE Tank – Hardware Acceleration (Click to enlarge)
Now that the rendering is being offloaded to the more powerful graphics processors, the FPS has jumped to 46, which produced a smooth animation of the fish swimming. This is a huge improvement compared to when the hardware acceleration was disabled. The graphics card in your computer may have different results than mine, but testing is the only way to determine the performance that you will see on your computer.
If you use Google’s Chrome Web browser, and would like to have the best experience online, I suggest you try using hardware acceleration and then run some of the test I mentioned above to see if it improves the performance of your browser.
