Need for Speed, Part 1
I was thinking about speed today. Feeding this site into the free analyzer at WebSiteOptimization.com reminded me of a couple of facts I had already figured out. First, the blog is growing too long.
Blosxom has a configuration variable called $num_entries to help with this. It allows you to limit how many blog entries appear at once. By default its set to 40; I’ve now lowered it to 10. This has had some unanticipated side effects. The comment for $num_entries is:
# How many entries should I show on the home page?
This seems to indicate that the limit is only imposed on the ‘home page’, or root category. In fact, it limits all category views. This is probably good, because eventually the categories will get full. However, there is no provision for browsing further back within a category. This may be a job for a new plugin.
The other thing the analyzer reminded me of is the need for gzip compression on the site. I looked breifly into this before, without much luck. My host, iPowerWeb, has no documentation about using mod_gzip on their support site, so I assume it isn’t implemented. I looked into the gzip plugin for blosxom, but haven’t figured out how to get the required Compress::Zlib module to work from the $plugin_dir/lib dir. It uses AutoLoader, requiring a make step. I did this, but couldn’t get it to work on my Mac. Today I submitted a support request to iPowerWeb asking for mod_gzip support. I’ll post the response when it comes.
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