- Are you in a shared hosting account? / Is your blog hosted on a slow server?
- Does your (WordPress) blog use a lot of plugins?
- Is your website’s design heavy in graphics?
If you answered yes to all of that then you should consider offsetting some of your site’s load into a CDN.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users.
(source)
One popular CDN-service provider is Akamai. If you see a website connecting to an akamai.net URL during page load, that’s one example of a website using CDN for its content. Big sites commonly use CDN for files like audio and video. But for small-time bloggers like us, we will more likely use it to host JS, CSS and image files.
Distributing your content to different servers (but not too many) could improve your page load times. It can give your visitors the illusion that your site is loading more quickly.
For WordPress, there’s a plugin to automate usage of Google-hosted Javascript libraries like jQuery. But if you prefer to do this manually, simply refer to the Google Libraries API page. Using Google’s public copies of the popular JS libraries is almost a must now, unless you have customized these files yourself.
I have personally experienced getting frustrated before by my blog’s loading times so I finally decided to take steps in improving its performance. One effective way of measuring your site’s performance is through YSlow. This Firefox add-on will also suggest using a CDN if you are not yet using one.
In this article, I will be listing the steps I took to host this blog’s image and JS files into Google’s servers. I got the idea to use Google App Engine as a CDN here. You can follow that one if you want a shorter guide. I have written a more detailed walkthrough here.
- Sign up for Google App Engine. If you’re a small blogger like me, it’s more than likely you will never need to pay for extra resources in Google App Engine so this service is effectively free!
- Download and install Python.
In Windows 7, I installed Python 2.7.2 using the MSI file. - Download and install the Google App Engine SDK for Python.
- Create an application. The Application Identifier will be part of your CDN’s URL.
- Open the Google App Engine Launcher. Go to File > Create New Application. The Application Name is the same as the Application Identifier. Choose a folder in your computer where you’d put all your CDN-hosted files.
- Put some files in that directory. I created folders to organize my files.
- Edit app.yaml in a text editor. With the two folders I created, my app.yaml file looks like this:
application: littlewolf version: 1 runtime: python api_version: 1 handlers: - url: /images static_dir: images - url: /styles static_dir: styles
Detailed documentation can be found here.
- If you’re using 2-step verification in your Google account, you need to get an application-specific password for your new Google App. Go to your Google Accounts page and click on “Edit” beside “Authorizing applications & sites”.
- Enter the application identifier for the name then generate a password. You’ll need the password each time you deploy the application (when you have made changes to your local CDN folder) so save it somewhere easily accessible.
If you’re not using the 2-step verification then use it! It’s an additional layer of security for your Google account. Stop typing your Google primary password everywhere. - Deploy the application by clicking the button.
- Enter your Gmail address and the application-specific password generated in step 9.
You will get a log window showing the progress of the deployment. If no errors are shown, close the window. - Try accessing your CDN-hosted files directly by URL. Here’s an example showing my header image for this blog.
You can now use these links in your blog template. In my case, I’ve uploaded to Google most of my bigger image files. I also grabbed Shelfari’s Javascript widget file and hosted it there. These big files were slow to download in a shared hosting server and was therefore one of the weak points in my blog. Run tests with YSlow to investigate similar things in your blog.
Using a CDN is just one aspect of site optimization. A blog’s slow performance is more often caused by many factors. But the easiest fixes to apply like CDN, minifying and caching have the biggest potential to bring noticeable improvements to your blog so there’s really no reason not to try them.
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Filipino Catholic · Hobby Blogger · 
Backup your Tweets with Tweet Nest
Twitter has an API limit of approximately 3,200 tweets. This means that when your tweet count exceeds that number then you will no longer be able to view all of them up to your first tweet. This has frustrated many tweeters and so there are now many ways to backup tweets.
I registered @littlewolf August 29, 2006, just a month after Twitter opened to the public.
I shared my twitter history in a post back in 2009.
Although this account is one of the first 5000 accounts created on the site (how do I know? I’ll explain later), I have not been a consistently active tweeter. Because of this, my tweet count is still far from reaching that API limit as of today. But I’m not gonna wait for that milestone so I’m backing up my tweets early.
Sadly, if your own Twitter account has more than 3,200 tweets then you will only be able to backup your 3,200 most recent tweets. Twitter’s FAQ seems to be promising this will change in the future.
The best (and coolest!) way to backup your tweets is by mirroring them to another site. You don’t need to be paying a webhost to do this. You can set it up right on your local computer with XAMPP. But that is outside the scope of this article and I will be continuing with the assumption that you have some knowledge of the basics of setting up websites.
Tweet Nest requires at least PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1. This tutorial will demonstrate installing Tweet Nest on a LAMP server with cPanel. In other words, the server this website is on. If you’re using XAMPP, the steps in Part 1 should be similarly applicable. Part 2 will not be applicable to XAMPP so you’ll have to look for other ways to automate the tweet grab on your computer.
Part 1 – Installing and Configuring Tweet Nest
I uploaded mine to a folder called “tweets” under the URL http://historicity.syaoran.net/ which is where I intend to put all this history stuff.
Fill out the setup form with your Twitter username, timezone and so on.
Create an app with “Read only” access.
Your @Anywhere API key is the Consumer key.
Specifying an @Anywhere API key will let your page have hover cards as shown below.
Notice my User ID. It’s below 5000, like I said before. I liked trying new web startups back then. Not so much anymore today because they’re popping up everywhere like mushrooms. Check out this tool if you want to know your Twitter user ID too.
Click the image below to view mine.
Part 2 – Automating the Backup using Cron
The file maintenance/loadtweets.php will need to be run regularly to update your Tweet Nest install with the latest tweets. Best to let a cron job do this for us. Most webhosts have cPanel which offers a quick way of adding a cron job.
I recommend you enable this to be sure your tweets are being backed up.
You will be asked for the admin password you gave in step 4 of Part 1.
The username is your Twitter account.
If you want to customize the look of the page, there are some style settings you can play with in the inc/config.php file.
And we’re done! Now whatever happens to your account or even if Twitter goes out of business, you’ll still have all your precious tweets with you. Thanks to Tweet Nest!