Questions, and Answers, from the man himself
I'm a huge fan of a rather quirky-funny, and extremely foul-minded blog called "Brown that Banana" – brownthatbanana.typepad.com
A true San Francisco freak of nature, just living his life and observing the wackiness of the world around him. Definitely not everyone's taste, but it's hard not to have the author grow on you, just a little bit, even when his language and subject matter are huge turnoffs.
Your blog is your brain's external drive; social media networks/services are the equivalent of cloud backup. The latter might be good enough quality, and easier to setup/use, but if you don't have both you're taking some pretty serious risks with the long term persistence of your content.
There are ~6,900,000,000 people on Earth. Are humans still relevant?
Sheer numbers do not equate to relevance, only to a perceived or real difficulty in filtering by relevance in a given context.
For blogs, that means that while it has become very easy to find blogs about making ice cream, it is much harder to find the best blogs about ice cream making, especially those targeted at making really good chocolate ice cream – because most search tools we have today will start mixing in popular blogs about chocolate ice cream generally, or even those dedicated to making chocolate candy… Not to mention all the blogs that refer repeatedly to chocolate ice cream manufacture as a means to sell me more Viagra. Got enough for now, thanks!
Perhaps the way in which blogs have best maintained relevance is at the individual blogger level – it still makes a lot of sense to use a blogging tool to write regularly, to document one's experiences and thoughts in the moment, if only for later personal referral. In that sense, blogging is simply an umbrella term for all such diaristic activities, including Quora posts, TwitPic and Twitter entries, and even Facebook updates.
Further, when such a personally-relevant blog takes off, and is maintained regularly, one can build immense writing skill, gain authority in one or more topic areas, and in some cases – as seen here and via the personal blogs of users like Mark Hughes, Jonas M Luster, and Lou Imbriano – it can even lead to professional gigs, either writing, appearing in the media, or within one's industry. Oh, for that day to come for this poor rambler… But I digress…
Long story short – like everything else in life, blogs are what you make of them, and relevance is earned largely based on the effort exerted.
There are 152,000,000 blogs on the Internet. Are bloggers still relevant?
This question makes no sense to me – I have not seen any hard data that shows WordPress to be significantly more vulnerable to comment spam than other blogging platforms' built-in comment systems.
WordPress itself, in fact, supports many comment systems via plugins, both local and hosted externally – including really featureful systems like IntenseDebate, Disqus, and of course the new kid on the block, Facebook Comments.
These systems have various strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of site/community being operated, and some of them (most prominently Facebook Comments) may seem more appealing in terms of effectiveness in blocking anonymous spam comments. But, for every pro, there's usually some other con waiting in the wings… In the case of FB comments, it's default loss of control of the comment data, and significant degradation of layout and formatting options.
If you want to host your comments locally, maintain total themeing control, etc – then WordPress' built-in comment system is still a good option – and combined with an anti-spam plugin like Akismet, or specific access/user verification steps, are certainly no more vulnerable to comment spam than other platforms' comparable built-in solutions.
It's likely both:
Yslow or Google Page Speed will help identify a lot of the content or WordPress-layout related issues, including javascript and CSS slowdowns that might be the fault of particular plugins/themes.
A quick Googling shows that WordPress on Godaddy has a history of performance issues:
http://wordpress.org/support/top…
In the above forum topic, one reader mentions around 3900 websites all running off the same virtual host server IP – that's… a lot. Other posters mention larger-scale issues with MySQL performance with Godaddy hosted sites.
The following advice is also given (much of which is still applicable):
Things I've found that help on GoDaddy's shared hosting:
1. WP-Super-Cache. The hosting isn't as bad at static files.
2. Use Google Libraries plugin, to eliminate long load times for javascript loading.
3. WordPress 2.8 causes a rather dramatic dashboard loading speedup.
4. In GoDaddy's hosting configuration, change it to PHP5 instead of the default PHP4. PHP5 runs much quicker on their systems for some reason.
WP-Supercache, or any of the other reputable caching plugins, will make a huge difference in performance – cached static pages require no database access to load, so especially for Godaddy this should be a big performance win.
Other similar options, like using Gzip/html/css compression will also reduce the size of files that are downloaded, which will "speed things up" for browsers. Being able to use canonical URLs and expiration dates on all relevant files will make sure that they are only downloaded once and cached on the client side, rather than at every request/visit. Some of these features can even be enabled via plugins, if you don't have lower-level webserver access. For more on this, just google "wordpress compression", and read to your hearts' content.
Long story short, it sounds like hosting WordPress with Godaddy is neither the cheapest, nor the fastest solution… But as long as you're going to stick with them, you should definitely familiarize yourself with the above tools and plugins – they will assist you greatly, regardless of where you eventually migrate your site (highly recommended).
My WordPress CMS is very slow to load. Is this a WordPress issue or a hosting issue or?
deano.com 