Site Performance – Feedback

RunScribe V1

You may have experienced varous site performance issues here over the last couple of months…many apologies. The site seems to become somewhat a victim of its own success and is struggling to keep up with the increased traffic. Please be assured that I am aware of some (all?) issues and I do my best to resovle them when I have the time.

I’ve either done or am in the process of doing some of the following and confess to not quite knowing what I’m doing at each stage. At each stage I though “I’ve cracked it”. Only to find…I hadn’t

  • Migration from wordpress.com to self-hosted wordpress
  • Migration from one seemingly-inadquate hosting package to another one with a further migration tonight onto better servers, albeit the same package (no i didn’t quite follow that logic either). I use Krystal
  • Installation of numerous wordpress performance tweaks – no doubt some will conflict with each other and cause problems eg asynchronous codes, SMUSH image compression, caching and several other tweaks. No doubt some will really contain viruses. #sigh At least I have backups and firewalls and antispam and two factor authentication
  • Introduction of content delivery network (CDN) – hey USA you now have your very own copy of this site sitting somewhere in Uncle Sam’s back yard.
  • Reduction of the number and aggressiveness of some ad units.I use Monumetric.
  • I appreciate ads are annoying eg when watching terrestrial TV. They are, however, a key source of my meagre income from this site. Mr Rainmaker kindly pointed me in the right direction for a plugin that can be modified to stop ads for subscribers. That’s not straightforward but I’m going to have a crack at doing that if I can find a decent WP/php developer.
  • A new Comments system just for Boris. I thought the old one was fine. Hey ho.

Like Ogilvy, my ad supplier MONUMETRIC are compliant with CHROME AD FILTERS. So their ads SHOULD be free of malicious stuff. Some will no doubt slip through but one reason I chose them was that they appear well-intentioned. MONUMETRIC (and me) have implemented ADS.TXT which is another way of ensuring ad quality. Monumetric also set ‘floor pricing’ which means they don’t buy low quality ads as these often have dodgy stuff in them.

If you have any complaints, suggestions or words of tech-encouragement then please comment below

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13 thoughts on “Site Performance – Feedback

  1. Boris gets a shoutout but not me! I am heartbroken.

    Still haven’t enabled the ability to post images….

    That might be for the best though.

  2. About Justin’s thought/input: +1 If posting images (= hosting on you server) eats up too much space, embedding (=deep links) from uploadservices would good/great too.

    1. space is not a prob
      i’ll dig through the options, it looks like a good plugin.
      i was just nervous it wasn’t workign as i can’t actually reply to any comments on the site itself (i’m using an admin console now)

  3. I dont mind adverts, and appreciate you need to make some costs back (at least). BUT.. the in line ones are really really annoying. If thats your intention, and you hope to introduce a DCR-kinda subs model, then you’re doing it great at creating an incentive! If not, may be worth revisiting the placings on the page so you dont make it really hard to read some of the articles.

    1. which inline ones please?

      there WERE ones that were placed inside images but they were really annoying and slowed the site. those were remvoed a while ago.
      nearly all of the ad units should be on the sidebar (perhaps the occasional one in the header too)

      other than that the only ones that i think you might mean would be the ad unit that is in the footer. (which is currently playing mouseover video which is against the contract that i signed up to…but there we go. ad brokers like monumetric find it hard to control apparently.) and there is also a video that plays at the end of the post. i didn’t think those were too intrusive…might depend on how you access tho eg pad/phonepc

      1. ah, didnt realise they had gone for good. Come to think of it, I havent seen them for a while – so good move there.
        Are you refering to the ones that ‘hover’ at the bottom of the viewable screen and move along as you scroll ? Yes – they are annoying too. Not sure why – maybe because it feels like its stealing viewable area from you – text is hidden so you lose maybe 10% of the readable screen.
        I’m seeing a BP advert there at the moment that spawns a video (Ive just clicked through – have a penny chew on me! 🙂 )
        Adds at the bottom – the true footer of the page, are fine cos I just wont scroll that far! 🙂
        On another note – I need a 10mile route tomorrow starting at Euston station at about 8am. Any ideas ? I usually hit the canal behind Kings X then round to regents park, down edgeware road ish, Marble Arch, Hyde Park, Palace, westminster and then back up Tott Court Road – but fancy a change.

      2. yes the BP one is the naughty one i’m talking about. should n’t be doing that.
        i don’t get paid for the clicks!! just the displays. it’s NOT the inverseof adwords.
        nope cant help you on the route, i dont venture up that end of town too much. i’ve done the canal bit you talk about tho
        as a general pointer look at the Capital Ring. that’s an interesting non-car bike ride. it’s really for walking but…
        the whole loop of london takes 8 or 9 hours if you’re (very) good at navigating. you see london in a different light.
        capital ring and london loop i find are good places to head for to follow a run route in a new area. as you know the rivers and canals can have interesting towpaths

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