The great plugin purge and other tweakery

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

When a new post contains at least one photo it’s likely to be the only one showing on the front page, although you can continue to access a list of recent entries from the sidebar on the left. The site archives dating back to August 2004 are no longer found in the header running across the top of every page, but you can now select any month for viewing from a drop-down list that appears in the sidebar on the right. This works in exactly the same way as the drop-down list for categories, but in making the change I’ve been able to ditch a resource-hogging plugin that I previously used to display the archives. The new mechanism is, I feel, more elegant and more useful, including a tally of how many entries were posted in any given month.

I’ve reluctantly ditched the Asides plugin—responsible for providing the one-liner entries under the ‘briefly’ category that used to appear in the left sidebar at the top—and the Democracy plugin, which provided the voting box in the right sidebar. Both impacted too severely on the time it took the site to load and really, while fun, weren’t essential. I will still post short entries to the briefly category but these will appear centre-stage, same as every other article.

I’ve also ditched a number of old plugins I no longer use, because the technology incorporated into newer versions of WordPress released since the plugins has made them redundant—although I expect some very old posts may no longer display correctly, but I’m prepared to accept that rather than keep plugins in place that drag and clash just for the sake of old stuff.

Linked badges and blog promotion boxes, too, have all gone—save one—and again, while offering diversions, I don’t think sufficient numbers of people, including myself, made use of them. Every image, every bit of code, all adds up to increase the time it takes for everything to load onto your screen.

What’s more, there was nothing unique about those diversions—nearly every blogger and his dog makes use of them these days.

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