Sprayfly

I just read the article Testeando Viper Cache para Wordpress on Anieto2k. The article is in Spanish and is a performance test and early review of Duane Storey’s latest Wordpress plugin - Viper Cache. Viper Cache is a caching engine plugin for Wordpress that can dramatically speed up Wordpress page loads and helps deal with large volumes of website traffic. I have recently been testing caching on my own blog and was already impressed with the results but it looks like ‘Viper Cache’ might just take Wordpress caching to a different level. For those of you who don’t read Spanish, here is a rough translation of the original posting.

As a result of my post comparing various Wordpress caching engine plugins, Duane Storey, the creator of ‘Viper Cache’ got in touch to offer me a beta version of his plugin for testing. It has to be said that what with it being in ‘alpha’, the installation process was a little ‘thorny’ and the cache files didn’t save themselves to the directory I had specified, however the plugin did perform fairly well.

I’ve dug out the stats for the other caching plugins to make a comparison:

Statistics: Viper Cache
Memory: 174.0 KB
Completed Requests: 1330
Request Time: 22,556 [#/sec]

There are also some comparison graphs available too:
Memory Consumption
Completed Requests
Request Time

The number of completed requests certainly draws my attention.

I look forward to getting my hands on the plugin for testing once it has come out of its alpha state. Hope the translation was useful to somebody (although the graphs say it all really!)

I have been doing some work on the site and have successfully integrated Highslide JS, a beautiful javascript image library with Crossroads, an excellent Wordpress plugin. Crossroads integrates Wordpress with Flickr so that you can easily include thumbnailed versions of your Flickr sets at the bottom of a post - simply by placing the setid within an html comment. Now, when you click on a thumbnail, Highslide JS causes the thumbnail to grow and ‘zoom’ towards the screen, leaving you with the large version of the photo. Furthermore, captions are also integrated and the keyboard cursors can be used to navigate from photo to photo. If all that is not enough, Highslide JS also preloads your photos from Flickr to save on loading time - making it all a smooth experience.

Just as a taster, have a look at this flickr set below:

Straight up

Splits!

Leg touch

Twisted yeah

Frog :)

Martines mobile

balancing act

another splits

One Hander

I recently needed to add multiple posts to a new category I had created on one of my Wordpress blogs. I really didn’t want to have to have to go through each post individually, manually adding the new category to each one. I therefore searched around and found this great plugin.

The “Batch Categories” plugin allows you to filter through your existing posts (you can apply multiple levels of filtering) by Date, Author, Status, Title, Existing Categories or by using keywords (even allowing wildcards). Once you have done this, you can select the posts you desire from the shortlisted selection and either add or remove them from a category all at once. This is exactly what I was looking for! Here are some screenshots of the plugin in action.