CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 501 One (Web server address)
CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 501 One way to reduce your bandwidth usage is to reduce the size of your pages. A properly constructed, valid, XHTML web page will be smaller in size than one written in the old-school style using font tags, tables, and spacer images for layout. Using CSS for styling and layout reduces the size of your web page so that it downloads quicker and reduces your bandwidth usage. It will most likely render more quickly in your readers browsers, too, which is an added bonus. WordPress strives to conform to the XHTML standard, but even though the code delivered by WordPress may be minimal, it still doesn t prevent you from writing pages and posts using the old-school style of web page writing, though it does encourage you to separate presentation and content by the appropriate use of CSS. In the previous chapter, I illustrated how to remove the sidebar of calendars, del.icio.us links, and login/register controls. Doing so not only makes the page cleaner for a single-post-entry context, but also reduces the page weight considerably, if your sidebars contain a lot of information, such as a long list of pages, posts, categories, and so on. The example in Chapter 17 would work well if your most weighty pages are individual posts, like two of the top three URLs in Figure 18-10. Checking Your Links Another regular routine task you should undertake is to check the links on your site. Nothing is quite so frustrating to a user than to click a link referenced in a blog post, only to find the page has disappeared. Inevitably, people do move their web sites to new URLs, or they rearrange their site so that old links to pages no longer work. Sometimes, they abandon their sites altogether. You cannot control what other people do with the pages you link to, but you can at least make sure your readers are not disappointed too often. What you can control is your own links. You should make sure that your own links you make to, for example, past stories still work. Another source of broken links is the list of links you have in your blogroll, resources list, and so on, managed by WordPress s Link Manager (described in Chapter 17). Finally, readers sometimes leave links in their comments, which can go out-of-date. You could check each of those links by hand: clicking each in your browser and checking that the link still works. Unfortunately, that gets tedious after about the first five! Luckily, a number of solutions to this problem are available, in the form of both online services and desktop tools. Using Online Link Checking Services A number of web sites provide online link checking services. They work by reading your web page after you provide the URL, and checking each of the links they find on your page. One such tool is Link Valet from the Web Design Group (http://valet.htmlhelp.com/link/). Figure 18-11 shows a portion of a typical report page.
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