It’s no secret that ROCKFUSE is a dofollow blog. Thought I don’t use the traditional dofollow badges used by all the other blogs that have taken the time to remove the ‘nofollow’ tag, I’ve created my own and I think it’s pretty visible in the sidebar.

Now, why did I exactly made this blog dofollow? Or in that case, why does any blogger make his/her blog dofollow? The obvious reason to do this is to influence comments. If you are in need of developing backlinks to your blog, you’d find that blog commenting is one of the easiest methods to do this - and dofollow blogs stand a higher chance of getting quality comments because of this.

But, there’s a claim that when you remove the nofollow tags, it will lure a lot of spam comments.

In the earlier post, we discussed how we can find the troublesome areas by using Firebug and YSlow. So, when are we actually going to do anything about it? Here’s the scoop on certain methods that can really give you a real performance boost.

Before going any further, I must state that it is extremely necessary you back your files up in case something goes wrong.

Compressing JavaScript

If you’re loading JavaScript file in your plugins - or maybe whole libraries, it would take your blog an awful lot of time to load everything.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot from my readers that the blog loaded slowly. Personally, I blamed it on me having to make every design look like the work of Picasso - but as I dug deeper, I found many more things that I could have simply changed/removed to make it load faster.

So, this series is made up of my own experiences in doing what I can to have a faster loading blog. Since there’s a lot to tell and explain, I’d break this topic down to parts.

Hunting down the problematic areas with Firebug and YSlow

There’s no point in hitting the nail where it has not need of it right?

The last time I got so excited about a Wordpress release is when Wordpress 2.5 was released and it was worth it. Although Wordpress 2.6 was not supposed to come out for like another month, do not underestimate it’s potential. As always, the new version of Wordpress has some minor bug fixes but nevertheless, a lot of killer new features.

Here’s a recap of the coolest features I’m digging right now.

Multiple Post Revisions

If you’re blogging online through the Wordpress editorial interface, good news to you! Remember that time you though that., the article you’ve been writing actually looked better 5 minutes ago before you going ahead and making those revisions?

Do you use dofollow plugins in your Wordpress blog to remove the nofollow attribute in your comments? Well, if you do, maybe you might not know that, those plugins can actually add a heavy load to your server, while processing pages with a higher number of comments, when experiencing a high traffic scenario.

Simply, this is what happens. When you install a dofollow plugin, when a page loads, the plugin will hunt down the nofollow tags and remove them from appearing in the page output to the browser. This is not the most effective method since what it does is using the system resources of your server to cure something that could have been simply prevented at the first place.

You know what they say right?

Not really sure what (not who) Ajax is? Quoting Wikipedia:

Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or AJAX, is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript, XML, and asynchrony is not required.

Alright! Still not sure what it means?