Plugins

Because there are times when reliable, affordable (read Free) web conferencing would make everyone’s lives easier, I thought you might appreciate this new and highly regarded Open Source offering- it is called DimDim.  DimDim may be found at: http://dimdim.com.

I am registered as: rabideau on the DimDim site.

We will be exploring utilizing this technology for transitioning ideas etc. to our client base.

For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

WordPressHelp (WPH) is very pleased to announce that we have implemented the newest release of TreeMagic-Banyan thereby aggregating the web’s most important WordPress information all in one location!!!

In our continuing efforts to make WordPress easier to use, WPH now affords WP developers & users the opportunity to double-click on any text word on this site and gain “instant” access to related WP resource information from:

• WordPress
• Lorelle
• Automattic
• WordPress Themes
• WordPressHelp
• AmbientWebs and
• TreeMagic

Users may access the information from these sites either individually (via the drop-down menu which appears when you double-click on a term) or in a collective, intelligently, pre-processed and correlated fashion (via the WP Banyan Portal). This Web 3 functionality allows users access information ‘on-the spot’ and then return to the source for continued reading and information gathering.

If you have additional sites you wish for us to incorporate in our WP Banyan Portal and TM-Banyan Search function, please use our Contact page to let us know.

AmbientWebs is pleased to inform everyone that the following sites are now enabled with TreeMagic-Cypress or TreeMagic-Banyan:

• TreeMagic-Cypress sites:
  • http://treemagic.org
  • http://drdiab.info
  • http://ambientwebs.com
  • http://goodwines.org
• TreeMagic-Banyan sites:
  • http://wordpresshelp.org
  • http://processteam.org

Please let us know other sites that are using the plugin… oh and we are also interested in what you might want to see this plugin do next….

Earlier I made some modifications to a WP-plugin for Drop-Down Menus.  I have placed the cleaned up code on this site for any/all to use. You should find it in the Downloads are.

The original plugin is: Copyright 2007 - Zoute snor

css cleaned up and validated by Mark Rabideau — 26 Nov 2007

All rights reserved by Zoute snor. You are free to use this software and redistribute it for free but may not include it in any commercial distribution without prior written permission.

TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
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