http://www.danstorm.com/dan-storm-article-css-5.html

1. Float container.
2. Use “overflow: auto” on the container.
3. Use “after”.

Yahoo! YSlow
Google Page Speed
PageTest

Checking over the logs it became obvious that queries using SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS are a problem. Digging through code it appears that where a limit on results is used it uses this query modifier to allow simpler coding of paging. The problem is that since the main query to grab blog posts on the blog home page or any archive page uses this, on a large blog this becomes quite inefficient.

For now I have tweaked MySQL so that the MySQL Query Cache is now larger. These articles were useful:
MySQL Query Cache (at MySQL Performance Blog)
Turn on MySQL query cache to speed up query performance?

Looking at the log after this change query times have dropped dramatically (from over 0.5 seconds and up to milliseconds). This has immediately improved performance of the blog and overall load on the server.

I am currently looking at some WP Caching API and plugins to further improve performance.

If you are looking for some more ways to speed up WordPress check out this article as a starting point:
4+1 Ways To Speed Up WordPress With Caching

And … for myself – just so I remember:
Install Memcache onto cPanel running CentOS

I have always been a keen follower of marketingexperiments.com. They recently blogged on things to test to help reduce shopping cart abandonment rate:
What else can I test … to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate?
Here are some suggestions from the article (of course test) …

1. Offer alternative payment methods.
2. State your shipping prices or rules upfront.
3. Offer exclusive products online.
4. Put your nav bar to work for your cart.
5. Promote your promo codes.
6. Plug in a progress bar.
7. Brand your checkout process

Definitely read the article. There is more detail there. In fact their whole site as a whole is worth a look!

cPanel Logs – A detailed view

Ralph Wilson interviews Bryan Eisenberg on Product Pages. Using examples from Lands’ End and Amazon.com Bryan provides some very practical tips.

Worth a watch if you are involved with operating or building ecommerce sites.

Real World Web: Performance & Scalability:

Google allows a number of ways to filter via their “Show Options” link above the standard search results. Clicking “Show Options” opens a column on the left with more options including the ability to specify a date range. Notice their suggested date format (dd/m/yyyy) and the date format I am using in my example search following the suggested same date/month order. Oops!

Google is localising the suggested date format but not handling the localised input.

On the right you can see using m/dd/yy it works fine.

(And no – no different if I use yyyy instead of yy).

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Besides questions related to shipping costs they identify five questions that are commonly in the minds of online shoppers …

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

A good list and definitely worth reading the discussion in the comments too.

Hopefully this saves someone the few minutes it took for me to find this – pretty much everything you need to know!

Upload your image and an alternative state and it will output the combined image with the background position values. Nice.

exim -bP log_file_path

Here is a good rundown of setting up a VAMP (Vista, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server from Devshed:
Creating a VAMP

The other thing to know, which this article skipped, is that you should run your text editor as administrator when editing the config files. If you don’t do this you won’t be editing the correct file (only your Users version of it which isn’t actually used by the system).

find /home -mtime -1 -name *.php

Pretty easy to modify this to give a different time period, search a different path, or find different kinds of files.

The Missing Google Analytics Manual

Bryan is probably the most influential expert on Conversion Rate Marketing.

A great resource.

50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools

It is a great list of PHP tools including: Debugging tools, Testing and Optimization Tools, Documentation Tools, Security Tools, Image Manipulation and Graphs, PHP Code Beautifiers, Version-Control Systems, PHP Online Tools and Resources, PHP Development Frameworks, IDEs and Editors, Firefox Add-Ons, and a bunch of useful useful extensions, utilities and classes.

10 Principles of the PHP Masters

Definitely worth a read for anyone doing PHP development regardless of the level. Here is the list

1. Use PHP Only When You Need it – Rasmus Lerdorf
2. Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability – Matt Mullenweg
3. Never, ever trust your users – Dave Child
4. Invest in PHP Caching – Ben Balbo
5. Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets – Chad Kieffer
6. Make Better Use of PHP’s Filter Functions – Joey Sochacki
7. Use a PHP Framework – Josh Sharp
8. Don’t use a PHP Framework – Rasmus Lerdorf
9. Use Batch Processing – Jack D. Herrington
10. Turn on Error Reporting Immediately – David Cummings

I especially liked the discussion of 7 and 8.

This covers layout and composition, color, texture, typography, and imagery in web design.

The easy (and fast) solution proved to be modifying the Nucleus RSS feed so that it exports all the blog posts in full. These can then be imported into WordPress.

Steps in brief (this might be different depending on your Nucleus version):

1. Edit the skin for xmlrss2 in Nucleus. Find this (or similar) <%blog(xmlrss2,10)%> and change it to <%blog(xmlrss2,1000)%> where the second number is larger than the number of posts in your blog.
2. Edit the template for xmlrss2 in Nucleus. It will probably look something like this:

   <item><title><%syndicate_title%></title>
    <link><%blogurl%>index.php?itemid=<%itemid%></link>
   <description><%syndicate_description%></description>
    <category><%category%></category>
    <pubDate><%date(rfc822)%></pubDate>
   </item>

   Change it to:

   <item>
    <title><%syndicate_title%></title>
    <link><%blogurl%>index.php?itemid=<%itemid%></link>
   <content:encoded><![CDATA[<%body%>
   ]]></content:encoded>
    <category><%category%></category>
    <pubDate><%date(rfc822)%></pubDate>
   </item>

3. Open the Nucleus RSS feed in a browser (it should be really long and include the content of all your blog posts). Save the source (nucleusexport.xml for example).
4. Reset the changes to the Nucleus templates and skins above so your feed is back to normal.
5. Import the RSS feed into your WordPress site (this used to be under the Manage tab, it is under Tools now).

Note: this won’t migrate comments and maybe other stuff that is important to you. This is purely the post content.

Found this great presentation today on Slideshare by Manuel Lemos of PHPClasses.org:
“Sending E-mail that reaches the destination using PHP”.

It provides a basic overview of email protocols and systems and covers best practices to ensure email gets through, including specific reference to PHP classes he wrote. The MIME Email Message Sending PHP Class is really useful.