Some people might have noticed some downtime on my blog, this in combination with just being added to the blog pack isn’t exactly ideal, but the issue has been solved, there were a few issues with the nameservers that have been permanently fixed by Lonetrek.

Besides this I’m not feeling really well at the moment, I feel a little sick and exhausted but I hope it won’t develop itself into the flu or something. I’ll also be actively blogging soon again as I have some material I want to write down.

~Xeross

Yep that’s right, the blog has been moved once more, we already had the blog situated at Lonetrek Hosting for a while now but after having a thorough chat about it with Anthony (The owner and founder of Lonetrek Hosting) I decided to upgrade to the Grid Power package in combination with the 75% ISK discount.

This brought my hosting costs/year down by over 80% compared to HostGator, with Lonetrek I pay 30$ a year (+ 250m ISK for the discount) and with HostGator I had to pay over 120$ a year. So now the blog has moved over the shared subdomain has moved over and I’ll be moving over all my other websites too.

So mad props to Anthony for providing great and personalized support and I recommend everyone that’s thinking about self-hosting their blog or hosting a website or something to go for Lonetrek Hosting.

I have once more remodified the theme, it was a fair bit of work but I’m satisfied with the result, a gaming blog just looks a lot better with a dark theme in my opinion.

I’ve also modified all images currently used in posts to be either PNG or GIF so that they can be properly viewable on both light and dark skins.

I’ll be adding a style switcher too, this will make the old style be just a mouse click away. Please tell me what you think of the new theme and if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Thank you.

So I recently installed a syntax highlighter and by coincidence the author of that plugin also had a post about decreasing wordpress bandwidth usage. So I’ve read it and I thought let’s check how big the frontpage of my blog is when downloaded by a new visitor (The FireFox extension FireBug works great for this). A whopping 1.05MB! as my website is hosted on my server at home and my upload speed is at max 150KB total that would mean to load the pages take about 7 seconds to load.

So I went back to this persons blog post (You can find it here btw) and started reading through it again. First I tried wp-minify but as he stated this doesn’t work properly in Internet Explorer and your images wont load if your css contains relative urls, so this wasn’t going to work.

He also mentioned that his syntax highlighting plugin uses a lot of bandwidth to load all languages it supports so I made it only load the languages it needed. Dunno how did affect the bandwidth usage but it decreased page load times.

After that there was 1 last thing I had to test, enabling GZip compressed output. So after a little searching I found a Wordpress plugin to enable it. I tested it, No changes at all. So I checked my apache installation and noticed mod_deflate wasn’t enabled (This is needed to enable the compression). So after enabling this I checked the size again, but it only decreased by 0.03 MB (That’s about 30kb).

So leaving that enabled I decided to check if the compression was indeed enabled(I used this page to test it). Firstly I checked the frontpage, It said compression enabled, and compressed to 23% of the original size, But this wouldn’t explain why the size still was 1.02MB. So I decided to check an image on my blog to see if that was being compressed, filled in the url hit check, and the results, not compressed. This meant that the compression was only enabled on Wordpress pages.

So I decided to search on google how I could enable GZip compression for all files through a .htaccess file and found this. Though this person said don’t enable it on images and also not on flash as that might make flash stop working I ignored it and tried anyway by just adding the following code to my .htaccess file.

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip\
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

After adding this I hit ctrl+f5 in my firefox (Clears cache before loading page) and checked the size again, now it was down to 163KB! that means it would load in around a second instead of 7 seconds. I’m now trying to find out how to fix WP-Minify because that would bring it down even more, and I might also try to decrease the size of the images used in the sites layout/design. I’ll report how that went after I’ve done it.

Hope this was helpful, If you have any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to comment.

Regards, Xeross

In my opinion the blog theme was a little too plain, Everything looked pretty much flat and just plain boring. So I’ve decided to make some changes to make it look better and less flat, These are the things I’ve changed.

• Added better looking and better readable comments (Example)
• Made blockquote borders rounded (Except in IE) (Example)
• Added shadows to bottom of blog posts and bottom of sidebar widgets
• Changed title bar look, Not much but it’s a slightly better looking style
• Added 3d look to navigation bar links and sidebar widget titles.
• Added submenus/dropdown menu’s to the navigation.

I still have more work to do to improve the blog, I think I’ll change the look of the post listings and single post view. I’ll update this posts when I’ve done that, For now leave some feedback on the changes.

Regards, Xeross

Hey Folks,

I’ve made some changes to the blog, I’ve added a list of pages in the sidebar on the top right, I’ve added the possibility to add comments on pages, And i’ve fixed a few minor things in the layout of the comments.

I’m also planning on adding ajax based comments, This makes it so that the page wont reload when you post a comment but the comment just gets added without that. Other then that I still have to change the header on the list of links so that it reads “Other EVE Online Blogs” or something similiar but that’s proving more difficult then i initially though.

I’ll keep everyone updated.

Regards, Xeross