“I’m back.â€
–Michael Jordan, announcing on March 18, 1995 his return to the Chicago Bulls
Too dramatic? Yeah, probably, but it is almost March 18th. Over a year ago I had decided to move my entire blog existence from a self hosted WordPress platform to TypePad. I did this for quite a few reasons, the biggest two were to get out of the business of managing my own installation and to experience another platform altogether. I was so frustrated by a really slow host and what I considered a less than powerful writing environment. I really enjoyed using TypePad, but there were too many times I missed the advances happening in the WP space. I will say that in the year I was away, WP really grew and matured. In the end, there are just too many people on this bus.
So in light of all that progress and growth I’ve decided to come back. I spent a few hours yesterday migrating things back over here to my own installation of WordPress, writing under my own URL again, and am finding myself to be pleasantly surprised by the speed I am experiencing. What does this mean for other parts of my life where I’ve neglected WP? Not quite sure yet, but rest assured that the labs are cooking up something really good. We all have to stay tuned to how deep the energy flow can take our collective decision making across multiple spaces. In short, I am very excited about the potential moving forward on lots of fronts.
I’ll have to leave it at that for now. What I will say is that it was amazingly easy to make the migration. The other thing I will mention is that I learned quite a bit from using TypePad for an extended period of time … it does a few things so much better than WP. Some of those things are ideas I’ve pulled into conversations relative to how publishing platforms can better support faculty, staff, and student workflows, social connections, and participation. I am still searching for some of the more elusive pieces to integrate into my professional workflows, but by sampling a diversity of platforms I feel like I am getting closer to it. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for Jim to leave a taunting comment or tweet.
Well, we’ll see if it sticks … I mean it took Jordan until March 28th to really be back. Now that was a killer Birthday present!
interested to see how it plays out.
Hey, Adam … Me too. What I am really excited about are the things we are cooking up in the PSU lab. Should be interesting.
If you want to keep your site fast, then serve your self up a big heaping helping of W3 Total Cache. It is truly amazing.
Thanks, Michael. Do you use that in addition to WP Super Cache? Would running both work or do you need to choose one v the other?
No need for WP Super Cache. W3 Total Cache does everything you need. You’ll want to get yourself an Amazon AWS account so that your site files can be cached on S3. It’s pennies a month, and the speed gain is phenomenal, even up against heavy traffic.
From what I read, W3 Total Cache is newer and more powerful than WP Super Cache, do not run both.
And ahem… what took you so long?
Do you use W3? I’ll read up on it and give it a try. Thanks!
The other thing I should mention is that WP still feels slow when publishing. One of the things that drove me away was how slow it felt on the admin side. Are there tricks to speed up that side of the experience?
I’m not positive about this, because I’ve never had an issue with the admin UI speed and never paid much attention to it, but I believe W3 Total Cache will also speed up your pages on the admin side.
Michael and Alan, thanks for the follow up. I will be moving to this tonight when I get back in town. I am also going to add the Amazon account idea. Appreciate it.
Nice.
WP is a powerful platform, there is no doubt.
Now we just have to get PSU Blogs on WordPress and the circle will be complete 🙂 Welcome back, buddy, I love ya.
I’d love to show you what we have cooking in the TLT Labs at the moment! Stay tuned, my brother!