Donncha O’Caoimh, one of WordPress’ lead developers spent the last few weeks working on a brand new plugin called WP Super Cache which is, without a doubt, the biggest advance in WordPress performance in years. (Please Digg it fast!)

Donncha has not only improved the existing ubiquitous WP-Cache system for users that are logged in (bug fixes, added plugin capabilities, etc), he’s literally invented a new methodology for static caching of documents for visitors which renders at least a 2-3X performance improvement over WP-Cache.
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This post describes how to add variable width, centered columns of stuff to the Worpress footer. Not sure what I mean? Well, look at the bottom of this site.

• These columns are fluid width, so it works in different browser resolutions and as you resize the page the columns resize.
• The columns maintain their centering on the page even as it is resized.
• You can put anything you want in the columns, though I’ve got text and lists in them for demonstration purposes.
• It should work with other blogging platforms as well as plain old HTML Web sites.

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Folks, since my site has gotten fairly popular I have people who want to advertise on the home page. The problem is that I didn’t know of a good method of embedding Ads that only show up on the home page and don’t appear site wide. (And not in the sidebar.)

I needed to employ a little PHP trickery in order to get this to work and I figured I’d share the methodology in case anyone else wanted to do this, or had a better idea as to how to pull it off.
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As a result of three Digg homepage appearances over a period of a few weeks bringing my blog to it’s knees I decided to make a few changes. In addition to acquiring a new server and finding someone to optimize the heck out of it for me, I also decided to re-vamp my Wordpress theme.

I’m probably a little pickier than most, but I was looking for the following list of features in the new theme:

• Speed - Along with the rapid growth of traffic on this blog I noticed a decline in page responsiveness. That is not something I want to subject hundreds of thousands of people to monthly. But most of the themes I came across suffer from “PHP bloat”, or the author’s feeling that more is always better.
• Accessibility - being one of the founders of HTMLHelp.com, it’s important to practice what I preach. So themes need to be accessible by any Web browser, on any operating system at any screen resolution - including screen readers for the visually impaired. This is currently very, very hard to find.
• Search Friendly - Although almost every theme claims to be “Search engine friendly”, I found that many could use quite a bit of improvement.
• Extensible - Webmasters have different tastes, so themes need to be flexible. Unfortunately the majority are poorly documented, use illogical naming schemes for CLASSes and IDs, and generally make it hard to modify them.

After having no luck finding an appropriate theme out of the hundreds that are publicly available I decided to just build it myself. The theme is currently in use here on One Man’s Blog, and I’m now making it available to anyone that would like to use it.
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WP Admin Bar is an indispensable Wordpress plugin which displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page - but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

I find this plugin to be absolutely essential to my enjoyment of Wordpress. It allows me to easily jump back and forth between viewing the blog and various management functions on the back end. If you’ve never used it before you’re going to wonder how you got by without it all this time.
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