I have changed my weblog design to display only six months of entries, from twelve months of entries. Gzip brought the size of the old page (text only) from 600K+ down to around 300K, but the PHP script I put together quickly was broken in the sense that it doesn’t do content negotiation, so a web client that does not understand gzipped contents would still get the same data and would not be able to make any sense of it. Googlebot is one such web client, so for awhile Google was not indexing my weblog.
By bringing the number of items on display down by half, the total size of text on my front page also dropped by half. 300K is still a lot, but Google is more important (!), so I turned off gzip in my script. This will have to do for now.
I also fixed a bug in the script, by locking the cache file when I write to it. This should avoid the potential problem of data file conflict and corruption, not that my website is busy enough that the script may be accessed simultaneously.
Things to do:-
Adding Box Model Hack to CSS file so it displays properly in IECouldn’t get it to work. Easier to just stick a bigger width value for body.- Fix the “monthly colours”
Proper HTTP headersDone.Add category archiveDone.
Client negotiation to send gzipped/plain text where appropriateDone.