Tag, date, and category archives have a new format: they show the first 100 words of each post, including HTML and images. To read more you have to click “CONTINUE READING.”

Before, they were full-text just like regular pages, basically becoming a holding pen for posts. Most people browsing archive pages don’t want to read everything; they’re skimming for information. But the reason I refused to use WordPress’ the_excerpt tag is because it strips images or HTML. Since my Thripp.com blog is a photo-blog with the photos at the top of each post, that is unacceptable.

After much searching, I’ve found …

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Thripp.com is now 30% faster than I said it was in my previous post. Brilliant Photography gets the biggest chunk of the speed boost, because it was the slowest to start.

All the HTML is now one line. That doesn’t yield a big speed improvement, but it’s just cool. The big thing is that I turned small images into CSS sprites and merged all the JavaScript files into one honker (148KB). That file is compressed with gzip if your browser allows it, and all the current ones do, so the bandwidth hit is only 45KB. Still big, I know, …

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Check out the new background for Thripp.com. Instead of light green, it’s a light green subtle mesh pattern.

If you don’t see it on the page, refresh the stylesheet in your browser’s cache by pressing Shift + F5.

The new background is nice on the eyes and more interesting. Enjoy.

You can upload images to ImageShack.us and hotlink to them in your thripp.com blog, without leaving the site. When you’re writing a post or page, click the add media button:

Then, you’ll see a new tab called ImageShack:

Which gives this form:

Click browse and find the file on your computer, then click Upload. Wait, and this will appear (it’ll look different for whatever file you’ve picked, obviously):

Then, pick an option. I chose “Insert thumbnail with link to image page,” and this immediately happens:

Or if you write …

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I added integration with Facebook Photos to the write post screen! Now, when you go to write a post in the administrative area, you’ll see a new button under “Add media”:

Click the “f” to add photos from your Facebook account. First, you have to set it up…

Click the first button, log in to Facebook in the window that pops up, and then you’ll get a window like this:

I checked “Keep me logged in,” …

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I’d noticed recently that the LiveJournal cross-posting function stopped working since I upgraded to Wordpress MU 2.5.1. I upgraded to version 2.0.5 of Evan Broder’s plugin, and it’s working again. It works great; it automatically posts this blog’s entries to rxtdev.livejournal.com, for example. My cousin, JT, is using it too.

Whenever you make a post, it gets posted to your LiveJournal account, and whenever you edit or delete that post later, the updates are made at LiveJournal behind the scenes without you having to do anything. You can do this on your thripp.com blog too; from the administrative …

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