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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I made the sidebar 30 pixels wider by taking away space from the content. The blog area is still wide at 778 pixels, so it doesn’t hurt anything. This makes a big difference because the sidebar was too wide before. You can give your categories longer names without the names wrapping, and I added the count for each one in parenthesis next to it, thanks to wp_list_categories with the argument, show_count=1 in WordPress MU.

I’m taking advantage of the extra space by clarifying things. Instead of “Search Here” and “Search All,” the search engines say “Search This Blog” and “Search All …

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I blogged before about how I had to give up caching because it doesn’t work on Wordpress MU. That was with my old web host (Netfirms), but now that I’ve switched, Wordpress Super Cache works fine.

I enabled it for the whole site. This is great news, because everything is gzipped now and loads real quick. The cache clears every 24 hours. The downside is that the stats in your sidebar stay a day out of date. I changed the wording from “Pageviews today” to “Uniques Yesterday” to clarify. Your tag and category pages may also stay a …

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