Myrddin @ MMO-Game.EU! » website

Myrddin at MMO-Game.EU Portal

Myrddin — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:38:24 +0000

Since I changed this site to a blog (in 2006) Myrddin.de has been a World of Warcraft related site. However now and then I’d like to write about other games too, but at the same time not clutter the blog with unrelated posts. For games like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Witcher 2 I have been mainly using other forums instead. This has been bugging me for a while.

WordPress Multisite

Recently I learnt about Multisite WordPress and found that it would fix all the above problems. Also it would give me the opportunity to have a mainsite with all posts while the different games would also keep their own sites.

What does it mean for you?

mmo-game.eu, the new site with all posts
myrddin.de (www.myrddin.de), character related posts, like for example kill videos, screenshots
warcraft.mmo-game.eu, World of Warcraft related posts
wildstar.mmo-game.eu, Wildstar related posts
witcher.mmo-game.eu, The Witcher related posts

You can switch easily via the Top Menu, but I suggest to sooner or later switch to the main domain www.mmo-game.eu. If it would not kill all links to myrddin.de I’d have switched it differently. Anyway I am sure in the long run it will pay off.

New Look!

Myrddin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 03:23:25 +0000

As you have noticed the past weeks there were some lack of updates. However I made good use of my spare time as you can see! The previous Theme was pretty nice, but due to all the stuff that was listed it was an Information overkill and the right posts were hard to find. In the next days I plan to improve that a lot. I’ll remove and overhaul pages and navigation.

Features

faster loading times (once I got the caches running again)
larger, better readable text styles
many improvements that will make it easier for me to post stuff
flash intro replaced with jquery
better navigation (work in progress)
FAQ section
better Facebook, Twitter integration
Updated World of Logs Class Rankings

Since I am often often AFK/Tabbed or am not replying due to being busy raiding I thought it would be a great idea to introduce a way to conveniently ask your questions here and thus build up Q&A section on the site. The main features of the site are already running again but more will come the next days. Be sure to check back.

Theme Showcase

Myrddin — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:59 +0000

As some of you may know I sometimes create wordpress themes. Once in a while you run across a design, that doesn’t fit the goal you had in mind, but at the same time is too nice to just thrash. There are probably a a couple of people who can use these and finish customization for themselves.

Free WordPress Themes

Most themes are with 1 or without sidebar, very customizable with 10 spots for widgets. If you want to take a look click here:

http://theme.myrddin.de/

I am not using plugins, except the piecemaker flash slider on top of the page. I used to use the cu3er as I am doing here on myrddin.de, but they only se $$$ sings atm and it takes forever to fix bugs. Piecemaker is more convenient to use anyhow and can adjust the dimensions to your need. Due to the nature of wordpress I had to use a fixed size for all themes, a bit too small for some and too big for other themes. It can easily (wordpress admin) be changed to fit as single theme.

Config

You can take a look at the Widget and Theme Options here.

If you want to have one of the themes, contact me.

Moved to New Server

Myrddin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:54:04 +0000

It’s been done! Last week I moved to a bit faster and better Server. Nah! Not in World of Warcraft! The Hardware that this Website runs on. Not like I have thousands of visitors, but now and then some major site links to this one and things start to get slow, really slow

The major issue of the server was its operating system that had end of life cycle 2 years ago and new features became more tedious to deploy.

Newer, Faster, Bigger

It was a good time for a general overhaul of running applications and to not daring to touch the core services. All in the sense of “never touch a running system”.

All these things have beenreworked, reconfigured and the site is running much faster now, despite the huge Cu3er Slideshow.

It seems somewhat odd to report Website related infromation on a WoW-themed Blog and thus I revived my old it-rhein-main.de domain for tech & admin talk.

If you like, you can head there and take a peek. At the moment the site is still “work in progress”, but it is starting to look good I’ll have to translate some pages to English and do the side bar.

Myrddin.de: Improved Performance, basics

Myrddin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:44:23 +0000

For a couple of months I have been moody about this site’s performance. This server serves only a couple of domains and this is by far the most visited of them – yes, really

This server is a vServer from a mass hoster running on ancient hardware shared with other people and I assumed it was one reason aside a bloated WordPress install with loads of plugins that raised response times to an unendurable degree. We had like 5 seconds on a cached page before anything was even served.

Increasing memory for php, mysql, apache worked only to some point, but as soon I got visitors from mmo-champion, wow.com or had other popular posts this site broke down.

Time for Action

About 1 year ago a 3D model of my World of Warcraft Enhancement Shaman loaded on the front page, this took alot of time … and bandwidth … lots of http requests … css .. javascript … delay from outside servers, etc.

Once the 2.1 megabyte and 160 objects were loaded it looked amazing However the lack of widgets and other – tedious to customize – content made me want to rework the site with a nice, custom, self made theme.

Polish up your Site

This was a long process with a lot of trial and error. At first I massively reduced the images used by the template. A Game Blog doesn’t live from walls of text alone – the idea was to cut lower the amount of images but keeping an appealing look.

Images

Avoiding gradients in articles, buttons, backgrounds and glare effects reduce the docmument size significantly. Not using icons in front of headers, date, categories, tags help to reduce the amount of http requests. Also you can easily scale down the quality of an image. Most image processing software will provide a preview, including filesize, making it easy to choose size versus quality.

Header

Instead of slicing a header image into pieces and thus creating a lot of additional files I moved the whole sheet (content) down and placed the picture in the background. With a an added transparency effect this saves a lot of work effort. Pesonally I like the look a lot, even though addmitedly it is kind of big.

Compression

The HTML (or generated PhP code) , Javascript and CSS are plain text files. You can shrink these by removing comments and other formatting that that ease legibility. In adition you can instruct your server to send these files compressed, reducing their size even more.

In terms of pure bandwidth optimization this was even the biggest gain. The document size was was reduced from 1.7 mb to 1.1 mb.
If you have many features on your site, your theme/plugins may come with individual java script and css. It is a good idea to combine them into single files. The compression will become even more efficient. More about that later!

Plugins

Plugins play a huge role in WordPress success. It is amazing how a few simple clicks provide new functionality to your site and its use. WordPress provides a search function in the admin area and lets you add plugins on the fly.

On the other hand plugins are often overused. Even well documented functions that you can easy add manually are served by widgets and not all of them conserve your resources.

Removing plugins that serve the same purpose or overlap functionality are a great way to scale down the document size.

I used to have “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” and “Search Engine Query in WordPress”. They provided similar results, lacked customization and were requesting active queries and thus server load.

Efficient Related Posts is my replacement for them. A plugin that shows related links at the end of a post to help the visitor find more interesting information on your site. ERP calculates related posts only once when a post is published instead of each time a client requests the information.

Bottom Line

Aforementioned suggestions help reduce a big chunk of the a website document size by a lot. the first move to optmize your website. After these steps I was at only 700 kb and 60 objects.

Shortly I’ll write a followup where I’ll elaborate in tech detail cache installation, server tuning and furhter opmtimization.

World of Logs DPS Rankings

Myrddin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:34:35 +0000

The most motivation I have gotten from raiding in the past was Topping Class DPS Meters. In TBC The WWScoreboard was the best website to display Rankings, per Boss, per Class and an average Total.

World of Logs has a similar feature, the Ranking Page here. It is a very nice list, but it does not include any kind of filters, yet. As Enhancement Shaman it is often tedious to find the proper page and thus I created and easy way to access the pages. Just select class, fight, difficulty and get directed to the proper Ranking Page.

http://www.myrddin.de/world-of-warcraft/world-of-logs-ranking-links/

Myrddin.de in new look!

Myrddin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:41:10 +0000

Here it is, the new look of the site www.myrddin.de! It all started out when I noticed that Google often pointed visitors tot he wrong pages related to the search terms. I started the category “recent searches” to write some posts to get google to point at better content by targeting at the exact search terms.

When browsing for information about wordpress I realized that the look of the website was quite old and the “cool myrddin 3D model” (you can still find it under “My Characters“) cost a lot of loading time. Also there are some nice plugins that helped to improve serving content.

Now, if you come here via search engine, for example “mace rogue” the right sidebar will show the search query and a list of related posts. At the end of each post there is a link to other posts dealing with similar content. If that doesn’t help you can use the search function ont he right or any list of tags, categories, pages. Hopefully you find what you are looking for now!

Just notice the rogue stuff is rather outdated sinc eI stopped playing “Slant, the Mace Rogue” at the start of Tbc. Basically I am not trying to gather all information tha tis available, and prefer to provide summaries of Shaman related information and other “cool” stuff, like for example taming garwal.

Everything is modular now which makes it easier to add and modify new features.I know there are still a few glitches, but I am working on resolving things asap.

Thanks for stopping by!

Don’t worry! New functions incoming!

Myrddin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:56:54 +0000

While playing around with some wordpress functionalities I realized that my old theme was getting really old. No widget support and the posts are looking somewhat boring.

During the next days I’ll play around with themes and designs … If you realize that some things aren’t working as they should you should come back in a few days.

There will probably be minor design glitches, but the postings and comments should still be functioning. The new design will provide many useful interesting functions