I think after a bit of tinkering I’ve gotten this site to a place where I can leave it mostly alone to deal with itself. I’ve set up analytics, search crawling and some caching to try and make it as fast as I can for a site reliant on dynamic content.

I wasn’t able to get varnish to work. I tried to use a reverse proxy to get apache to serve the content from varnish to the rest of the world, bit that was failing to serve any content other than the main page. It even left out associated elements of that page, like the CSS. While I could try and troubleshoot this, I don’t know of what use it would be. Instead I tried to optimise with plugins.

I’ve set up caching with W3 Total Cache, mostly with the default settings, but with minification and some tweaks to how its caching policy. I have yet to look into memcached, but all in due time. I’ve also set up Total Upkeep to make automatic backups, both locally and to my home server. Hopefully now if this goes down, I’ll have a backup of it that shouldn’t take too long to restore.

Currently the longest thing to load is the fonts. I’ll have to look into whether I can improve it by using some online font CDN. I think google may have one.

I’ve also set up code highlighting and latex, should I ever want to use those. And SEO so hopefully I’ll get some hits eventually. All of this with analytics so I can see if/when that eventually happens.

It’ll be interesting to see how I find this iteration of the site and how it performs. Hopefully better than the other one, but I don’t know if I like the interface here as much. Who knows, maybe I’ll try out a different static generator in a little, just to see if I like it better.