Posted June 17th, 2010 by Albert
During one of my recent Tridion consulting assignments the client asked me about the performance difference between a website using a dynamic publishing approach vs a static approach. For he had concerns about the performance of dynamic websites. In the graph below you can see the difference the Google crawler noticed after a website, which consists mainly of article type content, changed from a static to a dynamic publishing approach. The left side of the graph shows the average time it took the Google crawler to download a page from the website (created by a well known Tridion implementation partner – not Deloitte) based on the static publishing model. The right side shows the average time it took to download pages from the exact same front-end, but with the back-end rebuilt based on the dynamic publishing model.
As you can see the average download times went down significantly. We have regularly seen the cached (home)page load within 100ms and uncached pages in double that time. The peaks that show up from the middle of December marked the go live of an application which was not fed with Tridion data and showed some mediocre performance until the first week of January.
The project of replacing the Tridion back-end for this particular website felt like killing my white whale. The website performance increase was an added bonus on top of the other improvements we realized during this project.
Why page load times matter:
Posted May 11th, 2010 by Albert
In a standard situation I would strongly advice against installing Tridion software yourself. It is far more efficient to hire a friendly Tridion application engineer to do the installation for you. The reason behind this is simple: They install Tridion on a weekly basis where I struggle to get one installation a year under my belt. Add to that the vast knowledge about known issues that Tridion has available in their knowledge-base and you will arrive to my conclusion.
That said it is useful to install Tridion yourself at least once. Installing Tridion will teach you a lot about the intricacies of the system which will prove useful when facing disturbances. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted April 1st, 2010 by Albert
Today I ran into the fact that outbound links from the standard WordPress RSS widget are not tracked by Google Analytics for WordPress. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a WordPress plugin for an RSS widget that does track the outbound links. However before embarking on a journey to create a widget with this feature myself, and finally add something to the community that gave me so much, I tried out the KB advanced RSS widget.
Fortunately this widet gives you control over the output it generates. This made it fairly easy to add the GA tracking code to the widget by replacing the code in the last text area of the widget with:
<li><a class=’kbrsswidget’ href=’^link$’ onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outbound/rss/^link$’);” title=’^description$’ >^title$</a></li>
Hope this will be of use to someone.
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