My Monkey Do

A Log of Coding Solutions

google

Google font WOFF in Firefox

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Problem

In a website that gets fonts from Google’s CDN, the browser window loading icon continuously runs.  In Firebug you can see that the WOFF file from google is the culprit.

 

Solution

Turn off Firebug.  Apparently it’s a problem with Firefox/firebug that causes this issue.  Once you turn off firebug the website loads and no loading icon is shown.  The issue may be related to this, but not sure:  http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4649

 

keywords: google woff firefox error

Caching With Widgets

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W3 Total Cache is a great WordPress plugin that will help your Google Page Speed score and will also speed up your website.  The only problem is that it doesn’t clear the cache when widgets are updated.  So for example if you have a custom theme with a widget on your page and you update this widget, changes are not going to be seen.  You’ll have to empty the cache on the W3 Total Cache page.

WPEngine also has a caching system that doesn’t clear the cache upon editing widgets.  This means that every time you update a widget you have to manually clear the cache.  WPEngine is a great WordPress host, but doing something manually isn’t good for clients.

A solution is to add a function to clear the cache every time the widget is updated.  The code below covers W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WPEngine.  You can copy-paste it into your functions.php or just install the Clear Cache For Widgets plugin.

function clear_cache_for_widgets( $instance ) {

// if W3 Total Cache is being used, clear the cache
if ( function_exists( 'w3tc_pgcache_flush' ) ) {
w3tc_pgcache_flush();
}
// if WP Super Cache is being used, clear the cache
else if ( function_exists( 'wp_cache_clean_cache' ) ) {
global $file_prefix;
wp_cache_clean_cache( $file_prefix );
}
else if ( class_exists( 'WpeCommon' ) ) {
WpeCommon::purge_memcached();
WpeCommon::clear_maxcdn_cache();
WpeCommon::purge_varnish_cache();
}

return $instance;
}
add_filter( 'widget_update_callback', 'clear_cache_for_widgets', 10 );

Source: http://scratch99.com/wordpress/development/clearing-cache-when-widget-saved/
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/25425/page-cache-for-categories-not-updating-with-w3-total-cache

Page Speed SEO

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One of the metrics for Search Engine Optimization is the time it takes to load a page.  With Google’s PageSpeed tool, you can see if your page is loading optimally.  One of the ways to better your page loading is by leveraging browser cache.  The article below explains it well.  What I did was a little simpler.  I basically just bypassed all the ExpiresByType and just put the ExpiresDefault in my .htaccess.


<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access 2 week"
</IfModule>

keywords: leverage browser caching
source: http://thomasgriffinmedia.com/blog/2010/11/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-in-wordpress-via-htaccess/