From the dubiously-related-to-the-topic-of-this-blog department, I finally devoted a lazy few hours to getting this blog sorted! It was previously crawling, with pages loading at around 40 seconds. (According to WebWait, the premium website benchmarking tool, of course ;)).

• Upgraded to WP 2.5.
• Removed WP-Cache. Installed Super WP-Cache and set up htaccess correctly. At this point, caching starts working whereas it previously did not. Still, uncached pages remain dog-slow.
• Changed to default WP theme and pages load fast. This test tells me that my theme is wonky.
• Try to fix theme. Nothing works.
• Instead of going back to default theme, I switch to the pretty cutline theme. Fortunately, it works.
• Re-incorporate the old stuff.
• Remove a ton of sidebar links from 2004. While WP 2.5 admin interface is pretty and more usable, editing links still sucks as much as it did 4 years ago. I wish I could find a plugin that just gives me a data grid of links to maintain.
• The blog has a cleaner look, pages are generated faster, and caching is serving them faster. Plus it's easier to maintain and admin. Happiness and world peace reign supreme in the land of plentiful chocolate.
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