So if you have been reading my blog (yeah right) you might have read the entry about my successful attempt to do fullsite caching with my Mambo driven website. Because of the way I implemented this caching method, all unregistered users get the same page which ist very fast and therefor great most of the time. Now, I also use Google’s Adsense program on my site which works, as you probably know, simply by including javascript code into your pages. One thing I like doing with Adsense is to serve their referal ads for Firefox or the Google Pack, but since the Google code does not check whether the user is already on Firefox, useless ads are served. Google also lacks a language testing routine, meaning that German users will get the English referal link or banner for either product. This means that these checks have to be done by us, the publishers. We need to identify the users’ preferred language and the browser they’re using. Using PHP that is pretty easy, however, my pages are cached and no longer dynamically served to most of my visitors!

So what to do?

Its a fairly simple trick: We do what Google does! We move our dynamic ad selection routine to a non cached PHP script and implement that via Javascript.

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So after I completely relaunched icq-4u.com recently I was worried about google’s ability of finding all my new pages on its own. Luckily there is a Mambo component called GSG (Google Sitemap Generator) which generates a google xml sitemap from all of the basic content. And because GSG allows enhancement with plugins, it is possible to add content from non-basic components such as Remository to the sitemap.

Note: Installation of GSG in Mambo seemed somewhat tricky at first. I had to copy the folders includes/domit and includes/patTemplate from a Joomla to my Mambo installation, but after that it worked fine!

I couldn’t find a ready-to-download Remository plugin, so I made one myself. Please keep in mind that I do not have secret or non public folders in my Remository, so I do not check for these aspects when generating the links. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve described just a short while ago, I was working on speed issues with my Mambo (ver. 4.5.1) based site icq-4u.com. In addition to the caching of the site’s download charts I’ve also thought about adding full site caching. Of course this step requires a fitting scenario since a full site cache freezes most of the dynamic content modules one might be using.

What I wanted was a pretty fast frontpage, but even with Mambo’s native caching enabled it was still somewhat slow. The page generation time that I was displaying on my sites footer (which by the way is far from precise if you only include it in the template file) always stayed around the 0.7 mark which annoyed me. Of course 0.7 does not sound so slow, but considering that that specific duration wasn’t accurate (try twice as much, when timing correctly prior to template initiation) and that caching was supposedly already enabled I was a litte bit disappointed.

Having looked into Mambo’s caching function already I knew what was there and what was feasible, so I studied Mambo’s index.php to find a fitting spot for a cache inclusion. These are the steps I did:
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I have recently found my site icq-4u.com to be extremely slow, getting slower every day. The site runs on the popular content management software (CMS) Mambo and uses several thirdparty components and modules.

After some detailed analyses, i soon found the culprit. An addition to the file management component Remository called Remository multi-module is included into every page of my site. Its purpose is to read the complete downloads logs table from the mysql database and generate a list of the most popular files in a certain time frame. After looking into it, it wasn’t much of a surprise that a mysql table with 50000 rows (downloads) after only a week since the implementation remository was a little much to analyze for every visitor and every page.

So this is what I did to resolve this issue. It’s a fairly simple modification which howevery demands that your installation of Remository does not have secret folders or files for certain users. If you do hide files from e.g. unregistered visitors, this modification won’t make you happy.

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