Development

Give your RSS Feed a new look with CSS. If you have a website that has RSS feeds for comments, posts, updates or anything else you need to have it styled. Leaving your RSS Feed plain will make it blend in with all the other sites and even in some browsers make it difficult for users to read your sites RSS feed. Also giving your RSS feed a style that matches your site will show to your visitors that it’s part of the same company.

At one point or another you will need to force a website or a webpage to not be in a search engines cache or want to make sure it doesn’t get cached. I’m going to show you how to prevent Google and a few other search engines and caching services from caching your website. Please note that having a cached version of your site is often a good thing since if your website is under heavy load or no longer loads, users can still see your content.

A lot of sites have some sort of scheduled / delayed content system to help stockpile posts so you don’t need to work every day or at the very least have to manually submit the posts when you want to. I’ve seen sites use cron jobs to handle this feature but the easiest way is to use your existing date column for the content.

With most content tables, you will have a published date column so the user can see when the content was written or submitted. Use this column to your advantage for scheduled posting. Using the simple database setup below, we will create scheduled posts.

Having your website load and perform actions quickly is very important. Users don’t want to wait for a page to load. If they feel like your site is taking a while to load they will often navigate back and find another search result and visit that site instead.

What can you do about slow loading websites or to speed up your current site? Below is a list of items you should check through and perform. Also at the end of this post will be some resources you should check out.

When delivering large amounts of code to visitor to your website, you want it to be downloaded fast so the rest of your site can load smoothly. For instance, since CSS is usually one of the first render-blocking files that the web browser has to request and parse before the rest of the site loads, you’ll want this file to be as small as possible. Modifying your CSS file to be more optimized, such as combining rules, creating global classes and more can help reduce repeated CSS throughout your style-sheet. Along with optimizing your CSS and JavaScript, you should also compress your code.