This week for me has basically been a whole lot of web development and revamping.  While I’d love to just be able to “set it and forget it”, unfortunately that’s not always the case with websites.  You need to constantly revamp, revise, update, and improve your website’s performance in order to maintain and improve and maintain a quality user experience.  The other day, a friend of mine had noticed that my blog alone was throwing 400 requests and taking 40 seconds to load the main page.  There’s a great tool built into Google Chrome (view-> developer tools) where you can see and analyze everything that is running when your website’s page loads. What was the culprit?  WordPress plugins.  Oh, they’re fun to add and change and play around with, but certain plugins will jack up your website so bad.  The Sexybookmarks plugin was one of the most labor intensive plugins I had running.  Now we’ve switched over to some simple social share links, and with way better results.  If you haven’t already noticed, the site is flying now compared to the turtle speed it was chugging along with previously.  Less is definitely more, when it comes to add-ons, widgets, and plugins.  Now that we have things up to par again, I’m hoping and praying that my web host doesn’t send me another email threatening to shut us down.  That’s never a good thing!  Onward and upward.

In other news, on our main web page ArenaCreative.com we are approaching 6000 stock images live, so we are almost completely up and running with the entire collection.  Don’t forget to check it out, if you could use some stock images.  We are running a Spring Sale where you can score 25% your entire order, just by using coupon code SPRINGSALE25.  We also have two new subscription plan pricing packages available.  Take a look around, and let us know what you think of our entirely revamped stock photo website.

Looking for a great free collection of small, simple icons to link up to all of your favorite social media sites?  Here is a very clean and well rounded icon pack that I just found from Komodo Media.

Here were the icons I found useful, and you might also note that I created one more for the Behance Network, which was missing (in case anyone needs it).

I love using WordPress for my blog.  But sometimes, things can go a little haywire.  Today I realized that my media upload URLs (images I host using the easy upload feature in WordPress) were crazy long and wackier than a drunken monkey.

Took me a little bit of digging around, but I found out that you just need to go into your miscellaneous settings area in order to change the default save location.  If you start the link with another hyperlink of http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads then what will happen is it will upload your images to your wordpress install folder, in a subfolder named “http:” then another one within that names “www.example.com” and then another named “wp-content” and then “uploads” and so on and so on.

Here is an example link of what mine was doing.  http://arenacreative.com/blog/http://arenacreative.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/youradherebanner.jpg  What a mess.

Just change the value back to default, and you’ll be good to go:  “wp-content/uploads”.  I have no glad how my settings were changed; if I did it myself, or if something glitched somewhere along the lines in my WordPress installation.  All I know is I was happy to figure out how to fix it.  Hopefully this helps some other poor soul looking for a solution.  Click the image above to be brought to the help article on the WP site.

Don’t you just love the smell of fresh fruit?  Or maybe the smell of fresh plastic is more your thing… like when you get some new electronics or maybe some new camera gear?  Well, I decided to finally go WordPress with my blogging.  It will be better for SEO and also will be a lot more customizable than my previous blog host.  So far I’m loving it, but I did happen to kill an entire Saturday migrating over and tweaking things to get them the way I wanted.  In time, this web stuff gets easier.  It’s always a pain in the balls to get them started, and then after that it’s just a little maintenance and design things here and there.