Mark Headrick's Web Site.
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What's New on Mark Headrick's Blog
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- Sunday, May 12, 2019 12:29 AM: Happy Mother's Day 2019
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Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day for 2019, especially my mom. Love you mom, you’re the greatest! 😃
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- Tuesday, May 7, 2019 5:42 PM: Blog Updated to WordPress v5.2
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I just updated my blog to WordPress v5.2 which contains a number of feature updates and bug fixes. As always, I backed up my files and database first. I have automatic updates disabled so I can do this beforehand. As I usually do, I updated the local copy on my PC before updating my blog here. The update seems to have gone fine so far. 🙂
This did include an update to the Twenty Twelve theme that I use. Using WinDiff I determined that I only needed to make a change to the header.php file in my child theme.
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- Sunday, April 21, 2019 12:49 AM: Happy Easter 2019!
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Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Easter! Hope everyone has a great day! 🙂
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- Saturday, April 6, 2019 5:13 PM: Changes Made to Blog to Increase Performance and Replace Jetpack
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This adventure started after I saw this thread on Reddit: I created a tutorial on how to debug and fix a slow WordPress site. Something I wish I would've known when I started out as a Developer. : WordPress. So, I decided to try a few of the suggestions out, even though my blog wasn't really all that slow
I first tried the Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster plugin. This allowed me stop loading some CSS and JS files on the main page that were not needed, such as the ones for WP-Polls. I then disabled WP-Polls everywhere on the blog except for the single post that had a poll on it. I also enabled the option to minify all the CSS and JS files. I did not combine them since my webhost supports the HTTP/2 protocol and the plugin did not recommend enabling this option if this was the case.
The next plugin I installed to help with performance was Lazy Load by WP Rocket and set it to lazy load Images, and Iframes & Videos. This helped quite a bit by not forcing everything to be loaded initially.
Unfortunately, I didn't make before and after screenshots of website performance tools such as Google Page Insights and GTMetrix. The scores did improve, however. 🙂 Well, upon further investigation, GTMetrix did keep a history of recent tests: Latest Performance Report for: https://blog.markheadrick.com/ | GTmetrix.
I do take these reports with a grain of salt as there is nothing I can do about no Expires headers on third party content or the tool not taking into account that I don't combine CSS and JS files into one due to there being HTTP/2 support.
Finding Replacements for Jetpack
I then decided to see if I could find some plugins to replace what I was using Jetpack for so I could get rid of it. I needed replacements for Stats, Sharing (Facebook and Twitter buttons), and Subscriptions. I'm sure my recent support thread, How to remove all comment subscribers? | WordPress.org, helped persuade me to find something else.
To replace sharing, I decided to test out Sassy Social Share which seems to work fine and is a good enough replacement. You can see the buttons at the top of this post. This also allowed me to get rid of Custom Tweaks for Jetpack by BarryCarlyon which I used to move the placement of Jetpack's buttons.
For comment subscriptions, I went with Subscribe To Comments Reloaded. I had used the plugin this is based on before it stopped working and I went to Jetpack. Unlike Jetpack, I like being able to see the actual subscriptions within the blog's admin interface.
To replace the stats portion of Jetpack, I decided to try out Google Analytics. After creating an analytics account, I installed Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights. While most browser ad and tracking blockers will not load the scripts, many did not load the WordPress tracking anyway. I'll have to let it run a while to see how good or better it really is. After a couple days, so far it looks like it will be a good replacement. 🙂
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- Sunday, March 17, 2019 6:05 AM: Happy St. Patrick's Day for 2019!
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Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Everyone be safe out there and don’t do anything stupid like drinking and/or texting while driving.
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General Information
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Background: I was born on June 6, 1969 in Wichita Falls, TX, but grew-up in Edmond, OK, including going to Edmond High School there.
Current Occupation: It's a secret.
Before my present job, I was: a bank teller, Interned/Co-oped with IBM down in Southlake, TX at their Performance Evaluation Center programming Remote Terminal Emulators, and then worked for the State of Oklahoma in the Department of Vital Statistics (birth/death certificate stuff) for awhile, then spent 13 years working for Creative Labs, Inc starting out as a Technical Support Agent and ending up as a PC Technician/Help Desk Support in the IT Department.
Current residence: Oklahoma City, OK. If you want to know where Oklahoma City is in Oklahoma, or if you want to see what other internet resources there are in Oklahoma, click Oklahoma. Here's another site for info about what's in Oklahoma City.
Graduated May '92 with a Bachelor of Science in Computing and Information Sciences from Oklahoma State University.
Hobbies: Computing and all that stuff, Music, Movies, Snow Skiing (it's been awhile since I've been :/ ), Chatting on the internet (generally while working on our website or programming), and goofing off.
Radio Station I mostly listen to is the Classic Rock station KRXO 104.5 FM, followed by: KJ-103 and Rock 100.5 the KATT., all out of Oklahoma City, OK.
I have one sister, Jill, who got her PhD in Physical Chemistry, researching the atmospheric chemistry of alkylperoxy radicals (believe I got that right.. has to do with lasers, studying molecular behavior of various gases, CO2 and Ozone among others).. at the University of Colorado She's now a Research Associate at the University of Kansas.
Page last modified: April 18, 2019 1:50:19 AM CDT. *
*: The Page Last Modified date above simply means the date of the file that generates this page which may or may not have anything to do with the date that other parts of the site were updated or even the contents of this page which are, for the most part, generated dynamically.
Website was created with HomeSite v4.5. After Macromedia purchased HomeSite I stopped upgrading. It seems to do the things I want.. so why upgrade? Also, some aspects of version 4.5 that I use on occasion were removed from later versions.
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