Speed up a Drupal web site by avoiding slow blocks in your page layout
Drupal blocks provide secondary content that often lines the left and right sides of Drupal web pages. Typical blocks are menus, lists of recent posts, and forms for logging in and searching. But every...
View ArticleSpeed up a Drupal web site by enabling block caching
Most Drupal web sites have a set of blocks that line the left or right sides of its web pages. Typical blocks are menus, lists of recent posts, and forms for logging in and searching. Every block adds...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to strip HTML tags, scripts, and styles from a web page
The HTML tags on a web page must be stripped away to get clean text for a PHP search engine, keyword extractor, or some other page analysis tool. PHP's standard strip_tags( ) function will do part of...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to strip punctuation characters from a web page
When processing text for a search engine or analysis tool, code needs to strip out punctuation, formatting, spacing, and control characters to reveal indexable text. In international text there are...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to strip symbol characters from a web page
Most symbol characters, like + = © ™ ← → ☺ ♣ ♠, need to be stripped out of web page text before processing it in a search engine or text analysis tool. For international text there are thousands of...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to strip numbers from a web page
Numbers in prices, quantities, dates, times, phone numbers, and addresses may not be of interest when processing a web page for a PHP search engine or keyword analysis tool. In international text there...
View ArticleLatency-friendly gradient backgrounds using tables
A typical web page color gradient uses a thin GIF or PNG image repeated for the width of the page. However, the network latency cost for the image is high, slowing down the site. Instead, skip the...
View ArticleLatency-friendly bar charts using Unicode characters
A typical web page bar chart uses an image from a presentation or spreadsheet application. The network latency cost for the image is high, slowing down the web site. Instead, create bars using rows of...
View ArticleLatency-friendly customized bullets using Unicode characters
CSS defines only three bullet shapes: disc, circle, and square. To get custom bullets, web designers use small bullet images. The network latency cost for these images is high, slowing down the web...
View ArticleLatency-friendly hierarchical menus using Unicode bullets and a bit of...
JavaScript can expand hierarchical menus in place, without a page reload, but often these scripts are too fancy for their own good. Large scripts and lots of pretty icon images slow down page loads...
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