It was largely unexpected, but yesterday’s post had an enormous success. Okay, nothing compared to The Blonde Salad‘s posts, but I wasn’t expecting at all to get 500 visits in a couple of hours on a blog that I was considering as dead & forgotten.

This means it’s time to focus on improving your experience on this website. The weather in Ireland, where I currently am, is really helping me focus on my blog:

What I’ve done so far, in detail:

• HTTPS: I finally completed the SSL integration. All static links have been modified to use HTTPS, and any HTTP URL is now redirecting to its SSL version.
• Categories & Tags: I wasn’t using categories and relied on tags to categorize my posts. After a few years the tag cloud had become a real mess, so I spent a few hours in cleaning it up and reducing the number of tags per article. From now on, every post won’t have more than 5 tags and will belong to 2 categories: the real category, and a second one (English, Italian) based on its language.
• Caching: WordPress wasn’t performing at its best, so I tuned W3 Total Cache and switched to Memcache as its backend. It’s much better now.
• Permalinks: Sounds like my permalinks are not so permanent. I’ve modified some titles and URLs, so you should expect to incur in 404 errors for the next few days if you’re getting here via Google or old links.
• MySQL: Yes, believe it or not, I was still using MySQL 5.5. Switched to MariaDB 10.1, and I’m in the process of tuning it: you should expect some brief downtimes in the next few hours, while I restart services.

That’s it, for now at least.

Stay tuned!