Infinite scroll has become a standard feature in many web applications. Twitter and Facebook are the ones I use every day, but it’s also in a ton of Tumblr themes and Cargo Collective sites.

I feel WordPress themes has been slow to adopt infinite scroll- but after adding it to my site over the weekend I understand some of the complications.

(The Infinity Pool comes close, but it’s not as cool cousin, Infinite Scroll. CC Image. )

Unlike Tumblr or Cargo Collective, WordPress (.org) users can use plugins to add all sorts of javascript to posts. On my site Syntax Highlighting is the main culprit (which I use to display code snippets), but many others have social buttons or lightboxed images.

When infinite scroll pulls in additional posts via ajax, it doesn’t load the javascript code from the header or footer of the post that might be needed to display js content (e.g. social buttons, formatted code, etc) properly. That puts theme authors in a bind. Infinite scroll may be a better end user experience, but it’s going to lead to more support requests during theme set up.

However, if you don’t use much javascript in your post content, or if you display excerpts on your index pages rather than full posts, I’d suggest trying it out.

Ben Balter made a fork of the popular Infinite-Scroll plugin which is excellent. It’ll hopefully get merged into the .org plugin version soon (which I can’t recommend using in its current state). If you use Ben’s version of the plugin you should be able to set up infinite scroll for your theme in just a couple minutes. You can also see it in action on his site.

I’ll also posted a tutorial about how to add Infinite Scroll to a theme without a plugin.

Useful Links:

• Infinite Scrolling Best Practices (UX)
• Should You Use Infinite Scroll Instead of Pagination?
• https://github.com/paulirish/infinite-scroll

I’ve hosted most of my sites with BlueHost the last six years, but I recently migrated this one over to WP Engine. I was mainly curious to see what the impact on page speed would be. As WP Theming has grown in traffic so have load times– despite good caching, gzipped files, minified scripts and css, and sprited images.

Page Speed

The home page of the site had a page speed score of 96% before the migration and roughly 81% after. No theme code changed and the only plugin removal was W3 Total Cache. However, load times improved significantly (as measured by Google):

You’ll notice average page speed is 1.47 seconds faster, which is a significant 25% improvement. I’d venture to guess the numbers might be even more impressive for someone who had not already worked to optimize load times.
Continue reading →

I’ve recently been working on a website that needs to track external link clicks in Google Analytics. This is something that the WordPress.com stats plugin does by default, but not Google. In order to track external links with Google Analytics, you’ll need to set up a custom tracker event.
Continue reading →

Sometimes it’s necessary to use multiple Google Analytics trackers on the same site. If you’re doing this, never paste in both of the default tracking scripts that Google provides.

Instead, set up the tracking variables and just call the Google script once. Here’s what I’ve used:
Continue reading →

I’ve been working as freelance web developer for the last couple years working almost primarily with WordPress. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but I was recently offered the opportunity to work full time with Demand Media.

Demand Media runs eHow.com, Trails.com, Livestrong.com (among others) and social widgets that are viewed on millions of pages per day. It’s a really exciting company and position. Couldn’t pass it up. I start today, which also just happens to be my 29th Birthday.
Continue reading →

When you view a website, your browser will usually save a copy of all the files onto your hard drive. This is called a browser cache. It does this so the page loads quicker the next time you view it and everything doesn’t need to be downloaded again.

Browsers will generally be able to detect if the website has been updated and get a copy of the new files, but sometimes it fails. This is especially true if your web designer has been changing background images or xml files. To see those changes, you will need to refresh your browser.

Here’s a short video screencast explaining how to refresh the browser in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 6.
Continue reading →

A lot of people rely on plug-ins like NextGen to display images on their website, but the built-in WordPress gallery actually works quite well for most situations. Here’s a short video tutorial explaining how to use it. I recommend checking out the codex for deeper explanation of the shortcode and the jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries if you want a better presentation for clicked images.
Continue reading →