Archive for September 10th, 2014

A while ago, when I started this blog i used to rely on a couple of plugins to perform a few basic functions: Visitor statistics, Spell checking and a couple of other things. At some point down the road most of these got merged into “Jetpack”. Jetpack is kind of an official “megaplugin” that gives you access to a bunch of excellent features and let you piggyback on some services provided by WordPress.com. But there is a catch:

It’s extremely slow.

What you’ll actually use is in the glove box.

It might not matter on a professional, high capacity server, but the reality is that this is not what i have access to. I can “barely” run an unmodded Minecraft server. Jetpack introduced a huge latency both for visitors and for me when publishing, yet some of its features (Stats, automatic social media publishing, spell-checking, contact form…) where invaluable to me. Followed several years of damage control, trying to optimize the site’s response time with all kinds of caching and preloading voodoo.

Today somehow was the last straw, I say goodbye to Jetpack and hope that i will never have to come back. Now for those who are curious, here are the plugins i now use in replacement (subject to change), and YES it’s still faster.

• WordPress Contact Form Maker
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
• TinyMCE Spellcheck

Fuck you jetpack

As it turns out, when you try to use Twitter/Facebook and other social media APIs as an individual, without using any kind of intermediate service/company, the procedure goes from mildly annoying, to utterly impossible: Google for example doesn’t want to hear about you, Facebook and twitter both want your cellphone number, Plurk was by far the most convenient so far… but who use Plurk anyway?