With using fancy transparent graphics on your website you can easily increase the loading times and also the bandwidth consumption. Would you want to look at a site that’s loading for more than a few seconds? Don’t think so. Pngcrush to the rescue!

Pngcrush is a tool that helps you in making your PNG files smaller in size while preserving the quality. It’s a command line optimizer meant for LINUX or UNIX environments. You can even run it in a MSDOS window. It tries out different compression methods and with the best found solution it then compresses your file to reduce the size of the PNG IDAT datastream.

To be honest I haven’t yet bothered to build a backup system for my Ubuntu. Although I’ve been using it over a year now. Stupid me – I know! But since I haven’t had any problems with it I simply didn’t even think about it.

There is a very big list of great backup software out there but since I like to get my own hands dirty I wanted to build a custom script for it. If you’ve used or are using Ubuntu you know how easy it actually is. Basically all you have to back up is your home directory. All the necessary files are usually within that folder. So all you have to do is tar it and you’re done. This means the whole thing would just be one small line of code.

Showing related posts has always been a great way to keep visitors on your blog a bit longer.

When your visitors are searching for certain info on your site related content is the best way to offer more data to search from. With WordPress providing a list of related posts is very easy.

But why would you do it without a plugin?

It’s because the less plugins you use the faster your blog is. And don’t you feel that much better about yourself when you’ve done the work by yourself? I know I do.

Every website or blog owner should always try to find new ways of making their site faster and consume less server resources. This is especially important if you’re generating high traffic. Would you want to look at a site that’s loading for several seconds with every click you make? Here’s one simple solution.

This tip is extremely helpful if your articles have several images in them. Picture it this way – every time you open up an article consisting of several high-quality images (especially if you’re posting many “list posts”) all the images would have to be fetched from the server. This increases load times and also your bandwidth, what most hosting providers usually limit.

What is GDM?

GDM (GNOME Display Manager) is a highly configurable reimplementation of XDM, the X Display Manager. It starts the X session and shows a login window to the user.

What is XSplash?

Since the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala it has gained a new splash screen software called XSplash. It was specially built to increase booting speeds.

Since it’s still pretty new there aren’t so many themes out there for it yet. But I’ve managed to make a small list with some of them if you’re looking to substitute the default theme.