This is the web portfolio and personal blog of Leon Chevalier. If you are interested in having custom Wordpress plugins built for you, a professional site speed consultation or in a full-blown website then please continue here: show me your web services!
If you're looking for my blog with web design tutorials and open-source projects (including PHP Speedy) then please continue here: show me your blog!
I've been working as a full time web developer and designer now for 5 years, and have been making websites for 9. I've created large scale custom-build websites for a select group of clients and maintained those sites over a period of years. I now offer three specific services:
Custom Wordpress Plugins
If you can think of something cool you'd like to do with Wordpress, I can build it for you. Do you want to turn Wordpress into a news agregator? That's what I did with my plugin for http://purrl.net. Or what about a plugin to allow flexible publishing of your ads across your blog network? That what I did for internet marketer Jon Waraas:
Leon created me a plugin to use with wordpress so I can display advertising using OIOPublisher on my content websites. With Leons help I am now making $1,500-$2,000 a month off his plugin and OIOPublisher. Leon is a great php programmer and I will definably using him more in the future!
Jon Waraas http://jonwaraas.com
So if you want to push Wordpress to the next level, just get in contact and I'll give you a quote.
Site Speed Check-up
As your site grows the amount of work you throw at it increases. Until one day you look at your once sprightly baby, and realise the poor thing now takes 10 seconds to load. What can you do? How can you restore its youthful energy? Well, the first step is to diagnose the problem, and this is where my site speed check comes in. The service includes:
- A thorough 2 hour examination of your site and your server, looking for weaknesses and diagnosing where improvements can be made.
- I will install my asset compressor 'PHP Speedy' on your site. This can drastically improve things immediately.
- We will then speak on the phone or via email and I will detail exactly where improvements to your site and server can be made.
- We will then schedule the improvements in such a way as to cause no downtime to your site.
If you're interested in vastly improving the load time of your site, just send me an email and I'll let you know how much it costs and when I'm available.
Full custom-built websites
I tend not to do these so often any more; they require a lot of dedicated time and I'm often to be too busy these days. But if you have an interesting project and like the look of my site and my attitude, then please get in touch and we'll work something out. You can check out previous websites I have built in the client section of my blog: http://aciddrop.com/category/clients/
- Feb
- 02
I fixed a bug in CSS gzipping. New version here:
http://aciddrop.com/aciddrop/download/php_speedy_wp_0.5.2.zip
Thanks to everyone who let me know…
- Dec
- 18
Get your Christmas gifts
We have just gone live with space02.com. Space02 sells virtual gifts with a difference - you can claim any spot on the earth and turn it into your own microsite. From the “Gift a Space” page:
space02.com opens up an an amazing array of original gift opportunities. You can give the lucky recipient literally anywhere in the world. How about giving your primary school buddy the sandpit where you first played with trucks, or your first treehouse - or the first bar you ever visited?
And of course for the special someone in your life you can give a gift that will instantly rekindle fond memories - the location of your first kiss, the palm trees on your first shared holiday, the beach where you watched the sun go down togther.
And finally, don’t forget the amazing opportunity here to give joke presents! Did you find somewhere amusing on Google Maps? Give it to a friend! Was your friend the victim of an extremely funny practical joke in a certain location? Give it to them! The sky really is the limit.
Help me test!
The site is brand new, and is sure to have lots of things that need tweaking and improving. So I’d be very grateful if all you web-developers who subscribe to my feed could check it out any let me know what you find: leon@aciddrop.com
Many thanks and have a great Christmas!
- Dec
- 15
Quick update for you. Thanks to Matt for pointing out that 304 Not Modified headers should be sent if the compressed files have already been cached by the server. Here’s the update:
Also thanks to http://rakaz.nl where I stole some of the code from 
If you’re upgrading from 0.5 you just need to overwrite the /libs/php_speedy/controller/compressor.php file.
- Dec
- 11
Following the release of Wordpress 2.7, we have a new version of PHP Speedy WP. Along with making it 2.7 compatible, I have added a new feature: CSS Background Images are automatically converted to data URIs. This is useful in reducing the amount of HTTP requests even further. And, importantly, it’s compatible with Internet Explorer, even though it doesn’t support data URIs. Don’t ask me how I did it. Magic.
Here’s the download link:
PHP Speedy WP 0.5
Please leave comments here: http://aciddrop.com/2008/12/15/php-speedy-wp-051-recommended-upgrade/
- Jul
- 15
Just a quickie - a new version of PHP Speedy WP that works with Wordpress 2.6. Full credit for this goes to Kaspars of http://konstruktors.com/blog who sent me through a patch. It was great - I didn’t even have to look at the 2.6 code to work out what the problem was. Thanks Kaspars!
Download: PHP Speedy WP 0.4.7
- May
- 20
First off, apologies to everyone who has commented here in the last month. I have been completely ignoring the blog, due to working 24/7 on a new web application called OnlyAccount.com. It’s a social bookmarking app that allows you to bookmark across multiple sites and multiple accounts from a single submission form. If you do lots of social bookmarking, it can save you an incredible amount of time.
It’s currently in closed Beta but if you add your name to the queue there are test places available, so you should get in: http://OnlyAccount.com
I’m now going to go and catch up on the comments I missed.
- Apr
- 09
There’s no doubt that digg can provide an emourmous boost to your traffic. It’s great for ‘new’ articles and blog posts to give them a big rush of initial popularity. But it’s also useful for older articles - if you can keep the digg count ticking over, then you might have a shot at some of the long-term popular lists.
So, with this in mind, I wrote an article on how to display digg counts (like in the image above). It goes into some detail about how to retrieve the counts in PHP and via AJAX. And there’s full source-code as ever.
The article is a guest post over at Stylized Web - so head over there now to read it! Here’s the link:
http://stylizedweb.com/2008/04/09/stylize-your-digg-count/
Please ask any questions you may have here so I don’t keep having to head over there to check 
- Mar
- 26
Just a quick informational post for those of you using the PHP Speedy Wordpress plugin. Version 0.4.4 is now available from here: http://aciddrop.com/2008/03/22/php-speedy-wordpress-plugin-version-04/
This is a recommended upgrade (versions 0.4-0.4.2 had a couple of bugs which could end up displaying an error message rather than your page output under certain conditions).
- Mar
- 22
Isn't Easter great? Some quality time off work to spend with family and friends. Or, alternatively, to sit at your PC and work on a Wordpress plugin. I think you'll be able to guess from this release which option I chose.
The big feature of this release (0.4) is that PHP Speedy will now handle standard JavaScript libraries. Previous releases suffered from problems when a plugin used a JavaScript library such as Prototype/Scriptaculous. Also, I have noticed that some plugins include their libraries directly, which means that if more than one plugin calls the same library it is included (and downloaded by the user) more than once. For fun, I tested this out.
This is what can happen. A 8.4 second download of 576KB!
With PHP Speedy turned on and handling the libraries this what happens:
I thought that was quite funny.
Install
The plugin is a standard Wordpress plugin install - just copy the entire php_speedy_wp folder into your Wordpress plugins folder. Activate the plugin via the "Plugins" menu, then go to Options -> PHP Speedy.
You should then:-
- Configure PHP Speedy as you see fit, and click the "Set Options" button at the bottom on the configure screen
- Test the configuration
- Finally, activate PHP Speedy on its own activation screen. This is separate from the WP Plugin activation.
Download
You can download PHP Speedy WP Wordpress Plugin here: PHP Speedy WP 0.4.7
Changelog
0.1 - Initial Release
0.2 - Fixed bug in ignore (thanks Jeromy)
0.2.1 - Changed control of when plugin loads
- Fixed problem with space on ignore list
0.2.2 - Really fixed bug in ignore (thanks Steve)
0.3 - Added write of debugging info
- Now works on more pages
0.4 - Added Speedy handling of plugin libraries
- Wordpress exclusively handles gzipping
- Compressed files now appear first in document
- Fixed bug in debugging info write
- Made compressed files include at start of head
0.4.1 - Doesn't die if WP_Scripts class not present
0.4.2 - Fixed bug if no css or js in head
0.4.3 - Fixed is_* functions for all versions
0.4.4 - Fixed display for trackbacks (thanks Steve)
0.4.5 - Added check for empty POST array (thanks Jeromy)
0.4.6 - Updated test page to show use of PHP Speedy standalone
0.4.7 - Updated for WP 2.6
Having problems?
- If it seems PHP Speedy has had no effect at all
If you view your source code, and it looks exactly the same as it did before you activated Speedy please try the following:- First, make sure you really did activate Speedy. Make sure you click the 'Activation' button in Options | PHP Speedy | Activate.
- Look in the cache directory in the PHP Speedy plugin folder. If there is a text file called 'debugging_info.txt' please email it to me (leon at aciddrop.com). Please include the version of Wordpress you are using and the URL of the site (is it's public).
- If PHP Speedy breaks a plugin
If another plugin stops working please try the following:- Set the PHP Speedy configuration to use any standard JavaScript libraries that are in use by your plugin.
- Try adding to the ignore list in PHP speedy all the .js files that your plugin uses. If you don't know what these files are, search the plugin's directory for .js files.
- Let me know in the comments whether this worked or not (in either case).
- If PHP Speedy breaks something else
- Turn off PHP Speedy. View the source of your page and save it to a text file.
- Turn on PHP Speedy. View the source of your page and save it to a text file.
- Email me (leon at aciddrop.com) a description of the problem, both text files and the contents of the cache folder in the PHP Speedy plugin directory.
Known issue with wp-cache/WP Super Cache
I managed to do some proper testing with PHP Speedy WP and wp-cache and WP Super Cache. With all the buffer functions going on, the plugins get confused. I found that this could be fixed by amending the wp-cache-phase2.php file in the wp-cache/wp-super-cache directory. Just find the line that says: if ($new_cache) { and add this before it:
$mtime = @filemtime($cache_path . $cache_filename);
if( !((!$file_expired && $mtime) || ($mtime && $file_expired && (time() - $mtime) <5)) ) {
$new_cache = true;
}
PHP Speedy WP should then work with the caching plugins.
What's to come?
The eventual plan is to automatically improve all elements that could be slowing down your page (and causing that terrible Y-Slow rating). Next on the list are document images and CSS background images - so make sure you subscribe to my blog to be the first to find out about new updates.
- Mar
- 07
Please see here for the latest version of this plugin: http://aciddrop.com/2008/03/22/php-speedy-wordpress-plugin-version-04/
All comments should be added on this new page. Thanks!
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