Besides, Google cache can also be used as a proxy server to bypass office and school firewalls or access sites which are blocked in your area, restricted for registered-only users (but visible to search engines), etc. Using Google cache will also allow you to browse your competitors’ sites without leaving any trace of you being there (for that, you will need to use Google’s “Text only” version of the page).

I for one use Google cache on a daily basis and have collected a few useful tools to make the most of it. But before we take a closer look at those tools, let me note the following:

• Not all webpages are available in Google cache. Savvy website owners may choose not to allow Google to archive their webpages by using the NOARCHIVE Robots meta tag;
• All of the below tools are userscripts. I’ve tested them all in FireFox with Greasemonkey installed. If you use Opera, Google Chrome, Safari or IE, you should be able to still use the scripts but I didn’t try them there.

So here you go: how to make the most of Google cache browsing with the following userscripts:

Browse Google Cache

If you start using Google cache, the fist thing you will notice is that it won’t let you stay for long: whenever you click any link, it will bring you outside of the cached page to the actual website. If you plan to use Google cache often, you may want to have an option to stay within it when browsing the whole website.

If you want to browse the website from within Google cache without ever leaving it, you will need either of the following scripts:

(Note: as I have noted above, some pages may be absent in Google cache which means that sometimes you’ll end up landing on Google’s error messages).

1. Google Cache Continue Redux

This script adds yellow “cache” links next to each page link within Google’s snapshot of the page. Clicking the yellow cache link opens the Google cache version of the page, allowing the user to continue browsing the site through Google’s cache.

Before:

After:

Does it keep the initial search terms highlighted? – Yes!

2. Google Cache Browser

This script (or this identical one) replaces the links on a cached page for Google cache links – this way you can continuously browse the website from within Google cache just like Google Cache Continue Redux but with no formatting used for Google cache links (and also giving you thus fewer options: with it, you can’t easily leave Google cache by clicking off the actual link).

Before:

After:

Does it keep the initial search terms highlighted? – No

Easily Scan Through The Page Cache

1. Google Cache Highlights Browser

This script makes Google cache keyboard-friendly. It creates two hotkeys (“n” for “next” and “b” for “previous”) that will automatically scroll through highlighted search words on a Google cache page:

2. Google Cache Mapper (Text-Only Version)

This script adds a virtual scrollbar to the left of the screen that provides a quick way to find highlighted terms on a Google cached page. Google highlights your search terms using different colors and this script visualizes the matches.

You can hover over any part of the scrollbar to see the search term and its immediate context. You can then click through the different colors in the scrollbar to go to any search term occurrence:

Do you use Google cache a lot? Please share your tips and tricks!

The browser cache usually works behind the scene: you are unlikely to notice it even exists unless you feel like digging deeper.

But do you know that you can actually have quite a bit of fun viewing your browser cache? Do you know why and how you can clean it? Today’s tutorial is just about that: what you can do with your Firefox cache.

Viewing Your Firefox Cache

The cache statistics and directory location can be viewed in about:cache. Then:

• about:cache?device=memory – Lists memory cache entries.
• about:cache?device=disk – Lists disk cache entries.

It is really not easy to make sense of that interface but luckily we have an addon to make it easier.

CacheView is a GUI Front-end of “about:cache”. It allows searching and sorting memory and disk cache files. CacheView gives you a preview pane for any images, and makes it really easy to save MP3s and flash files from the sites you’ve visited.

After you have it installed, just go to Tools ->CacheView (or just use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C) and you will be presented with a nice table containing your cache files and a preview pane.

The table is sortable by column (key, size, MIME Type, storing device, Last Fetched date) and what’s more it has a search function which adds a lot of sense to your cache database:

You can also right-click on an entry and delete it. It won’t delete things if the page is still opened in one of your tabs.

CacheSearch is another useful cache addon for FireFox which can search through the full-text of cache records:

Clearing The Firefox Cache

There are a few reasons why you may want to clear the Firefox cache, including privacy concerns and technical problems. I usually do it when I have any issues with a website: problems on sign-up, incorrect interface loading, etc.

Clearing the Cache Manually

Official Guide:

• Navigate: Tools -> Options -> Advanced panel -> Network tab
• In the Offline Storage section, click Clear Now.

FireFox Addons:

If you find yourself clearing the cache too often, you can find this little addon helpful (which we have previously mentioned in a post on optimizing Firefox): it adds a button to your browser toolbar – with it you can clear the cache with one click of a mouse.

Note: After installation, you will need to manually install the button to where you want it to be. For that, right-click on the sidebar and select “Customize“.

Here’s an alternative addon that can be used for that: Cache Status which will both monitor your cache statistics for both memory and disk devices and allow to clear it any time:

Clear The Cache Automatically:

• Navigate: Tools -> Options -> Privacy panel
• In the drop-down select “Use custom settings for history. “
• Select the check box for Clear history when Firefox closes and in the Settings next to this check box select Cache:

More Tips On The Firefox Cache:

• Override cache for any individual page with either of two shortcuts:
  • Ctrl+F5
  • Ctrl+Shift+R
• Control How Firefox Caches Websites With Better Cache: this addon allows you to set rules for caching.
• How To Recover Deleted Posts Using Firefox Cache

Do you have anything else to add? Please share your Firefox cache tips in the comments below!

CloudFlare is a service which sets just about any website up on a Content Delivery Network, more commonly referred to as a CDN. Even more than that, it acts as a ‘firewall in the cloud‘ to prevent malicious spam and hack attacks from even getting to your website. On top of this, their entry level service is free!

The free plan protects your site by working to block known malicious IP addresses from your website via the Project Honeypot service. Project Honeypot maintains a list of known IPs who have been caught spamming or attempting attacks either because they are actually malicious attackers or because their machine has a trojan installed on it.

For questionable sources it will present a CAPTCHA to prove that the visitor is a real human and not a spam bot. The upgraded plans which include better statistics and more advanced protection from cross site scripting and SQL injection attacks among others.

How To Set Up Your Website With CloudFlare

It takes minimal technical knowledge to get started with CloudFlare. The most important thing you need to have access to is your Domain Registrar’s Nameserver Settings. This can be reached from your domain’s control panel on most domain registration providers and the process differs for each registrar. If you do not know how to do this, check with support at your domain registrar or do a quick google on “How to change name server“.

Sign Up

Cloudflare is now in open beta and you can sign up here. After your initial username and password creation you then proceed to set up your site. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to set up a hobby forum/image gallery site where I have had some problems with spamming in the past.

Set Up DNS

Once you enter your domain in the ‘add site’ box, CloudFlare analyzes your DNS records for their current values. It checks commonly used ones – if you have any custom records set up, it is good to double check them before migrating over to the service since CloudFlare effectively takes over your DNS hosting as well. You can add the custom settings on the next page. They will automatically add a ‘direct’ which will allow you to bypass the CloudFlare network and access your website directly should you need to for testing or other purposes.

After confirming your settings, CloudFlare will assign two new nameservers for your website. Proceed to your domain registrar and update your name servers to the ones provided. Once you save them it will take some time for the settings to migrate out to the internet. This could take anywhere from instantly to 24 hours to fully propagate. CloudFlare will also email your old and new name server settings for your record.

Sit Back and Relax

That is it! Your domain will now be protected & sped up by CloudFlare’s services. If you are interested in more of the technical aspects of how CloudFlare works to speed up and secure your website, their CEO Matthew Prince has a great writeup on how CloudFlare works over at Quora.

After roughly 24 hours, you will be able to get all kinds of interesting stats about your website.

Simple & Secure

As you can see, the CloudFlare service makes it easy for ‘every’ website owner to add professional grade security and content delivery optimizations to their website. The service recently won the ‘Most Disruptive Company‘ at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and is on track to becoming a big player in the web hosting field. If security is a huge concern for your website, I would definitely consider upgrading to the pro account – but for most website owners the free account is enough to offer basic protection and speed increases.

Another feature is that if your website goes down, CloudFlare will serve the last cached version of your page and files. This is useful if your webhost provider goes down a lot or if you are hosting it on an unsteady connection (like your home). Since CloudFlare serves most of the static content, it also saves on the bandwidth used by your site.

If there is one concern I have about that service, it is that is you are adding another layer of complexity onto the web hosting stack. If your site goes down, it gives another potential location where there could be a problem. I haven’t seen this happen yet, but from my experience in the web hosting field usually the simpler the setup the better. However in this case the security and speedup you receive from the service far outweigh any negatives.

Give CloudFlare a try today and let us know how it goes. I have set it up personally on 3 sites and have seen some decent speed increases on them. CloudFlare quotes an average of a 30% speed increase on websites on its network. This unique service is a great offering for website owners all over the world.

One plugin I’ve seen on a lot of these lists is WP Super Cache, a caching engine designed to produce static HTML pages and load your blog faster. WP Super Cache is a good plugin, don’t get me wrong, but is it really the fastest?

If you’re really looking to speed up your WordPress blog, I recommend you check out the W3 Total Cache plugin.

In this article, I’ll educate you about this plugin and show you what you can do to give your blog a blazing fast speed.

What’s All The Hype About?

Before I show you how to set up this plugin, I figured I should give you a little more incentive to check it out. According to the plugin page, W3 Total Cache is:

the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

It boasts a significant improvement (at least 10x) in overall site performance, as well as “instant” second page views.

Don’t know what a CDN is? Read on and I’ll show you how to set all this up.

Getting Started With W3 Total Cache

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, head over to the settings page.

On the General Settings page, you should see a few messages at the top of the screen. One may ask you to ‘empty page cache’. Go ahead and do that and make sure you disable/uninstall any other caching plugins (like WP Super Cache) for the time being.

W3 Total Cache’s default settings are fine to start with. Go ahead and check the box under General to turn caching on.

You should already see an increase in speed just from using W3 Total Cache, but to throw your site into warp drive, I’ll show you how to set up a CDN.

Why Use A CDN?

If you are hosting your own WordPress blog, chances are you are renting server space from somewhere. Regardless of what hosting provider you are using, your server is probably in another state/country. Add that to the fact that it’s a shared server (probably a busy one) and sometimes it can take a while to load all of your files (images, etc.).

A content delivery network allows you to eliminate this delay. A CDN will use a server close to you to deliver your content when called upon. It’s this efficiency that allows your website to load faster.

Setting Up Amazon CloudFront

Still on the General Settings page, scroll down until you see the Content Delivery Network settings. Check the Enable box, and under CDN Type select Amazon CloudFront. Save your changes and you should now see a bunch of new messages at the top of the screen.

Go to the CDN Settings page from the drop-down menu at the top and scroll down to the Configuration section. To fill in this information, you’re going to have to input some data from Amazon.

Head over to the Amazon web services page and click Sign Up for Amazon S3. Then, head over to the CloudFront page and sign up for that as well.

[Note]: Technically Amazon S3 and CloudFront are not free, but they’re awfully close. It costs roughly 15 cents per GB of monthly bandwidth transfer, which most of us won’t come close to using. Not a bad way to make use of the change you find in your couch.

Once you’ve signed up, head to the Account tab and select Security Credentials.

You’ll want to copy your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key and paste them into their respective WordPress fields.

Now, you can scroll up to the top of the Amazon web services screen and click on the Sign in to the AWS Management Console link. This will take you to your management page.

Click on the Amazon S3 tab and select Create Bucket. Name your bucket (preferably something short) and go back and enter in that name in the Bucket field of WordPress.

In the management console, select the Amazon CloudFront tab. Click Create Distribution, select your bucket under Origin, and click Create. When the State column goes from ‘InProgress’ to ‘Deployed’ (takes a few minutes) we’re ready to move on.

See where it says Domain Name? Copy what’s in front of

.cloudfront.net

and paste it into the hostname field in WordPress. Click Test CloudFront upload and save your changes to make sure everything checks out.

Finally, head to the top of your WordPress screen and click on export your media library. Click Start and it will upload your existing media files to your CloudFront account. When finished, go through the other buttons and do the same thing.

[Note]: You only have to do this once, when you first install the plugin. Everything you upload to your media folder from here on out will automatically get copied over to your CloudFront account.

Conclusion

The first time you visit your website after setting up W3 Total Cache it should load at normal speed or even slower than usual. Don’t be alarmed, as this is normal. Click refresh and see how much it speeds up your WordPress blog!

What do you think of this plugin?  Let us know in the comments below.