3/10/2006
Tired of Waiting on Wordpress Admin Main Page
The Wordpress admin main page contains several blocks of content retrieved via RSS from Technorati and the Wordpress site itself. The content itself is a useful addition to the admin panel as it is used to post news, security alerts and development information. The problem I find is my main admin page takes up to a minute to load while these links are fetched. Reload the page and we wait again while same data is re-fetched.
While the feature is worthwhile, the implementation is broken. Not only do I (and every other WP user) have to wait eons for the page to load, the servers the data is being fetched from are needlessly overtaxed by all of this redundant fetching. A waste of resources on both sides. The data could be fetched once and cached for hours, saving local wait time and load on the Wordpress servers.
On one recent software project I was involved with, the vendor was using their blog to post a changelog, news and security alerts for their software. I wrote a simple RSS fetcher that saved the retrieved information to the database to be reused for up to a day before being refreshed.
Maybe the next time I have a weekend afternoon to kill, I’ll work out something similar for Wordpress.
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