Lupe

Not sure what happened, but when I logged into my site an hour ago, suddenly for the first time since January 1st, 2024, all of the Jetpack statistics that have been altered and incorrect on the “Summaries” page have been restored to their correct historical figures. Thank you to whoever worked this feat of magic! Was beginning to lose hope that it would ever get corrected.

I didn’t realize that Infinite Scroll worked the way you describe. Sounds like both basic WordPress and Infinite Scroll permit a choice (setting) of how many posts to load on the homepage, with the difference being that Infinite Scroll also provides this additional “load more posts” button to click? If so, might be worth a try.

Thank you Kathryn P!

Hi, Kathryn P:

Thank you for the response!

I’m shocked! I’ve always thought that infinite scroll was a feature of the TwentyFifteen theme, but then I’ve had Jetpack since day one, too. When I look at Jetpack>Settings>Writing after receiving your response, I now see the following situation, which I can’t remember ever having even looked at before:

“Theme enhancements Save settings Learn more Infinite Scroll

Create a smooth, uninterrupted reading experience by loading more content as visitors scroll to the bottom of your archive pages.

Load more posts using the default theme behavior

Load more posts in page with a button

Load more posts as the reader scrolls down”

The first of these 3 options “Load more posts using the default theme behavior” is the one selected. Does this essentially mean that Jetpack is not affecting TwentyFifteen as far as how posts are loading? Seems to be what it implies, and you’re telling me that I don’t have Infinite Scroll active at the moment, which also seems to support this conclusion.

Since I always thought that TwentyFifteen did have infinite scroll as a feature, I always thought that the behavior I’m seeing on my homepage WAS infinite scroll. I can scroll down from my most recent lead post down through a number of other full posts before finally coming to the end you displayed above.

I only recently discovered that I could go from my WP dashboard to Settings>Reading and change a setting labeled “Blog pages show at most _ posts. Apparently it had been set at a default reading of 10 all these years. When I changed it to 6, it did change the number of posts I was able to scroll through from the homepage from 10 to 6. I thought this was a way to control the infinite scroll feature, but apparently this setting is just part of basic WP functionality?

In any case, you’ve answered my question on whether TwentyFifteen incorporates any way to display only excerpts instead of a full post. Nope! I also use the Classic Editor plugin, so if I get the drift of your proposed solution, I’d have to switch to Gutenberg, which would be a whole new learning curve.

I’m thinking that the short, quick solution is to simply dial down the number of posts that can be scrolled though using the “Blog pages show at most _ posts” setting, since apparently it’s all considered part of my homepage and slowing things down. One might think this will make a substantial difference. Would be better to at least have the excerpts available, but oh well.

Thank you for straightening me out on Infinite Scroll, Kathryn P!

Thank you for the clarification, Marko.

I have no doubt that the W3 Total Cache plugin would work on Disk: Enhanced, if I change the permalink structure from “plain” to “post name” as you suggest. That’s very easy to do. A couple of clicks.

However, if I do that, it will break every one of the many hundreds of existing links to my site. Since I don’t know how to efficiently redirect those external links to the new post name permalink structure, I can’t change the permalink structure without incurring all that damage.

So, I seem to be stuck with the “ugly” WP default plain permalink structure, which is why I’m having trouble finding a caching plugin that will work with my site without creating other significant issues.

Hi, Marko Vasiljevic

Thank you for the response. If understand correctly, Disk: Enhanced and Disk: Basic are two different settings that can be chosen from in the W3 Total Cache Plugin, and that only the Basic setting might work with my rotten plain permalink structure. Have I got that right?

Thanks for the suggestion on memory-based caching like Redis or Memcached. Sounds like I’m going to have to do a little more investigation before leaping into anything.

Good suggestion on playing around with a stage site first. If I can figure out how to do that, might be the best way of approaching the whole permalink/caching issue. Nice to know that LiteSpeed Cache plugin should work even with my current /?p=xxx structure.

By the way, since everything I read seems to indicate that /?p=xxx is the worst possible permalink structure choice, any idea on why it’s WP’s default setting? Seems ridiculous. Or is that no longer true?

Thanks for the response, qtwrk!

My understanding is that if I change the permalink structure, every link to my site will break, every browser on earth will think I’ve died, etc. So I believe I’m stuck with the goofy plain text way at this point.

Yes, /?p=xxx is sadly what I’ve got now, and have had all along. If the LiteSpeed Cache plugin will work with that, it’s good news!

Thank you for the response, Kathryn P!

Unfortunately, I don’t know anything at all about CSS or html, so I don’t dare attempt making the needed modification you’ve provided to adjust the position or cropping of the header image in order to correct its appearance on small screens. Too afraid I’d just break something serious in the process. However, hopefully the information you provided will help someone else with more skills and a similar problem with their header image. Guess my site’s header image has been terrible on small screens for nearly 8 years now, so although I would have liked to have fixed this issue, it’s probably not the end of the world to leave it as is. Not going to change images at this point. It’s perfect, and just what I want on large screens.

The other data you provided on main content column width and featured image size along with the recommendation to double these image widths on upload is fantastic information! Exactly what I was looking for! I’ve always wondered how I was supposed to know what size all my large images should ideally be re-sized to in order to minimize excessive memory use while still maintaining acceptable image quality. Can’t believe I finally have the answer after all these years!

Wish I’d realized the significance of these issues and found the answers way back when I started this blog. Would have saved a ton of server space and my site would be working much better than it is now. At last check, I have over 24,000 original images (not including thumbnails) using 185 GB of my host’s server space, significantly slowing down site speed. Could have been using a fraction of that much memory all this time. Thank you so much, Kathryn! Nice to know a genius!

Thank you for the response, thelmachido!

I’ve got a couple more questions related to images on the TwentyFifteen theme.

First of all, I know it sounds crazy, but I only recently acquired my first smartphone. Until very recently I’d never before seen my site, adventuresoflupe.com on a small screen. Didn’t even realize, or long ago forgot, that the “header image” moves from the side bar on large screens to the header on small screens.

Now that I’ve seen the header image on a small screen, I realize that it’s been cropped terribly wrong all these years! Take a look at it on a smartphone, and you’ll see what I mean. Without affecting the image’s appearance on the side bar, which is already exactly how I want it, is there a way that I can adjust where the image gets cropped when it appears on a small screen? If not, what can you suggest? How do I fix this?

My second question is what is the minimum image size width that will completely fill the standard TwentyFifteen main column width? I am still using the Classic Editor plugin, so there are no blocks, just a single column width that all images used in the body of each post need to fill. Seems to me that this would be the maximum width that I ought to be resizing images to as long as I’m using the TwentyFifteen theme, isn’t it?

Found the drop box where the image size setting can be changed from the media library. Not a TwentyFifteen theme issue. My mistake. Issue is resolved.

Found the drop box where the image size can be selected. Not a Classic Editor plug-in issue. Issue resolved.

Been playing around with this, and have now discovered that the issue is that the Classic Editor visual editor is now loading medium-sized images (300×225), instead of full size images (2560×1920) from the Media Library.

After insertion into the post, I can click on the medium-sized image and edit it to full size. This works, but is very clumsy, since each image must be individually edited this way.

Apparently some default setting has been changed? How do I reset it so that the full size images in the Media Library get automatically inserted into the post like they used to be?

Hi, Gerard:

Thank you for the response. Sounds encouraging with the lossless compression. Tried working with the Short Pixel plugin for a little while this morning, but couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it. Going to come back to it when I have more time to play around with it some more.

Hello, again Patrick:

How do I select the images that I want to Bulk Smush? Want to test Bulk Smushing a couple of images at a time to see if it is really resizing the images for me.

Hi, Patrick:

Thank you for the help. Sounds promising. Guess that I will have to try bulk Smushing a couple of photos.

Unfortunately, although I’ve watched your screen record video a dozen times, you do so much so fast that I can’t tell what’s going on.