Shifting into gears…
Wordpress 2.6 released not too long ago, and like any dutiful Wordpress fanatic, I promptly upgraded. Since there have not been any screaming rant posts on this site for a while, you can safely assume that the upgrade went without a hitch.
As is typical with these kinds of upgrades, I start poking around to see what all has changed. It didn’t take me long to discover the “turbo” option, and its usage of Google Gears.
I have to admit, Gears is one of those things that pretty much missed my radar. I didn’t know what it was when I first saw it. Naturally, I was curious and I went out to see exactly what it does. This is what I found:
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
Cool. If I am understanding it right, it allows some websites to essentially offload to the local machine and allow that offloaded version to take advantage of the local OS. This (I assume) will make the entire Wordpress experience more performant.
Naturally, I had some security concerns. The moment one starts talking about giving a website more of a foothold on my machine, I get leery. However, I have to assume that the folks at Google have already considered this, and from the looks of it they have. In addition, OSX is pretty good about giving me the heads up when it thinks something fishy is going on, so I put those concerns to rest.
click. install. enable. download to database.
Now here’s my problem: I am not really seeing the benefits. To give you an idea; my workplace network connection loads my Wordpress site really slowly. I’m talking dial-up speeds here, folks. It only happens at work, and my home network connection loads everything up just fine. I had hoped that by using Gears, accessing my site from work would get a little better. However, it still runs pretty slowly, leading me to assume that there is still a considerable amount of “phoning home” from the local database going on.
Color me confused. Time to do some more reading…
However, everything I found that talked about Wordpress + Gears specifically talked about the speed benefits. The “natural interaction” to my desktop doesn’t appear to be fully utilized (read: running like a local application). So really what we are talking about here is a sophisticated caching mechanism. Like I said, I am not seeing any speed improvements in either my work or home environment.
So, if there are any fellow Wordpress fanatics out there who know more about this particular feature, please feel free to school me in its proper usage. :)
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