WordPress 2.6 first introduced the Turbo button I believe which allowed it to work with Google Gears. I never really thought much about it, but recently I had to modify a bunch of posts on my HD-Trailers.net blog and lets just say things weren’t as snappy as I’d like them to be. Updates took about 10-20 seconds. However I finally decide to try out the Turbo button and see where I could go from there.
Apparently what it does is that it downloads a bunch of static pages, so it doesn’t have to fetch them every time I load any of the editor/admin pages. And I do have to say things are now much snappier. It’s not lightning fast, but lets just say that post updates take less than 5 seconds. One would usually attribute these type of slowness to the webhost involved, but I’m seeing similar slowness on both Dreamhost and 1&1. However, after installing Google Gears and enabling it for both my blogs, things have been very smooth and I’m a much happier camper.
I also hate using my mouse to navigate the WordPress UI and wish they would implement some more keyboard shortcuts/hot keys. I did learn a new one. Apparently alt+shift+p publishes or updates a published post. For more WordPress keyboard shortcuts, take a look at The Ultimate List of WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts.
A few shortcuts I would really like are:
- Save Draft
- Preview
- Jump to a specific section (i.e. Editor, Title, Tags, Categories, etc.)
Finally, I searched around to see what other stuff I use supported Google Gears. I couldn’t find anything officially posted by Google, but Wikipedia had this list:
There are a number of web applications that use Gears. These applications come from a variety of companies, including Google (Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Reader, Picasa for mobile, Calendar), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho (Writer, Mail), Remember The Milk, and Buxfer. WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits.
The only things I use on that list other than WordPress are Google Reader and YouTube. Gears allows Reader to work offline, which is neat I guess, but half the stuff in my RSS feeds requires me to visit the site. For YouTube, I believe Gears support was only added to the uploader and <sarcasm>you know how big a video uploader I am on YouTube</sarcasm>.