WordPress Wednesday: Speed up Blog posting with Clutter Free

I’m a big fan of Mark Jaquith. He has several useful and easy to use WordPress plugins to his credit.

One such plugin is Clutter Free. It lets you hide portions of the WordPress posting interface that you rarely (or never) use. Instead of being minimized (and still taking up room), they’ll be completely invisible.

How does this speed up blog posting?

While it definitely won’t help you type faster, Clutter Free ensures that you save a good deal of bandwidth if you disable the image uploader and especially the Post Preview.

WP still doesn’t have an inbuilt auto-save feature in the self-hosted version and so it is always advisable to hit “Save and Continue Editing” while posting, especially long posts.

WordPress 1.5 and below used to have an inbuilt post preview. In 2.x the Post Preview iframe was introduced. The iframe lets you see how your post will look like once it is posted. However, with it comes a lot of additional loading time and lots of bandwidth being eaten up from both your internet connection and your hosting.

Clutter Free completely removes out the Post Preview, i.e. it doesn’t just hide it and so you save a good deal of bandwidth and loading time. If you are using the WYSIWYG editor then it works wonders because the editor only loads once the entire page is loaded.

Inline Uploading is yet another feature I never use and have that disabled. More time and bandwidth saved

The other elements can be hidden which means lesser clutter around your WordPress screen.

If you’re like me, then Clutter Free is one great plugin to have installed on your WordPress blog.