Lately I’ve been giving the blog a bit of maintenance, mostly because the response time had become absurdly slow. I’m still not sure whether the problem was my workplace network or the hosting itself, but even with the site on a Hong Kong server, it really shouldn’t have been dragging that badly.
My first thought was to use a CDN. That would have been the straightforward fix, except most CDN services I looked at require a properly registered domain before they’ll work. Cloudflare’s free plan was available, so I tried that, but once it was enabled the ping results were awful. That route clearly wasn’t going anywhere.
While searching around, I remembered something I should have thought of earlier: a caching plugin. I had used one on older versions of the blog, so this was hardly a new idea. After reading a pile of posts comparing WordPress cache plugins, I found that a lot of people recommended the paid plugin WP Rocket. I downloaded a cracked version to test it, and I have to admit the improvement felt obvious.
Unfortunately, a few days later the blog became inaccessible, and I found a newly created PHP probe file sitting in the hosting space. It was hard not to suspect the cracked WP Rocket package. That was enough for me.
So I switched over to WP Super Cache, another plugin that gets recommended all the time. As for how much difference it made—well, if opening the blog just now made you think of Usain Bolt, then maybe it’s working. At least from my side, the speed now feels acceptable.
Because I had used a cracked plugin, I didn’t want to take any chances. I backed up the database right away and installed Wordfence Security for some peace of mind. It doesn’t solve everything, but it does make me feel a little less uneasy.
Over the past year, there have been countless articles analyzing the domestic economy, and most of them point in the same direction: downward pressure is real. I don’t know how strongly other people feel it, but I definitely do.
A simple example: I used to get at least a few sites asking to buy links from me for promotion. Over the last year, that number has dropped straight to zero.
Besides selling links, I also run Google AdSense ads on the blog. Google’s ads are clean and visually unobtrusive, and if I’m being shamelessly honest, I think they even make the blog look a bit nicer. So far I’ve already withdrawn earnings once after hitting the minimum threshold, and the second payout should be coming up soon as well. Added together, those two payments are enough to cover several years of hosting and domain costs, which has greatly reduced how often I need to go to the household finance minister and awkwardly ask for spending money.
Then, some time ago, I suddenly noticed that the Google ads on my blog were no longer showing up.
I searched both Baidu and Bing and got nowhere. Having a problem is one thing; having no solution is what really gets frustrating. So I started checking the issue carefully, step by step:
- I use Firefox, and Adblock is not enabled on my own blog. I also don’t have any separate ad-blocking software installed.
- The ads displayed normally in both IE and Chrome, so I concluded the issue had to be with Firefox itself.
That turned out to be exactly the case.
Firefox has built-in content blocking. The tracking protection feature that was originally framed as a privacy tool is now part of content blocking. When you see the shield icon in the address bar, it means content blocking is active. At the moment, that feature protects against certain known trackers.
The fix was simple: set Firefox to Standard mode, meaning it will only block known trackers in private windows. After that, the Google ads displayed normally again.
And yes, that may lead to an obvious question: why am I using Firefox instead of Chrome?
One more thing, and this is a genuine request for help.
Does anyone know an RSS client that works on both PC and Mac, can sync subscriptions in real time, and doesn’t require any special network workaround to function properly?
If you have a recommendation, I’d be grateful.