Performance & Optimization

I suffer from that paradoxical form of laziness peculiar to computer geeks where I will save myself save myself 15 minutes of work on something by spending 4 hours creating a shortcut. As such, the menus on this site are dynamically generated by traversing the category tree in PHP and laying out menus and submenus from categories and subcategories, sparing me the trouble of updating them manually as I add new content. This took some effort.

I created a shortcode that does this (well, modified a shortcode, originally from the Hierarchical HTML Sitemap plugin, by Alexandra Vovk & WP Puzzle) and soon my site was happily generating dynamic menus on the fly and keeping up with my work as I added pages, edited titles, and rearranged categories.

And, along the way, getting slower.

And slower. And slower.

Finally the other night, due to a confluence of circumstance,…