Google Gears and WordPress

September 4th, 2008

Here's a little tip if you use WordPress. The newer versions of WordPress (both hosted and wordpress.com versions) now include a "Turbo" function.

WordPress has incorporated Google Gears into it. For those of you who that means nothing to, Gears basically allows a web page to access data that's local on your computer instead of on a server. This can be used for a variety of different things, from allowing offline usage (imagine using Google Docs "online" on a plane), to caching files. WordPress has chosen to cache files to it, this means instead of having to load a bunch of data from the server (or figure out if it needs to be loaded from the server) it grabs it directly from Gears.

The even better news is that there is now a beta client for Safari (previously only Firefox/IE). Those of you using Safari can download it from google here, and the rest of you can go to the main Google Gears page. Once you have it installed, hop into your WordPress admin and look for the Turbo link in the upper right. Then sit back and enjoy the speed.