Yeah I have found in the past they do ad quite a bit of time to the load time of a page. I would defer them to load last and then the content is there first.

get those image sizes down and you should be in fair standing

Optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 58.9KiB (17% reduction).

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I removed the leaderboard ad at the top and the page speed increased quite a bit...

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.clubpen ... m/u5ZzJ3zZ

glad that you have got a faster site now

just follow what that speed testing site tells you and you cannot go far wrong for sure. I would buy the fella a "cup of java"

it took me the best part of a week to get through all the info but was well worth it !

LOL, I'd say...

I don't know if this is worth addressing, but when I attempted to compress my existing images with WP Smush it, it gave me "filename is not writable" errors.

Check who owns the image file directory or download them first and then compress them and then re upload them perhaps

I got this error message when trying to upload a file:

"The uploaded file could not be moved to /var/www/wp-content/uploads/2011/08"

Ah kk sounds like the user that you are trying to upload the file with does not have access to the images folder.

ls -l -h

the file that contains the images and then use that user to upload them

infact copy and past what you get from the command and I will further assist

root@li374-118:~# ls -l -h
total 1004K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1000K 2011-05-19 17:25 mod-pagespeed-beta_current_amd64.deb
root@li374-118:~#

ok that is the home dir

you need to list the images folder
use this

cd /var/www/yourworpresssite/wp-content/uplaods/

replacing "yourworpresssite" with the folder name that your site is in
then

ls -l -h

root@li374-118:/var/www/wp-content/uploads# ls -l -h
total 4.0K
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K 2011-08-02 05:53 2011
root@li374-118:/var/www/wp-content/uploads#

I'm guessing I have quite a few permission issues going on. A lot of things have been acting weird since I migrated from the shared host.

Yup root owns that file, I would for ease while you get your perms sorted use the following to gain access.

so from the root dir type

cd /var/www/

then

chown -R www-data yoursitesfolder/

replacing the "yoursitesfolder" with the folder of your site

This is not the best way to do this and so you SHOULD change the perms back once you have finished uploading images

using

chown -R root yoursitesfolder/

and to sort the file perms out if you have users uploading content and what not read and refer to this article on the wordpress site
http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

Yeah, I have no idea what's going on with the permissions. They were fine as of yesterday.

Although I do not do it this way as I only want myself to upload things to the server you can do the following;

make a user that is part of the www-data group and a sudeor and set the file perms to match for the folders you want web users to have access to. and then give ownership of your site to the new sudo user.

This will require that you do some reading of the setting up of users and of the wordpress page I gave you the link for.

TBH if it is only you that is uploading I have found that the most secure way is to change the file perms to www-data for the site while you are working on it and change them back after you have done.

Not that I am paranoid about security

TBH it is the server admins preference and what preference of what you want your users of your page to do.

Basically using the method I do usually means that users can make posts, but will not allow them to upload anything

I've changed it and it lets me upload now. Security rly isn't a issue so this should be fine.

Is there a way to change the apache user to root?