If you look in the top right hand corner of your WordPress dashboard (for later versions of WP only) you will see a link marked Turbo, I thought I would spend some time explaining what this is and what uses it can be put to.

What Is Turbo

Turbo is WordPress’ implementation of Google gears, a technology which allows most of the static scripts, images and CSS files of your WordPress installation to be downloaded to your local machine and run locally rather than over the network.

Come on The What is the Point, Speak English

It makes your WordPress admin faster!

If you have the majority of the file you need to add posts, moderate comments and all of those crucial admin tasks held locally on your machine, they run faster due to lack of network latency.  I’m sorry I cannot help but talk geek, but if you have to go off to the internet, collect the script files process them remotely on your hosting providers server, then return a result it will a slower than going to your local machine and doing the same.

Can You Do Stuff Without A Network Connection?

On of the great benefits of  working with Google gears on other systems such as Google docs or Gmail is that you can do a lot of tasks offline without a network connection, only when you need that connection (such as sending a mail) are things stopped.

The answer to the question, unfortunately not, Turbo does not give you resilience for your network connection only increased performance.

If you want to develop posts off line, you may want to check out Microsoft Live Writer which gives you a word processing environment to develop your posts offline plus a button to push the post to your blog for publishing.

I am sure there are hundred of offline blog post writers, if you know of others please leave details in the comments section.

A Cautinary Note

Only use the Turbo function on a secured unshared computer, you will be downloading potentially security leaking scripts onto a share machine which could be used to hack your blog.

Wrapping Up

If you are experiencing performance problems using your dashboard consider hitting the turbo link and downloading the static content and scripts locally.