WP Super Cache 0.8.3 "Speedy"

WP Super Cache version 0.8.3 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

Double Caching

This releases fixes a long standing compression bug. In older versions of the plugin, the cached page was compressed twice. Once to display to the current visitor, and once again for the cached files stored on the server. This has now been fixed and there’s a noticeable speed increase for anonymous visitors. Unfortunately as a side effect, it’s not possible to display the “super cache gz” html comment now. To verify that html pages are being served from the supercache directory you’ll have to add an error_log() somewhere and check that visits aren’t logged.
The plugin now uses fopen() instead of gzopen() which according to a comment on the gzopen() manual page is unreliable under high load.

IE7 Fixes

Apparently IE7 has problems when gzipped files are served as “x-gzip” files, under certain circumstances. This is an obscure bug but this has been fixed. If you’re upgrading, either remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess and visit the admin page and that file will be regenerated, or edit that file and change “x-gzip” to “gzip”.

A number of smaller bugs were also fixed. Check the changelog for further info.

Miley Cyrus vs Miley Byrne

Well Holy God! Did ya ever think there’d be another Miley to rival our own Miley Byrne? Apparently Myley Cyrus is a young actress/singer who stars “as Miley Stewart/”Hannah Montana” in the television series Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel.” I’d never hear of her before coming across this post on WordPress.com but what do you know, she’s famous! That explains all those Hannah Montana lunchboxes in the shops.

Meanwhile, the real Miley was a character in the Irish soap Glenroe that enthralled the Irish nation during the 80’s and 90’s. Mick Lally who played the character recently joined TG4’s Ros na Run. Must set that up to record later. He also released a single that flew up the charts to hit the no. 1 spot in Ireland. Check it out on Youtube. There is also an atrocious remix of the Glenroe theme song by Dustin. Oh dear, prepare to have your ears assaulted if you click that link!

A song from the series, The By-Road to Glenroe, performed by Mick Lally, was released as a single in Ireland in 1990, featuring the Jim Lockhart version of the theme tune as its B-side, and reached Number 1 in the Irish singles chart.

I did a double take when I heard about Miley Cyrus, thinking of Miley from Glenroe of course. The same happened when I first heard Fergie on the radio. I thought, “she doesn’t have such a bad voice for a British Royal.”

Show me the money!

World markets might be in freefall but here’s a reminder of better times. On January 1st 2002, Ireland changed it’s currency to the Euro along with the 14 other countries in the Eurozone. Price increases followed as retailers “converted” their prices from the Irish Punt to the Euro. The economy went into overdrive as cheap credit flooded the market and drove inflation to sky high levels.

Still, it’s handy going on holiday to Spain and not worrying about converting currency any more. If only we could afford to go on holiday again ..

Irish coins

In this gallery are each of the Irish coins and the £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes that were legal tender until February 2002. More information about the changeover can be found on the ECBI Euro website. I also have a ten shilling note from 1963. Anyone remember those?

What do you call a twit?

In the course of developing my Twitter stats page it occurred to me that there is no definitive name for a Twitter user. So I asked,

what do you call people on Twitter? Twitterer?

Replies came thick and fast:

I still don’t know, so I went with what I originally thought, “Tweeters”.

The Twitter Stats are generated from data I’ve collected since July 29th using my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress. It’s collected almost 100,000 tweets since that date. The stats are fairly basic, and they’re cached (individually) by memcached and the page itself is cached by WP Super Cache which is a good thing because it takes several seconds to generate! So far, the stats presented are:

  • Top 30 Twitterers
  • Top 30 Twitterers who repeat themselves
  • Top 30 friendliest Twitterers
  • Top 30 Twitterers who talk to me

For more interesting stats, check Tweetrush. (It’s down right now, but I presume @ajmckee and the lads are working on it and will have it running in no time at all!)

WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages 0.3.1

One of these days I’ll rename all my plugins and give them nice snappy titles.

Version 0.3.1 of the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin (for WordPress MU) has just been released. If you’ve been using this plugin you should probably update because this fixes a number of bugs including the problem with the Prologue Theme (and possibly Feedwordpress but I haven’t tested that.)
This release wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Thomas Schneider!

Main changes:

  • Pages are now filtered out because they don’t really fit neatly anywhere in the global posts page.
  • Prologue Theme problem with wp_insert_category() is fixed.
  • Set comment and ping status of global posts to closed.
  • Lots of translation work, including a German translation.
  • Lots of fixes related to when blogs change status, or posts are edited.

Grab it from the download page.