An advert in the Lifehacker RSS feed tells people how to lose stomach fat. Good thing too. The next post tells people how to put it on…
Could this be an evil plan by the Lifehacker folks to get more ad clicks? It’s a devious idea of course, and subtle but I’ll be keeping a close eye on future posts!
Update! WordPress MU 2.8.5.2 has a tiny fix for a post publish bug. You can download it from the usual place.
WordPress MU 2.8.5.1 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.
This is a security and bugfix release and a recommended upgrade for every WordPress MU site. What happened to 2.8.5? I had it tagged and ready for release when Luke reported a little problem. It wasn’t possible to edit blogs! It was an easy bug to fix but code had been tagged and zip/tarball archives created so I had to create new ones. Thanks Luke! Saved the day. 🙂
Thanks to everyone else who contributed and helped in any way during the making of this release. Your help is invaluable.
This release also fixes a problem with slashes in blog and site options. You’ll be prompted to run the site upgrader. Please run it on all your blogs. For a more comprehensive look at what has changed recently, take a look at the Trac Timeline.
ubuntu.com is down unfortunately. The release of Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, is obviously driving a heck of a lot of traffic to the site. (I wonder if they use the equivalent of wp-super-cache?)
Anyway, I’ll be upgrading tomorrow probably and once I do I’ll be checking out some of the applications mentioned on this page. Everything from an alternative media player, the (as yet unreleased) Gnome 3.0, audio/video editing, a photo manager to the pretty sweet Electric Sheep screensaver are listed here.
Many of the apps are available for Ubuntu 9.04 but others require building manually. I’ll be busy over the weekend 🙂
Here’s a few of the eye catching screenshots from that page, just to whet your appetite!
At the recent Automattic meetup in Quebec Matt gave a passionate talk about how great the Dvorak keyboard layout was and handed out paper copies of The Dvorak Zine.
The meetup was hectic and the first chance I had to try it out was on the plane home. Just over 5 hours from Montreal to Heathrow, London. Here’s what I typed in about 2 hours:
Mad! Typing this on the flight back to London using the dvorak keyboard layout. It’s slow going but I have plenty of time to practice, it’s a long flight! My finger memory says QWERTY but they’re very slowly mapping to the new layout. Vowels come first followed by s, m, l, n and d.
It’s definitely a better layout but right now I am so slow! I’m glad that I have power on this flight. No need for the extra battery! I love how th are next to each other.
Gotta get me a layout I can stick to the keys of the macbook.
Watched the Hurt Locker while typing this.I always type i instead of d.
Gonna watch Night at the museum 2 again, just so I can watch the ending, finally.
I’ve got three seats to myself. Maybe I should sleep? Seems that would be the most sensible thing to do, now wouldn’t it? Looks like we’re about half way across the Atlantic! The film is fast forwarding nice and fast!
Time for a break from Dvorak!
Wow! Layer Cake is a great film! A bit violent but good ending! Only 156 miles to go! Then at least an hour in Heathrow! Can’t believe I didn’t Sleep!
Yes, I didn’t sleep. That was a long day, and Layer Cake was on my laptop (freshly ripped from the DVD I bought before leaving). I can heartily recommend Air Canada. Best experience I’ve had in economy on a trans-Atlantic flight.
Anyway, changing the Mac OS X keyboard to the Dvorak layout is easy, as it is in Linux too. Trying to login using the Dvorak layout is a right pain though.
I didn’t try to rip out the keys of my Macbook but I did rearrange the keys on a wireless keyboard. It actually didn’t help, mainly because the keyboard itself isn’t that comfortable.
The next step was to run through a few Dvorak keyboard training tutorials. They went well and I repeated the first tutorial several times, improving the times and accuracy each time. I’m not doing quite as well as Nick is doing though. I’m impressed.
I’ll persevere. My hands are retraining themselves. The Dvorak Zine is a great help, but if I tried using Dvorak for work I’d be 90% less productive right now. Matt, that ok then? 😉
The WordPress Exploit Scanner has been updated, with lots of help from Jon and Ryan.
In recent weeks blogs running older versions of WordPress were exploited. If you’re concerned that your blog might have been broken into, download the plugin and run it. It will find false positive results but it will do a reasonably good job of finding the code that’s inserted into a hacked site.
The plugin works by scanning every directory on your site. This is done recursively which unfortunately takes up quite a bi of memory. If you get an out of memory error please read the readme.txt as it has a suggestion for fixing the problem.
PS. WordPress 2.8.5 was released last night. Make sure you upgrade! A WordPress MU release will follow shortly.
And for our next product, we’re bringing out a toy that makes pottery called “Harry The Potter”.
WP Super Cache version 0.9.7 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.
Since the last release of the plugin a number of new features have been adding, bugs fixed, and documentation updated. For a taster, here are the changes from the readme.txt:
If you’re upgrading and your blog is installed in a sub directory the mod_rewrite rules may not have been created correctly. You’ll know this because the timestamp on your cached pages will change on every load. If that happens, remove the Supercache rewrite rules and recreate them through the admin page.
You can list all the blog’s cache files now, ordered by generation time. From that listing you can delete individual files.
The debug function is very powerful. You can choose the level of logging. Level 1 logs errors and warnings of a serious nature. Level 5 logs them plus lots of normal functions. Here’s what level 5 logging looks like for one single request:
20:49:34 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ No wp-cache file exists or user agent rejected.
20:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ In WP Cache Phase 2
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Setting up WordPress actions
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Created output buffer
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ supercache dir: /www/wp-content/cache/supercache/ocaoimh.ie/was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Output buffer callback
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ supercache dir: /www/wp-content/cache/supercache/ocaoimh.ie/was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Anonymous user detected. Only creating Supercache file.
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Gzipping buffer.
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Writing non-gzipped buffer to supercache file.
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Writing gzipped buffer to supercache file.
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Renamed temp supercache file to /www/wp-content/cache/supercache/ocaoimh.ie/was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/index.html
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Renamed temp supercache gz file to /www/wp-content/cache/supercache/ocaoimh.ie/was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/index.html.gz
21:49:35 /was-the-janitor-really-in-the-fugitive/ Sending buffer to browser
That’s a lot of text. Keep an eye on the load on your server because logging that much data on a busy server will add extra load. Start by limiting the logging to your own IP and test with various browsers.
The error messages that are normally sent to the browser about “missing html tag”, “404 error” and “blank page” are now only shown if debugging is enabled. This will hopefully avoid problems with PHP scripts that generate Javascript.
This release adds a new “late init” feature. This is only useful in half-on mode however. This causes the plugin to create the “cache key” and display the cached page at the end of the “init” action, after all WordPress include files and plugins have been loaded. This is very useful if your application needs to interrogate the database to modify the cache key. Activate it by setting $wp_super_cache_late_init to true in the config file.
Lots to digest and new toys to try out. Hope you enjoy this new version of the plugin!
Last year I voted no to Lisbon and despite reading about the controlling superstate in “Vulcan’s Hammer”, as a consequence of the fictional Lisbon Laws I’ll be voting yes today.
More than anything else, the “No to Lisbon” campaign has convinced me to vote that way. Thanks.
