A very lengthy article that I must read yet, but if going by Mark’s previous efforts it’ll be an enlightening look at how PJs prepare their work for publication.
Author Archives: Donncha
The Digital Journalist January 2005
Here’s the latest Digital Journalist online magazine. Includes a special report about the tsunami, lots of photos from China and other stuff.
WordPress Multiuser Jan 9th Snapshot
Here’s a major update of WPMU. Go download it now!
New in this snapshot:
- Use PEAR Function Cache if available. Several plugins have been rewritten so they’ll cache their output to save on databases processing.
- Main WordPress loop has been cached in a better way. If a page is now cached all we need to do is get a few settings from the database.
- The last release was plagued by the wp-login feature that redefined the site url if the blog was moved. As all wpmu URLs are virtual this was a big one!
- Kitten’s Spaminator will now import keywords from the “main” blog to help detect spam in other blogs. (As there’s no registration page yet you’ll have to trust me that it works great!)
- Previously when comments were posted, regardless of whether they were spam or not, the Smarty cache was cleared. This wrecked any performance gained by caching content so now the cache will be refreshed from the backend.
- Because of too-vague mod_rewrite rules, posts with titles containing 4 digits failed.
- Misc bug fixes and WP upgrades.
WPMU Update – Improved Caching
Hopefully you should see this site run a little faster, I’ve moved most database accesses to inside the cache loop.
For most users caching and processing of requests should be faster as the whole WordPress posts-loop is now cached, however there is a trade off. I can’t check if there are multiple or single posts on a page so every page, including the front page, is cached with your comment credentials and user login (if any). In other words, if I visit the front page and then you do, the front page won’t be cached for you, but if two anonymous users visit the second visitor will get a completely cached copy.
If you see any problems please leave a comment on this post, or email me at donncha @ linux.ie!
A bit later…I’m watching the logs and I’m glad I made that change. We’re being hit by 240 280 attempts at referer spamming from sex 4singles.com. After the first hit, all they get served is static html! 🙂
Winter Surfing
Too cold for me, but not for some.
The BitTorrent Effect
Here’s a great interview with the author of BitTorrent. I’ve only read the first bit but I’ll be picking it up later at home.
istock and shutterstock vs "pro stock" sites
This thread on dpchallenge says that, “istock / shutterstock are ruining the industry”.
SharQ recommends Alamy, Corbis and other sites that sell photos on a royalty basis. istock/shutterstock sell royalty free photos so photographers could be “underselling” their photos. It’s an interesting thread and worth a read.
According to their FAQ, Alamy require 48MB tiffs (24MB for “reportage material”) which my camera might have a little trouble creating. By upscaling a 2048×1920 photo to 3584×2688 the resulting uncompressed tiff file is 28MB. *ouch* It might be a while before I submit stuff to them!
Meanwhile, in the world of the amateur photographer I’ll continue to use the “royalty free” sites such as istockphoto and shutterstock.
Here’s a thread about how well some users of those sites are getting on. Note to self, upload more photos!
The Dundalk Blog
DERMOT AHERN DUNDALK IRELAND – Not much on there now but apparently this blog “named and shamed” drug dealers and criminals in Dundalk and surrounding areas.
They’ve taken down all the interesting slanderous bits, but it was fairly irresponsible to put it online in the first place anyway!
You might be able to find some of the content on the Irish Republican News forum.
Sky charges for repairs to non-faulty digiboxes
There I was going to subscribe to Sky+ and this story comes along. Does this bug still exist? Is it on new boxes?
British Sky Broadcasting has denied accusations that the company tried to profit from a known software fault in its digital video recorders, after customers were charged £65 for engineers to visit their homes.
Thanks Pron for the link.
WPMU Update – mod_rewrite fix for digits in URLs
Here’s a small fix to fix a big mod_rewrite rules bug. URLs like this, http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/2005/01/06/2004-indian-ocean-earthquake-wikipedia/, won’t load properly as mod_rewrite gets confused between the date of the post and the year in the title. Here’s a quick fix:
Open the .htaccess file in your root directory and replace each occurance of ^(.*)
with ^([_0-9a-z-]+)
Thanks to Kae and Darragh for spotting that.
The latest CVS update broke post editing a bit, an extra field was added. Here’s how to update your blog if you’re using it:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_posts ADD menu_order INT( 11 ) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL" | mysql wpdb ;done