Category Archives: WordPress

Saturday morning at WordCamp 2007

WordCamp at Swedish American Hall

WordCamp 2007 has just started and I’m there! Photos and posts are already appearing online and probably the best way to track them is by subscribing to the follow page’s feeds:

I’m posting photos to my WordCamp 2007 Flickr set. It’s growing slowly but surely and from my vantage point on the balcony I have a good view of the proceedings!

Lorelle at WordCamp

Half way through the day and I must say I’m enjoying Lorelle’s talk the most. (Edit – here’s a great write-up on her talk). I’m not very interested in podcasting but Dan Kuykendall’s talk on the subject might make me install his podpress plugin just to see what it’s all about.

Om and John Dvorak’s talk made me feel sick. I can’t imagine that most of the audience have problems with moderating too many comments. I know I’m overjoyed when anyone comments! And that comment about using the default WordPress theme made me angry. It’s not only new users to WordPress who use it but at least one established and respected blogger uses it and it hasn’t hurt how his writing is perceived. I felt a huge gap between what they were talking about and what I think about. Anyone else feel the same way? (eh Lorelle?)

self help for cats

The Blog Monetization talk is just finishing up but I went downstairs for a walk about and took a quick look at the stickers and card table. This card from Self Help for Cats is definitely the best card down there. Go visit them for feline help!

While on the subject of making money, here’s Jeremy’s tips for making money online:

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New! Add your photos to the WordCamp Flickr group! Tag them with “wordcamp” and “wordcamp2007” too!

OMG! Robert doesn’t know who Lorelle is! Shocker!

Matt & Matt

The Matt Cutts talk is great, I’ll post snapshots of his slides later! Biggest tip I’ve learned so far? Use dashes or underscores to separate out the words in categories or tags. Don’t join words. Update – text link ads are a definite no-no. Sites will be penalized.

Funny cartoons of Wordcamp 2007 participants and visitors: bodyabcs.com! Oh yes, hey hot stuff!

I'm in San Francisco, luggage is in London

Thanks BA, this is the second time I’ve flown to San Francisco, and it’s the second time my luggage has been delayed in London. Notice a pattern? Don’t you like my name? Grrr. My luggage is supposed to be delivered tomorrow night to the hotel, but i need to do some shopping this afternoon for essentials.

On a lighter note, almost all of Automattic are downstairs in the lobby and it’s good to finally meet many of them! Mark and I had an uneventful flight, and even fixed or discussed a few bugs on the way! Desktop Tower Defense is no easier at 36,000ft than it is at sea level however. Oh well!

See you all at WordCamp!

Overdue update! Luggage was delivered around 4am on Saturday morning so I picked up the case and had a change of clothes just in time for WordCamp!

Have you completed your WordCamp registration?

I'm going to WordCamp

Well, I’m off to San Francisco in a few days time for WordCamp and I’ll finally meet some of the newer members of the company. Actually, that would be almost half the company. Did I mention that Automattic is a rapidly growing organisation?

Anyway, registration for WordCamp is now closed, but a number of people still haven’t filled in their details, despite having paid for tickets! If you paid your $25 but never filled in a form with your tshirt size and blog URL then check your email. There’s a link there you should click! Your name will also appear on the attendees when you are done. I’m going to send out reminder emails tomorrow but please save me some time copying/pasting of emails and ID codes and fill in the form first!

See you at WordCamp!

PS. If you live in Ireland, leave a comment here. I’ll pick out 5 comments at random and once I’ve verified that your mailing address is in Ireland, I’ll pop a couple of WordPress stickers in the post to you.

The WordCamp 2007 schedule is now online

The schedule is up for your perusal now. It’s a two day event this year on the 21st and 22nd of July with the highlight being the bbq lun.. uh, I mean, it’s all great. I’m looking forward to attending as many talks as I can and meeting people. I’m sure Matt Cutts will have some interesting whitehat SEO tips for us too!

Meanwhile, a group of Irish people who are heading to Silicon Valley on December 2nd to, “try and build some long-term relationships and friendships with people over there which will be good for the Valley and good for the Paddys.” From the About page:

An ad-hoc group of Irish business people have decided to form their own delegation to tour Silicon Valley and create closer bonds with companies and people in the mecca of the computer world. The tour nicknamed “PaddysValley” will head off at the start of November, taking advantage of the new air routes from Aer Lingus.

There’s still plenty to do but if you’re in business in the Valley, and want to build up a relationship with business in Ireland, check out paddysvalley.org. A pity they’re not heading over in July. It’d be nice to have an Irish crowd at WordCamp!

Update! Matt says the registration page is now active. That Paypal IPN stuff is the business!

The real way to improve server performance

If you want to improve server performance, the best way is to move as much of the processing off it and onto the client machine. All those visitors of yours are running souped up AMD and Intel CPUs with their big screens and fat harddrives. No wonder your small little hosting plan can’t keep up. Here are some very good ideas from a Slashdot comment I read this morning.

  • Databases can get pretty slow with complicated queries, so upload your database to the client when they load the page and then your database queries are distributed.
  • PHP isn’t very fast, and neither are Perl or Python, so you don’t want to be running them on the server either. Write an interpreter for the language of your choice in Javascript and move your business logic to the client. This will also interface better with the client side database copy.
  • SSL is a performance killer, don’t use it. If you need to send something securely just prefix it with a predetermined number of random letters and numbers, no one will think to look beyond them.
  • Writing to databases can be pretty bad too. Try discarding all your changes, your users might not notice the difference, but they will appreciate the performance gain.

Check out the original post for a few more invaluable nuggets. If you follow all these tips you’ll be well on your way to becoming a respected and l33t hacker.

And now the big news. I’m really excited about this. The next version of WordPressMU will have a special Javascript client-side db (JCSDB) library built in. JCSDB will enable distributed and parallel access to your WPMU db without the danger of harming your servers. The best thing about it? If your site is dugg or slashdotted then your visitor’s machines will handle the load transparently. Instead of using slow and ungainly TCP/IP the library will use super-quick UDP to communicate. It really is the best way of sending data over the Internet.

I expect Matt will roll out JCSDB on WordPress.com just as soon as a few of the final bugs are ironed out. It might be a bit of headache for Barry and Demitrious to administer, but at least we can get rid of at least half our servers and use them to power a massive game of Counter Strike at the next WordCamp.

Update on May 31st! You all thought this was a joke didn’t you? Well, Google Gears has just been released and “is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality”.

  • Store and serve application resources locally.
  • Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
  • Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness.

It’s still in beta but Google Reader already supports it by allowing you to download up to 2000 items to read offline. This could be useful when I’m flying to SF next July!

WordPress.com stats for your own blog

Andy announced a new WordPress stats plugin that uses the polished WordPress.com traffic graphs on your own self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve been testing it here for the past few months and it’s worked fine. I must download the new plugin and install it to see what other goodies Andy has added since.

Eventually I’ll get around to releasing my own referrers plugin, but as our newborn Adam is taking up so much of our time it might be a while before I get around to it!

How I move a WordPress blog to a new host

Aaron Brazell described how he moves his WordPress blog to a new host and it’s very familiar since I’ve done something similar a few times over the last few months.

I’ve figured out a few things from those moves which you might find useful if you get sick and tired of your hosting:

  1. If you’re self hosted and have a domain name, set the “time to live” (TTL) to as small as possible, say 15 minutes. You should do this about 24 hours previously. Doing this will mean that visitors to your bog will start seeing your new host sooner!
  2. Just after you dump your database to a file for export close all your posts to comments. I do this with the SQL, UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status='closed'. Now quickly transfer your db over and get your site up and running in the usual manner. Your old site will still get traffic for a while yet. Googlebot will still visit too, but nobody will leave comments there so you don’t have to worry about synchronising your comments table. You could do the same with ping_status too if you get a lot of pings.
  3. For extra brownie points add a small message in the comment area informing the visitor that, “Comments are disabled. This site has moved to new hosting. Please check back later to leave a comment.”
  4. If you fiddle with your hosts file make sure there isn’t an entry for your domain pointing at the old site. That happened to me on my Macbook and even after updating /etc/hosts it still didn’t work right. I had to reboot the laptop!
  5. Say “Thank You” to anyone who helps, especially support staff!

Good luck moving, it’s not as hard or as daunting as it might be. ssh, scp/rsync, mysql/mysqldump and tar/gzip are your friends when moving!

Further Reading:

PS. Thanks to Linode for hosting, Blacknight and Michele for DNS, and you for WordPress.

WP Plugin: Import your Flickr comments

I have had a plugin running on my photoblog In Photos for quite a while now that imports comments on my Flickr stream into my blog posts. It prefixed “Flickr:” to the username and linked back to the Flickr comment.

Due to overwhelming demand (two people asked!), I cleaned up the plugin a bit and put a configuration page on it and called it the Flickr Comment Importer. There are a few things to consider if you want to use this plugin but it’s straight forward to install and configure and it’s all documented on the plugin page.

Download it now!

Ireland.com uses WordPress MU

Damien alerted me to the fact that the new Ireland.com blogs are using WordPress, and so with much excitement I hit the site and browsed around. A quick look at the source showed that they are in fact using WordPress MU which is rather neat.

Ireland.com is the website of The Irish Times, a major daily newspaper here. It’ll be great to see journalists blogging there, but only if they are allowed free reign. If they pull it off, they’ll bring a lot more attention to the site.

So far, only two blogs are operating. On the Record is a music blog written by Jim Carroll, and Price Watch by Conor Pope. Conor’s first post is Window or aisle? €15 please, a short post exploring new charges by Aer Lingus. I don’t see a Trackback link there but hopefully they’ll allow trackbacks and pingbacks sooner rather than later.

Welcome to the ireland.com blog page. We have two blogs, one written by music journalist Jim Carroll, using his weekly column On The Record as its cornerstone. This blog will shed light on the machinations of the music industry at home and abroad. From today, the consumer-focused PriceWatch section will also be carried in blog form on the site. Written by Conor Pope, the blog will be updated throughout the week and will allow users to post details of rip-offs, ask questions and perhaps even highlight bargains they have spotted.

Update on Sep 8, 2009 They’re not using WordPress MU any more unfortunately. Looks like a Windows based system, with ugly urls. The links to the blogs above are broken as a result. Disappointing.

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