Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress MU 1.2.4

The new WordPress MU 1.2.4 went live this afternoon and can now be downloaded. This is based on WordPress 2.2.2, a security release, so it’s important to update your WordPress MU install too. If you haven’t changed any files, all your need to do is copy over the new release and things should work fine.

  • Kses has been reverted so you can use class and id attributes in your HTML tags again. Conor is already happy because his microformats will work again!
  • The installer has been smartened up and is now friendlier and may catch a few more problems before they arise.
  • Lots and lots of bugs have been squashed. It’s been messy but they had to be exterminated.

If you’re comfortable with Subversion and merging file changes, then the list of changed files should come in useful. You can also download a diff file there if that suits. Check the forum announcement for feedback.

Dvorak vs Malik at WordCamp on video

John Pozadzides has released the first video from WordCamp and it’s sure to be one that will interest many. John C Dvorak debates with Om Malik on the subject of Blogging vs Journalism. It’s hosted on blip.tv and John has uploaded a high quality version there.

I won’t embed it here, go look at John’s post for the video! Thanks John for doing such a great job!

We spent a good portion of today at SFMOMA, where they have a really interesting photography exhibit, and some of the modern art on the first floor really caught my eye, especially the self portrait of Andy Warhol and the image containing the pencils across the room from it. Blew my mind they did.
Later we went for dinner but in between we relaxed in a local park. Here’s a photo Alex took of me and Matt. Alex has a neat little RF transmitter and receiver for his camera and flash. He lay the flash on the bench next to him while he shot this photo. Good fill flash and it’s not in-your-face like an onboard flash would be. I have to get my hands on an RF transmitter to go with my 580EX!

While on the subject, this is Automattic. There are quite a few of us now, and as you can see, we’re really getting into the formal “must wear a suit to work” dress code.

WP Tip: don't blog as Administrator

do not blog as administrator

The default user when you install WordPress is called “Administrator” and many people don’t change it which unfortunately leads to anonymous looking posts made by Administrator instead of by Matt, Mark, Lloyd, Joseph, Alex or your own name of course.

I would venture to say it’s a new user problem but I remember seeing Administrator posts by old hands at the blogging game so it might be worth double checking, just in case. Your template might not show Administrator, but your RSS feed isn’t as clever.

It’s simple to check and fix. Log in to your WordPress blog, go to Users, and then Your Profile. If you haven’t changed your first and last names, do it now. Click “Update Profile” and then change your “Display name” to a friendlier name.

One final tip, it’s probably much safer to blog as a non-admin user. If you’re logged in all the time, consider creating an editor or author user. If you leave your laptop unattended in a busy area for a moment it’s much less likely that someone will do real harm to your blog. (Presuming they don’t rob the laptop first!)

If you’re a WordPress.com user, then don’t worry about Administrator showing up on your blog posts, it won’t happen as your login name is your author name. Isn’t that nice?

Sunday Morning Wordcamping

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Barry spoke at length about High Performance WordPress this morning, and Matt came on stage to introduce and summarise the main features of the new Hyperdb. If you missed it you’re definitely going to want to watch the video when it comes out. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that Barry was out last night telling me, “ah you’ll have one more before you go..” 🙂
Great talk guys!

Barry’s talk is already online. That was fast!

Rashmi Sinha, Iterative Design in Agile Environments

Rashmi Sinha’s talk on “Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems” is fascinating. I agree with her observation that the Internet really isn’t democratic. Whoever is popular will get ever more popular, in general. There are exceptions of course but the well established bloggers like Robert Scoble are hard to dislodge from their pedestals.

Dave Winer at Wordcamp

Dave Winer talking at Wordcamp.

John Pozadzides, Wordcamp Cameraman

John Pozadzides is the guy with the camera on the balcony at Wordcamp. He’s going to post videos of the event online and is looking for suggestions about where that should be. I’ll suggest blip.tv, as it’s served me well in the past!

Liz Danzico, Usability Analysis of WP

Liz presented research into the backend that will eventually make it into WordPress 2.4

Finally, Charles Stricklin has a great write up on the second day including the reminder that I sort-of promised to release that Paypal Instant Payment Notification code ..

There are literally hundreds of images from WordCamp on Flickr. Scott has posted a few too, and made them available under a CC license and here are a few photos taken by Alex who is just as mad about photography as I am!

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Really finally this time. I had my photo taken and then they made a cartoon out of it. Thanks! 🙂

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!