Tag Archives: irishblogs

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.

WordPress MU 2.6.2

WordPress MU, the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com has been updated.

Version 2.6.2 is now available for download and is a required update. WordPress MU isn’t vulnerable to the security bugs that were the reason for WordPress 2.6.2 but it does contain a number of important bug fixes, including:

  1. xmlrpc.php works better if you use multiple sites. #735
  2. get_option() wasn’t reading all options.
  3. Configurable media buttons on the Write page. #598, #738
  4. 404 “file not found” errors on folder installs is mostly fixed. #745
  5. And more .. (timeline)

PS. Don’t forget the voting is now open in the WordPress MU plugin competition.
PPS. Registration is now open for BarCamp Cork II on November 1st. I’ve put my name down to give a talk there.

Want to test super speed caching?

Yesterday morning was one of those mornings. I couldn’t sleep, but not for want of trying. Around 5am our 17 month old baby wasn’t too keen on the whole notion of shut-eye. Instead I took him downstairs to feed him, and do a little surfing and hacking to pass the time until the sun rose.

Lucky for you that I did.

I discovered that WP Super Cache was compressing the page output twice! That’s right, it’s my own fault, but for over a year that little bug has gone unnoticed. I won’t bore you with details, but it’s fixed now and if you compare wp-cache-phase2.php from the latest release with that in the development version you’ll spot the differences.

In testing, I noticed that pages were generated more quickly. Sometimes twice as fast as before if everything else had been cached by the object cache. I even posted a message to the support forum asking people to try it out but the silence is deafening which is why I’m turning to the power of the blog post.

If you’d like to give this bit of code a go, grab the development version of WP Super Cache, test it, and leave a comment here. Before you install it, grab a few pages while not logged in and record the page generation time, then after install, check out the same pages. I’d love to hear if it improves things.

You could also try setting “$cache_rebuild_files” to 1 in wp-cache-config.php. That will enable some experimental code that moves supercache files out of the way when the page becomes stale but then restores them while the page is being rebuilt. That should help significantly on busy sites where lots of comments are made. It’ll be switched off by default because I don’t think it will benefit most sites, and will only result in more I/O. Check out this forum thread for further info.

If you’re interested in testing the plugin in the future, you could subscribe to the wp-super-cache-dev tag, where I’ll post development updates on the plugin.

WP Super Cache 0.8

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

If you’re not interested in the changes, simply grab the latest version of the plugin and copy the files into your plugin folder. It’ll work, but if you’re upgrading, you should read on.

Major changes in this release:

  1. Generate a semaphore id based on hostname and cache path to avoid problems on shared hosts, props Tigertech.
  2. If you run WordPress from a different directory to where it’s installed, supercached files weren’t deleted when a post was made or updated. That is now fixed. Thanks Viper007Bond for all your help on that.
  3. Paged archives, category pages, and tag pages are now cleared when a post is edited or comment approved. This replicates what WP Cache did all along so you should hopefully see supercached static files updating more often.
  4. If your .htaccess is read-only, the mod_rewrite rules are displayed on the admin page. Thanks Matt for the patch.
  5. Updated mod_rewrite rules won’t serve static html files if there’s a “=” in the url. Should catch all sorts of problems with plugins and attachments. You’ll have to manually edit your root .htaccess to match the new rules.
  6. Set cache control and expiry headers of supercached files. They are cached for 5 minutes, but with a “must-revalidate” header. Delete wp-content/cache/.htaccess for the new rules to be updated.
  7. Check for WordPress MU because it can’t update the .htaccess file.
  8. Write supercache html to temporary files and rename. The old way opened the correct file for writing, did some work and wrote the file. In the fraction of a second it took to write the file, someone might request it and get an incomplete page.
  9. The Supercache expiry time has been removed. There can be only one.

Edit: 0.8.1 has just been released. This addresses the following:

  • The “forbidden files” problems some users had is fixed.
  • Supercache files were being removed needlessly when a moderated comment was made.
  • I added a “Clear cached files when post is edited” checkbox.
  • I added a “Delete Cache” link next to the Dashboard link on the dashboard.
  • Tigertech found that when a file is renamed and the new filename is already used, the old remains.
  • Updated readme.txt.

Google Chrome on Linux and Mac

Google Chrome, the open source browser that recently made headlines, was unfortunately only released for Windows. Linux and <a href="Mac users were left out in the cold.

It was possibly to get the browser working with Wine, but it wasn’t very stable by all accounts. Thanks to CodeWeavers, they have ported the Chromium browser to Linux and Mac OS X and packaged it ready for download on both systems!

First impressions of the Linux version? For some reason my whole screen goes black while a page is loading or when a new tab is opened. I see this in Vice (The C64 emulator) and any movie player other than mplayer so it’s an issue with my setup, not the browser. The fonts in the url bar suck as well, but I’m sure they can be fixed too. My curiousity is sated. CoveWeavers did a great job, but I’m going back to Firefox. (Via Tom)

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux. Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.

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