Tag Archives: WordPress

Donncha's Wednesday Links

Confusion reigns again. As promised yesterday, today is Wednesday’s Links! I really gotta get that plugin written so it’ll create these titles automatically. Happy Thanksgiving to all my US visitors!

  • Automattc Projects lists most of the commercial and GPLed projects Automattic has worked on. I’ll be looking at the secure admin plugin later. Should be useful for WordPress MU installs.
  • Lorelle reports on a new form of spamming and copyright theft called spinning. There are pay-for online services out there that generate nonsense content that search engines think is English, but is really fragments of content taken from other sites with words replaced to avoid the duplicate penalty. If you find someone scraping and stealing your content, you can get your own back on them. If they use Adsense, Daily Blog Tips recommends that you report them for copyright theft. Hopefully the thief will have their Adsense account suspended. Excellent idea.
  • George Barr has a great post on camera design. I love his opening paragraph.

    Someone sent me a joke the other day – one of those, “how come” type – one line of which was “how come they put a man on the moon before they put wheels on luggage?”

  • Preventing ad blindness from DBT again. Useful ideas if you have advertising on your blog.
  • Pop culture will eat itself – what a great capture!
  • Happy Blog Birthday to Dave. 10 years young!
  • Everyone eats right? Even the cloned Storm Troopers in Star Wars needed somewhere to sit down and eat. Here’s what happens when Darth Vadar wandered down to the canteen. Via Emmet.

    If you like that one, check out Darth’s hidden talent which I also got from Bifsniff.

A Simply Silly WordPress URL

I’m not sure why I noticed this protest sticker. It’s stuck to a lamp post on Patrick Street, Cork but maybe it was the typo in the URL that triggered my subconscious. One thing I can be certain of is that WordPress.org is not taking sides in any conflict of any sort! GPL software can be used by anyone just so long as they stick to the agreement with which they accepted the software.

Silly Stupid Typo

As expected, palestinesolidarityproject.wordpress.com points at an old blog of theirs as they have now moved to their own server at palestinesolidarityproject.org.

Glossing over the .org mistake for a minute, why do people still put the “www.” in front of long-winded urls? It gets stripped by WordPress.com anyway. Why not put “http://” there instead? Makes more sense to me. Three cheers for the no-www movement!

So, have you seen any glaring typos on posters, fliers, stickers or blogs that made you look twice? Today’s link post doesn’t count. I did that on purpose to make a point. Sure. 🙂

Donncha's Friday Links

I really have to resurrect that link posting plugin I wrote for WordPress. Meanwhile, if you’re groaning under the deluge of comment spam that Akismet catches, try this modified version which orders the spam comments by IP and url. Rename the file to akismet.php and drop into your plugins/akismet/ folder. It’s the same idea as the Akismet Worst Offenders I blogged last year but rewritten from scratch. Looks dog ugly but maybe someone will carry the work forward?
Later today I’m going to check in changes to the super cache plugin to create html files in the root folder of your blog. You have to explicitly name the path, so there’s no danger that your blog directory will be overrun with lots of new folders.

  • lol.cat actually exists! (via Google Inside)
  • Adam compares ads vs reality and would eat the real fast food. Come to think of it, so do I, even after I read Fast Food Nation.
  • And via comments on the post above, Gaz hates the iPhone.
  • Gavin blogs a 2 hour documentary on the war in Iraq that appeared on BBC last month. I need to find a 2 hour gap in my life to watch it!
  • WordPress plugin authors, if you already know the ins and outs writing plugins, of using hooks and creating tables, then Custom Queries should be high on your learning list.
  • WordPress.com is now the second most visited blog site in the world, knocking Typepad into third place according to Nielsen Online.
  • You can worry about content length or you can go with the flow and write great content. Good points about scannable content WRT certain audiences however.
  • A trip to the creationist museam. Fun. Look at the Flickr set too. This is what really happened to the dinosaurs, who only died out 4,300 years ago.. via Damien.
  • Meet the GIMP has a few interesting posts and videos – panoramas, Support Creative Commons! (no, sorry, I won’t!), and selecting selections in the GIMP.
  • Live.com Webmaster Console – I logged in yesterday with my hotmail account and added a few of my sites. You should too, and add your sitemaps. Looks like live.com haven’t penalized my sites, but I can probably count on one hand the number of hits I get from them!

PS. There’s a baby boom in Ireland! Congrats to Robert and Sylwia on the birth of their son, and also of course to my cousin Orla and her husband Henry on the birth of their son Conor! Adam will have another cousin to play with! 🙂

Donncha's Thursday Links

I have to admit, I preferred how WP 2.2 displayed lots of draft posts on the edit and post pages. Having to go to the Write page and click on the “54 more” link is annoying. For some reason, this post didn’t show up as the newest draft. Now it does, maybe because I deleted another (newer) draft post of the same name. When I created another “Donncha’s Thursday Links” post it didn’t show in the drafts list either. I had to search the drafts posts for “donncha” and it appeared at the bottom of that list. Strange.

I should get used to having my photos ripped off, but I don’t think I ever will. It’s as upsetting now as it ever was.

PS. Ray D’Arcy appears on the Restaurant tonight on RTE 1 at 8.30pm!

100,000 page views in 5 minutes

Now, that’s why you can’t believe benchmarks. Sure, this server was able to serve 100,000 page views in 282 seconds but:

  • Requests were made from a VPS in the same datacenter. No need to worry about slow clients, or maintaining network connections to many remote clients.
  • I used Litespeed Web Server instead of Apache.
  • Was it realistic? Even a digg that sends you say, 8,000 page views in an hour, isn’t going to exercise your server that much unless your page is chock full of graphics, css and Javascript. (oh wait, web 2.0 ..)

So, Litespeed’s webserver is the one to go for? Maybe not. I can’t for the life of me get compression of the static cache working. When I do, the browser tries to display the gzipped data directly. I can enable the webserver’s gzip function but from tests I don’t think it caches the resulting gzipped file. (btw – mod_deflate, the Apache2 module that does the same thing suffers from this problem too!) Later – testing this again. Litespeed allows you to set a a gzip cache directory. For normal traffic it’s worth doing so pages load faster.
The mod_gzip site is a great resource if you want to find out more about compressing HTTP content.

How did Apache cope? I was serving 100 concurrent requests and Apache didn’t cope too well. It did serve all the file requests eventually but the load average jumped to just over 50 and the site was unavailable to anyone else. It’ll serve 1000 requests for a static file fine, even 10,000 too, but under constant load the server starts to wilt. Unless you have the RAM to keep enough Apache child processes going all the time you’re going to start swapping.
Meanwhile, Litespeed hardly caused a blip in the server’s load average. I’m quite impressed and I’m running it now. It’s also what powers WordPress.com. Even if you’re not using WordPress, you should look at alternatives to Apache.

This leads me nicely on to announce WP Super Cache 0.4! Download it here!

Major new features include:

  • A “lock down” button. I like to think of this as my “Digg Proof” button. This basically prepares your site for a heavy digging or slashdotting. It locks down the static cache files and doesn’t delete them when a new comment is made.
  • Automatic updating of your .htaccess file. (Backup your .htaccess before installing the plugin!)
  • Don’t super cache any request with GET parameters. You really need to use fancy permalinks now.
  • WordPress search works again.
  • Better version checking of wp-cache-config.php and advanced-cache.php in case you’re using an old one.
  • Better support for Microsoft Windows.
  • Properly serve cached static files on Red Hat/Cent OS systems or others that have an entry for gzip in /etc/mime.types.
  • The Reject URI function works again and now uses regular expressions!

Support queries should go to the forum. Make sure your posts are tagged “wp-super-cache”, but if you post from that link they will.

Donncha's Friday Links

There is no vulnerability in WP Super Cache. Chris blogged about it after we spent a late night of debugging it until 1.30am. But if:

  • You are using Windows (props Computer Guru)
  • You are using a Red Hat or Cent OS system, or just having problems with compressed content (props Dennis)
  • You want to use the reject uri function
  • You want to try out the new automatic .htaccess rule generator
  • You want WordPress searches to work again

then you should head to the download page and try the development version of the plugin. Official release tomorrow probably.

I tell ya, I have learned more about Apache, content types, mod_rewrite, IIS and Red Hat vs Debian differences with this project than I ever could have considered healthy.

  • Joseph linked to How to Debug PHP with Vim and XDebug on Linux. I started reading but then I realised I had to compile Vim again! I’ll stick with my error_log(). Inertia is a bitch isn’t it?
  • Haha. Hugh responds to requests for a Facebook cartoon. (via Damien)
  • Google is abusing nofollow? Credit where credit is due. That’s just mean.
  • Akismet announces Defensio. So, who’ll hack both their plugins to compare results? Should be easy. Should be interesting! Chris is comparing the two on different blogs. Excellent.
  • The WordPress MU Codex is going to get another boost when we start populating it with useful nuggets of information from the forum. More documentation, more help, less frustration.
  • OK, so how many Irish and UK natives sneer, sniff and give out about the Polish people living here and in the UK? This is what happened to Joe who broke his ankle in Poland. Wouldn’t you just love if your hospital was that good?

    He arrived in the hospital at 10:15am, He was wheeled into the doctor at 10:30am and then taken for an X-Ray. By 11am it was confirmed that his ankle was broken and it was reset. By 11:15am his ankle had been placed in a cast and by 11:30am he was back in his hotel eating his lunch. 1 hour 15 minutes, done and dusted.

  • Stephen Fry bemoans the advent of modern cameras and mobile phones. Gone are the days of the simple autograph.
  • IPhone Day in the UK today! Fanboys started queueing For the iPhone release in the UK, yesterday. Unfortunately for them they have to deal with British weather. Whycantheywaitafewdays…
  • Googlehacks is a neat front end to Google allowing you to find music, books, videos and other things online. via and Digg so you all probably saw this too 🙂

Donncha's Thursday Links

Reports of an exploit in WP Super Cache are being investigated but details are vague at this stage. There are only 3 reports of this out of hundreds who installed the plugin. Email me at donncha at ocaoimh.ie if you find files from outside your blog in wp-content/cache/supercache/
Tell me the following if you can:

  1. Plugins installed on your blog.
  2. WordPress version.
  3. The output of ps auxw and lsof if it’s installed.
  4. If you notice any strange processes running, check that they are not shell or php scripts.
  5. Anything strange in your log files? Look for the string “=http” for funky stuff. There will always be strange entries, so don’t be too alarmed if you see them, see my perl bot post. They’re fishing for an exploit on your server.

On to the links ..

  • You can now make your Google Reader tags public and add those sites to your blog as a blogroll. Nice! I still want a “timely dozen” like Photomatt used to have. Must look at Simple Pie ..
  • I’m shocked. Alkos is writing on his blog. I thought the world ended when he used colour but this? What will happen next? Oh, great photography, as usual!
  • Robert’s girlfriend has only a few days to go and his nerves are starting to go. Good luck with the birth! He has also posted Super Cache benchmarks. Good results!
  • Any world leaders reading? If you want to justify an outrageous pay rise, talk to Ireland’s Prime Minister/Taoiseach. His pay rise takes him to the top of the list of top 30 OECD countries. Well done Bertie! Now where’s the health service gone?

    Ireland €310,000
    The US €276,000
    Britain €267,500
    Germany €261,500
    Switzerland €256,000

How well did Super Cache handle the digg?

I must admit making the front page of Digg.com wasn’t the nail biting experience I expected.

$ grep "GET /2007/11/05/wordpress-super-cache-01/" access.log.1|grep digg -c
4686

digg.com

My Super Cache announcement only drew 4686 visitors which is an ultra-light Digg. The Digg page for the post received 808 diggs as of a few minutes ago which is great. Thank you for voting! Judging by the sheer number of comments on that post, there’s a lot of interest out there in the plugin.
What about traffic graphs? The spike at the end of the first graph is my nightly Backuppc service kicking in. The second is from Google Analytics. My server could certainly handle a lot more traffic!

digg.com traffic
analytics-digg

A quick look at my uptime shows the server hardly broke a sweat dealing with the extra traffic except where some idiot spammer bots tried to download my archives a few times. Unfortunately the first time that happened the archives weren’t cached and the load climbed.

For maximum performance, download Xcache and install it. The Xcache WordPress plugin uses Xcache to cache data structures and makes WordPress much faster, even if you don’t use any other caching tool.

Donncha's Wednesday Links

Post digg.

  • Ireland’s Prime Minister or Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, recently received a nice pay rise of €38,000. He is now one of the highest paid heads of state in Europe. He even earns more than George Bush! Here are 50 ways his party, Fianna Fail, laugh at Irish voters. (via). Twenty Major elaborates on a possible discussion between Bertie and a member of Government. It’d be funny if it wasn’t based on fact. (via)
  • Damien is lusting after the Eee PC. Toni already bought one and he has the same complaints I had reservatioons about,

    * The screen and keyboard are tiny
    * I was hoping for a longer battery life (seems like it gets about 3 hours)

  • I Broke Blogspot.
  • How to scale WordPress MU is a work in progress. I’ve only skimmed it so far but I’ll dig into it later.
  • Make Linux look like a Mac is a Gnome theme with instructions and screenshots. Looks pretty.
  • Haha! Niall discovered that the Golden Spiders voting form only does Javascript validation. Vote as many times as you like! (sort of)
  • When I get older. What scares you most about the prospect of being old? Failing eyesight, hearing, physical disability? Memory loss or dementia?
  • The digging yesterday of my Super Cache post wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be. More on that later.

Donncha's Tuesday Links

  • HolisticNetworking is now on WordPress MU 1.3 describes some of the issues one admin found when upgrading to the latest WordPress MU. Thomas – you should package that signup key system in a plugin and put it on the WordPress plugin site or WPMU Dev!
  • More discussion on the WordPress.com theme marketplace and some interesting comments from theme designers too.
  • Gamma Goblin is looking forward to the ballet at the Opera House methinks. The linked mp3 is hilarious!
  • The next generation Jpeg compression could be Microsoft’s HD Photo and will be called Jpeg XR. “XR stands for “extended range,” a reference to the format’s ability to show a wider and finer range of tonal gradations and a richer color palette.” (Via Thomas Hawk)

Digg users! Want to help test the Super Cache? You might see this server go down in flames, or it might survive and keep serving files. Who knows? Digg it to find out! 🙂

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