Here we are, live from BarCamp, predictably I’m late, but just in time for lunch!
Tag Archives: WordPress
I'll be there too
See you tomorrow at BarCamp Ireland! There’s going to be a big crowd and great speakers. Tom will be there and he has volunteered to speak twice. I won’t be talking, but come up to me and ask me about WordPress MU and wordpress.com, I’ll be the one wearing the WordPress tshirt!
I see that the wiki has been updated with the following message:
All attendees, whether you have signed up already or not, please send your contact email address to barcampireland at gmail dot com. Thanks.
It’s a public wiki and I haven’t seen the same message on the BarCamp Ireland Blog so maybe hold off sending that email until there’s a similar announcement tomorrow. Me paranoid? Never!
While I’m here, blogging at 23:30, this will be of interest to the rest of Automattic and anyone else who works at home – Myths About Working From Home. You never really leave the job do you? (via)
Simple UTW Performance Boost
The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress is a great plugin. It does the job of handling tags rather well. I’ve noticed many hits from Google searches that go to a tag page instead of a category page of the same name so there’s something there that Google likes. I love it! Christine Davis did a super job filling a niche with the “ultimate” tool that anyone could want.
Unfortunately what isn’t so good is what goes on behind the scenes:
- UTW ignores your default category when saving your posts. Why ignore the default category when that is probably the subject you care most about? On my photoblog, In Photos.org my default category is “photos” and I certainly want people to find my images.
- UTW does an expensive SQL JOIN when it can’t find any tags for a post. Remember what I said about the default category? If you primarily post to your default category then every time someone sends you a request your server will get bogged down trying to find a non-existant record. It’s really bad when you have several years of posts and thousands of records in there.
- If you’re not going to use the fancy AJAX tag search then don’t load the associated Javascript. It saves an extra request on the first page load, and the browser doesn’t have to process the file.
Here is a patch that addresses those issues. It needs to be edited before you use it because you have to add a default tag. Here’s how to install it:
- Decide on a useful default tag. For this blog I use “holy-shmoly”. Open your WordPress database with phpmyadmin and look in wp_post2tag (the name may be different depending on your prefix). If you have already used the tag then find it and note down the tag_id of that tag. Otherwise, add your tag and note the new tag_id.
- Edit utw-patch.diff and look for the strings DEFAULT_TAG_NAME and DEFAULT_TAG_ID and replace with the name and id you picked out in the last step.
- To apply the patch, copy it into your wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ directory and run the following command.
patch -p0 < utw-patch.diff
- If you don’t have access to patch, then open utw-patch.diff in your favourite editor and make as much sense of it as you can. It’s not hard once you have the source files open as well.
I’ve noticed a significant drop in server spikes since I made those changes. It takes a while for the default tag to be populated as it’s done when posts are visited but once it’s finished you should see a marked improvement. Oh, and install WP-Cache 2.0 as well. That’ll help you ride out the occasional digg!
Download the patch: utw-patch.diff for UTW 3.14159 for WordPress 2.0
By request, here are the modified files. Rename .txt to .php and copy them into your plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ directory, overwrite the originals:
Spaceblog is in orbit
Peter announced that the Soyuz spacecraft carrying Anousheh has achieved orbit! Hopefully we’ll see her post to the blog from space soon. It’s amazing to read all the comments on the announcement, from all over the world! Wow!
Dinner in Cork, October 17th
Pat Phelan is organising a dinner on the night of October 17th for anyone interested. Shel Israel and Rick Segal will be there so it should be an interesting and lively night. Venue is the Taste of Thairland, Bridge St. Cork at 8pm.
Shel Israel visited Cork last June to attend the Web 2.0 conference and it’s great to see him back so soon!
Google Sitemap WP Plugin Tip
If you use the Google sitemap plugin for WordPress it’s probably a good idea to disable the auto rebuild option. This is especially true if you have a large blog and a small server!
Go to Options->Sitemap and uncheck “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog”.
You can regenerate the sitemap by calling a URL with a secret key. It’s listed on the configuration page. Copy it into your bookmarks or make a cron job to call that URL at a time when your server isn’t busy. Posting to this blog would timeout quite often if the server was loaded in any way. If it wasn’t loaded before, it almost always was after! It took some time for me to figure out that it was the Sitemap generator.
The sitemap generator plugin is a great program, it does what it says on the box, but disable to the auto-update feature if you’re having problems posting!
BarCamp Ireland – September 30th in Cork
I found out from Damien that BarCamp Ireland now has it’s own blog. Their press release gives a quick overview, but if you want to know who’s going and talking you should take a look at the BarCamp wiki where you can signup to attend. There are twelve speakers so far with topics ranging from running a start-up, Web 2.0, OPML, Ruby and more.
Should be fun and interesting, and it’ll be great to meet up with some of the folk I met at the Web 2.0 Conference again. See you there!
Paper Blogs
| -ChanServ- | [#wordpress] Welcome to the WordPress IRC Channel |
| wpbot | donncha is someone who blogs on the Internet |
| ketsugi | o rly! |
| ketsugi | as opposed to blogging on paper? |
| donncha | yup |
| Kamigoroshi | i tried blogging on paper once.. |
| Kamigoroshi | but no one commented.. |
| donncha | Kamigoroshi: lol. the good ol’ days? |
| ketsugi | teehee |
| * | ketsugi leaves a trackback on Kamigoroshi’s paper log |
| donncha | actually, so did I, and I expect that blog will survive for a lot longer than my virtual one |
Who will take care of your weblog after you’re gone?
What’s my name?
Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.
How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.
For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).
Happy Birthday WordPress.com!
One year on and still going strong! Lorelle was the first to notice but shortly afterwards Matt posted a nice message saying that yes we had forgotten to celebrate the birthday but it was great that one of our own bloggers had remembered. Nice list of trivia too!
Reading through that list, it’s true that Matt and I hadn’t met when I started working for him. In fact it was several months later in December before we met.