Colin Charles Agenda

I wanted to have an RSS feed be returned, for a specific tag or search item in Wordpress. Hopping on to IRC, and speaking with Dossy, we realised that there was no plugin to do this. However, after a short amount of poking around (circa under 2 minutes?), the way was clear:

?feed=rss2&s=STRING

Now I can have a specific lca08 feed. Or one for the eeepc. And the list can go on…

FWIW, feed= can be rss, atom; basically anything Wordpress supports.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, rss, search

On November 17 2007, I went to the inaugural WordCamp Melbourne. It was a truly interesting event - crowded, filled to the brim, and held at the pretty amazing Watermark Bar, in Docklands. It was a really warm day, and the only complaint would be that Watermark put is in a glass dome, with only 2 fans and no air-conditioning - nice, greenhouse we were in! Food and drink were good, as were the talks in general. I took some notes, and am placing them online now (late, but better than never). Note that the event was sold out - so kudos to James Farmer for organising it.

Making money with Wordpress - Darren Rowse

- exclusive content, for a paid area (like forums?)
- textlinkads/paid links/paid reviews - nasties from Google, so this can be an issue
- RSS advertising?
- direct ad sales, and getting rid of the google adwords…
- donations? jason kotke survived for a year on donations
- book deals? other writing gigs? consulting? many other ‘unofficial’ ways
- give away a lot for free (principles, what you want to talk about in your niche), then consult, with individuals
- align yourself with a niche - the more people think about your branding, the more people think about you when its time to look for an expert
  - establish trust, expertise, authority
  - showcase what you do; do case studies, showcase what you can do, for free, and others will pay
  - give away the principles
  - sell someone not yourself (be careful of adsense, because someone else might be making money out of you)
  - make yourself accessible (write comments, participate)
- best places to place an ad: top left hand corner, or at the bottom of a post
- I find it interesting, that my quick analysis of Darren’s site, without AdBlock Plus, shows that he only feeds B5Media ads, and doesn’t actually use adsense. He however, does recommend you to earn money via adsense… so he writes about adsense, and so on, and encourages people to sign up via his link. Crafty.

bbPress - Sam Bauers at Automattic, who hacks on it

- install wordpress
- install bbpress in a subdirectory (/forum)
- cookie is shaed of wordpress/bbpress, so login in wordpress, and you’re logged into bbpress
- disable registration on the blog, and allow registration of users on the forum only
- plugin that attempts to make a post in wordpress, and starts a new bbpress forum post (bbsync). can be improved…
- beware htaccess rewrite rules… Wordpress takes “Everything”, so might redirect to the blog even when you want to go to the forums… Consider placing bbpress .htaccess before the wordpress stuff
- in config.php for wordpress, watch the trailing slashes. http://bytebot.net/blog is BETTER than http://bytebot.net/blog/ (no trailing slashes == good)
- bbPress Integration installed on bbPress, and let bbPress handle the registration (and it will assign a default role in Wordpress)
- uses mysqli now, but they want to switch to ext/mysql, because wordpress uses it too
- Check out the AppleSwitcher forums and website… Forums run bbPress, and is skinned really well

WordPress caching - Forum hosted by Alex Shiels (Automattic)

- Fix wordpress object cache, to work for large multiuser sites
- wordpress.com - dozen+ memcached servers
- custom version of wordpress object cache to talk to memcached
- Caching is counterproductive?
  - can’t just cache everything, because some blogs only get hit irregularly
  - have multiple levels of stuff, because there’s overhead in the caches
- SuperCache is used on wordpress.com, and this is released. Used only on specific content
  - builds flat HTML files
- wp-cache is down within the data structures. GZIP compression, and caches whole pages
- Barry found php5 is about 15% slower than php4
  - IO is not a bottleneck, its more CPU

Wordpress Sandbox - Alister Cameron

- XHTML and CSS
- http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/
- Customise it with CSS alone, you don’t mess with anything else in the sandbox. Its all fully valid XHTML
- sandbox has hAtom and hCard microformats, woven into the page
- He uses YUI’s toolkit + sandbox (makes use YUI grids)
- Pay a visit to the CSS Zen Garden
- Asides: look at photomatt.net - anything in red with a | bar, is an aside. Also check out http://www.alistercameron.com/ his asides are in green
- http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides

Wordpress.com - Alex Shiels
I took these notes on my mobile phone… before whipping out my laptop. They’re even more terse!

• Wordpress.com
• 600gb mysql tables
• 1.5tb worth of file uploads
• currently, over 1000 cpu cores…
• Mysql master-slave replication
• special version of wpdb, known as hyperdb
• use pound
• heavily cache - edge caching with akamai (limited), full page caching for some pages, memcached for the wordpress object cache. Memcached handles 50000 pages/second
• take a look at barry’s wordcamp 2007 video, about hyperdb
• the memcache stuff isn’t released yet

All in all, I also need to take a closer look at nginx. It is apparently much nicer than lighttpd, in terms of it not using as much memory. However when I asked for some solid proof/evidence, I wasn’t given it, so I guess I’ll have to do my own research. Will be on my todo list for the holiday season (which has already started for me!).

Technorati Tags: wcm07, wordcamp, wordcamp melbourne, wordpress

Having been to the inaugural WordCamp in San Francisco last year, and having a ball of a time, I’m so happy to note that there is now WordCamp Melbourne. Its on November 17, from noon-7pm at Watermark Bar, in Docklands.

Its not free, but a paltry $25, to cover venue leasing and some snacks/beer. Hope there’s WiFi at Watermark. And mad props to James Farmer for organising all this.

Technorati Tags: wordcamp, wordpress, wordcamp melbourne, watermark bar

I updated Wordpress yesterday, so am currently trying out 2.3, Dexter. No major dramas, all, really thanks to the Automatic Upgrade plugin, which I’ve been using recently (second Wordpress version it’s upgraded).

One annoying bug, was seeing: WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]. If only I’d read the release notes before hand, I’d have realised the Google Sitemap plugin was to blame (there’s also a relevant forum post). Disabled that (for now) and all is well. There’s some slick in-built tagging, so I’m using the web interface to write this (something I haven’t done in a very long time).

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going from 1.2 to 2.1 should be no problem at all. Speaking of releases, a new WordPress is just around the corner.

I just love updating WordPress. He mentioned that there’s a plugin that downloads the new package, unpacks it, installs it, and does it all on the fly, but it scares him, due to the recent break-in. Well, it seems fair, and I too wouldn’t want such a plugin, but a more automated way of doing things, would rock, though. For what it’s worth, WordPress 2.2 will allow you to disable all plugins at one button click, so that should be useful (and yes, this means I can script it easier). And now, they run an md5 like every minute on WordPress to make sure the release doesn’t change!

I’ve also been advised to use SVN for deploying WordPress. I’ll definitely look into it soon, as I want to get everything into revision control eventually.

I also got to speak with Bryan Alsdorf, Eventum developer, and got a nice run down of the history of the software. More love needs to be given to this tool, as its great, is basically the infrastructure that runs MySQL Support, and others will definitely find this useful too (if in the support business). I learnt some new things, the fact that there is also a command line interface to it, makes me like this software even more. Again, part of the fun of working in a distributed environment - this is the first time I’ve spoken at length to, with Bryan.

Got so many more people and DotOrg folk to visit tomorrow. Well, enough writing now, its time to go visit the DotOrg reception to grab some drinks and food.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, eventum, mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, dotorg

I especially enjoyed reading Steve Yegge’s blog rant, titled The Pinocchio Problem. If you haven’t read it, you should, as he believes that world class software systems have two things in common: an extension language and a plug-in system.

Updating Wordpress a couple of days ago (this is now becoming a regular chore, spanning over 14 steps, not all of which can be automated (deactivating plugins, reactivating them in the correct fashion to not watch them bomb), I was thinking about the Wordpress plugin architecture. Its very nifty, allowing one to make Wordpress just rock totally harder. Some that I can’t live without are:

• The AdSense Manager - after implementing the Sidebar Widgets plugin, this is now a necessity, otherwise I won’t get AdSense on the sidebars
• Akismet - I hate spam, and I’m sure, you do too
• del.icio.us widget - its always nice sharing what I read with all of you, thanks to the Sidebar Widgets
• Feedburner Feed Replacement - redirects my default rss feed, to feedburner
• Flickr Widget - with the Sidebar Widgets, there’s no way I’m displaying the usual flickr widget, without maintaining an out-of-tree sidebar.php, which I don’t want to be hacking on regularly
• Sidebar Widgets - very cool stuff, that you see on Wordpress.com, finally for all of our consumption
• WordPress Database Backup - because sometimes, dumping the database bores me

The plugin system probably makes Wordpress one of the best pieces of blogging software out there. In fact, Wordpress has made Matt, the most popular Matt in Google! The sheer energy of all the folk using and developing on Wordpress is amazing, as I witnessed at the inagural WordCamp 2006.

It amazes me, that companies regularly, commercially offer WordPress hosting. They come up with these “1-click installs” and upgrades, that I’m wondering what I’m doing wrong with upgrading Wordpress regularly. Sure, most of the 14 steps I stated earlier, include silly things like cd’ing to the correct directory, moving it and so on - all of which are script-able. But the plugin deactivation, and correct activation (like, you don’t want to start the Flickr Widget without the Sidebar Widgets, which would seem the alphabetical thing to do, but clearly make the plugin system whinge), as well as running the upgrade itself, happens via a Web browser. Manual intervention to me, sucks.

Now, on to release engineering. We users get a lot of Wordpress releases. A PHP blogging system, looks like it can be a lot of work, if you’re going to manage multiple blogs. Or websites - I’m starting to see a lot of websites that are just blog based, with pages that link to “permanent” content. Companies are doing this, regularly now. I’m of the camp, that its a big mistake, as good ‘ole HTML is probably better for a website (fine if you need sidebars, a standard top toolbar, etc… - use Apache SSI, or a little amount of PHP templating). The announcement list, is one that everyone running Wordpress should be on (ditto, with MediaWiki, but I’ll save that rant for another day - though most of what I mention about the plugin architecture, also plagues MediaWiki).

A good plugin system, will have a mechanism to provide updates. Firefox has this - at the very least, when you upgrade Firefox, it looks for newer plugins. When you upgrade Wordpress, you could still be running age old plugins. And when you manually check to see if these plugin versions match, sometimes the websites themselves aren’t too direct without you using your mouse and hovering over a link.

I find some plugins critical - Akismet, so my comment spam level stays down, to a manageable state. I’ve been bitten by an update before, that I didn’t know about. Easy fix? The moment you feel you’re getting too much spam, visit the website to look for an update. Too manual for me. Just recently, the AdSense Manager - over a span of a couple of weeks, there have been two releases. One of which, is significant enough to warrant an update - the Google AdSense ID was not being passed to Google. Suddenly my traffic stats at Google, for the blog, seemed to drop to zero.

What’s missing with Wordpress, is a plugin updater. With release engineering such that one can run a SVN checkout version of the Sidebar Widgets, and have to visit a website to get the latest code from HEAD for the Flickr Widget, it would rock, if an updater regularly spidered the SVN repository and informed you if there was a new release, or something sitting in HEAD (okay, trunk, whatever).

Technorati Tags: wordpress, rant, plug-in, plugin, adsense, google, google adsense, adsense manager, flickr widget, sidebar widgets, wordpress hosting, web hosting, update, plugin updater, spam

I find it interesting that Wordpress with the Akismet plugin (yes, I upgraded my blog to run the latest Wordpress a while back) is still allowing spam thru. To make it even funnier, my wordpress.com account has also received spam that Akismet didn’t catch. Maybe its not working as planned then.

It seems that the Akismet API is fairly open, which is interesting. Requests for integration with MediaWiki, can be fairly interesting. MediaWiki’s own methods of spam protection don’t seem to go very far, as edits still tend to need patrolling (I subscribe to the RSS feed of changes which seems to make a lot of sense).

Now to decide to go back to patrolling blog comments or just turning the feature off. How do other Wordpress users deal with spam?