“Then, when someone wants to see any of the pages on your blog, those pages are created for them dynamically, on the fly.” Sounds familiar… The new Blogger doesn’t make users wait on rebuilding anymore, nice upgrade! (What happened to all those folks saying static was the only way to scale?) That and their other new features show a real respect and sensitivity to their users, the only thing missing is an exporter. Rebuilding is so 2004.
Category Archives: Tech
Bloglines DOS
Bloglines is DOSing blog providers. Every other major crawler implements some sort of per-resolved-IP throttle, why can’t Bloglines? Even if there were a way to opt-out of their hundreds of simultanous crawlers descending on your service, it seems to me the default behavior should be to not be harmful, and then work with large providers on a case-by-case basis to increase the concurrency of requests. We don’t have this problem with any other aggregator or crawler, hosted or non-hosted. Test: freedbacking
WP.com Performance
It’s nice when people notice these things. There are a few more performance changes planned that may help even more, even while we’re adding more than a thousand blogs every day. Right now we’re in noodle mode, throwing things against the server walls and seeing what sticks. 🙂
Search WP with Firefox Extensions
Plugins to search both the WordPress Codex and WordPress Support forums from your Firefox search bar. Cool!
Foundation to Corporation
Mozilla moves Firefox, other products, under for-profit umbrella, interesting, and ultimately for the better I think.
Google Spell Checker
The source code to Google’s new toolbar for Firefox has some entertaining details and reveals their new spell checker web service, which I think is really nice. Who’ll be the first to rewrite the AJAX spell checker for WordPress to use this web service instead of the PHP pspell extension?
Dave Hyatt Switches
Dave Hyatt, best known for his work on Mozilla and now Safari, has switched from MT to a new blog on WordPress.
XML-RPC Vulnerability
To clarify for all the confused people WordPress is not affected by the recent XML-RPC problem that lots of other apps were. We use different, more secure libraries for XML-RPC. The problem was discovered by the same guy though, I imagine he was auditing our code and found totally unrelated, which we fixed in our recent release. Of course you wouldn’t guess that from the title, “PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits.” Let’s go down the list: PostNuke – content management; WordPress – blogging; Drupal – content/community management; Serendipity – blogging; phpAdsNew – ad serving; phpWiki – wiki (not blogging); phpMyFAQ – FAQ management. If it bleeds it leads, right? 😉
This is Real Broadband
Care of VVD Communications, the cool company with a bad website, I now have a synchronous 10mbps connection in my apartment. The first thing I did was go to a bandwidth testing site, as seen above. I was using Comcast before which was pretty snappy, but this is a whole new way to experience the internet. This is even faster than the connection I get at work.
This will definitely mean I’ll be able to run a lot more things from home, the upload bandwidth is about 10x what I had before, which means it’ll be much faster to upload pictures, serve files, stream music from home, and all the other stuff you should be able to do in a hyperconnected world. (Maybe I’ll even catch up on photos now.) They were also able to light up all the ethernet panels in my place so now doing some of the multimedia things I wanted to do around the house should be much easier. (Wireless was really too slow.) Best of all, the whole thing is only $35 a month and there was no setup.
I’m still going to have Comcast for a few months until my contract runs out, what I’m wondering now is if there’s a way to have the router balance the internet traffic between the two connections. I’m using a WRT54GS which I’ve loaded up with alternative Linux-based firmware before with good success. I wonder if that sort of balancing would be possible?
Mac Gamma Tip
While poking around and calibrating all my monitors the same way today I found the setting for making the Mac OS X gamma similar to that found on PCs, personally I prefer to see things how most of my users are going to see them. It’s under System Preferences, the Displays, Color, and then click Calibrate.
Javascript Compression
So what’s the best way to compress Javascript code? I found a couple of online services that didn’t work and this Perl script which seemed nice but was a little overzealous perhaps because the resulting code errored out.
SQLite Administration
I needed to play around with a SQLite database today (we switched all our bug tracking from Mantis to Trac) and it really strikes me how immature all of the SQLite administration tools are, especially considering the incredible competition like phpMyAdmin. I ran into tons of cryptic errors, scripts not doing anything, not handling magic quotes properly, and a million other problems most PHP programmers fix after a few months learning the language.
Newsgator and FeedDemon
Scoble hinted at the story Om just broke, that Newsgator will be buying FeedDemon. Should be interesting.
Blo.gs Sold
So blo.gs has been sold and there are no details as to who it’s going to (or for how much), which is odd. As a user I feel sort of blinded by oncoming headlights, but hopefully more information will be available shortly. There were 12,207 users when I first got the announcement, the number seems to be going down. I hope the new owner is cool. Update: I heard the new owner is cool.
Tim Draper Rocks
See famous venture capitalist Tim Draper sing along with a song he commisioned from The Eagles, the air guitar at the end is especially good. More on Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Net-Enabled Bootstrapping
How Ross Mayfield has grown Socialtext as a virtual company and the pros and cons of that system. I see interesting similarities between the way the WordPress team works, and I imagine the same would be true for other open source projects as well. I sat next to an awesome MySQL guy on a plane a few weeks ago and he told me that a significant percentage (I believe it was 80%, more accurate figure welcome) of the MySQL company worked from home. Their conference is the only time of the year most of them see each other face-to-face.
Ajaxian Blog
The Ajaxian blog has pretty full coverage of O’Reilly’s and AP’s ultra-exclusive Ajax Summit that happened the past two days. The presentations range from the normal to the really exciting. (WordPress is using Dojo for several upcoming things.) If you’re one of the 15 people I’ve read today complaining about not being invited, I wouldn’t really worry about it. Costs probably kept the event limited and at the end of the day conferences and speaking are 86% political anyway.
Home Storage Solution
Jeremy’s search for a home network storage appliance is very similar to my own, so go give him advice. I’ve also been considering just getting another dedicated server instead, for ~$100 a month I can get a high-bandwidth server with 250+ GB of storage and upgrade it every year. Of course this might not be necessary with home bandwidth going up — I got two offers this month for 10mbps and 25mbps internet connections in my building for under $30 a month, a third of what I just paid to Comcast.
Double Standards
A lot of the same people who rant and rave every time Internet Explorer has another security snafu are being strangely silent about Firefox’s recent flaws. I wonder how many of the web technorati are willing to give Firefox a pass every now and then because of its superior standards support? The Firefox team is also to be commended for their rapid response to the issue on the only site that’s vulnerable by default.