Split Your MT Export File. I wrote a quick little web service to intelligently split large export files from Typepad and Movable Type into more manageable chunks.
Category Archives: WordPress
Economical Grids?
My friend Jason is blogging about Joyents grids and linked to one of their new whitepapers. The cost structures in the whitepaper were interesting to me, to give the executive summary for $2425 a month they got in aggregate 12 GB of RAM, 130GB of storage, and 750GB of public transfer. Some of the storage was block, and some was “distributed NFS mounted.” In systems terms, this came down to 800/mo for Big-IP load balancing, 1000/mo for 8 web servers, and 500/mo for 2 DBs.
Since a lot of startups ask me for hardware advice, I was curious this setup would compare to one of the better dedicated providers, LayeredTech. As disclosure, Automattic currently has 8 servers with Joyent that we got when WP.com first started (and they were called Textdrive) and we have 50+ with Layered Tech. Both are active, we serve blog traffic from Dallas (LT) and the main site/tags traffic from San Diego (Joyent).
However this raises an interesting question: If we had $2425/mo to burn and were just starting out, which would be a better choice?
We have the Joyent costs laid out there in a typographically-correct whitepaper, so I decided to dig into LayeredTech’s slightly-1999 website to see what would be comprable. First I started with the web nodes, their best deal currently seem to be the AMD 275 dual core with 2GB RAM, 250gb HD for 175/mo. Let’s get 10 of those. Let’s get two more but with dual 73gb SCSI mirrored drives for the DBs, at 190/mo. We need a file server, something CPU light, I went for this one and put two mirrored 500gb drives in it for 159/mo. Finally we need some load balancers. Two million hits a day is only 23 requests a second, which my laptop couuld probably do, but let’s get two 3800s at 109/mo each and we can put Pound + Wackamole on them for high availability. Those can easily balance probably about 30-40mbps of traffic each.
500,000
Biggest Community Wins
Biggest Community Wins. “I picked, in other words, community over open source. And honestly, I have very few regrets about that decision, despite our pending migration.”
PC World Blog Tips
PC World – New Tools Help Take Your Blog to the Next Level. “Top-flight bloggers are increasingly moving to WordPress, Automattic Productions’ no-cost, open-source blogging software. Unlike the basic blogging tools found in Blogger, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, and Yahoo 360, WordPress offers tons of plug-ins and widgets for customizing your blog.”
In Seville, Spain
I’m going to be in Spain this week for Evento Blog España. It will be my first time in Spain or Seville, so if you have any tips please leave them in the comments. I’ll be bringing a huge stack of WP stickers, and if there are any WordPress users in the area I’d love to get together, just drop me an email.
MySQL Camp Google Notes
After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.
Le Monde
The French newspaper Le Monde has moved all their blogs from Typepad to WordPress, if only I could read French.
BloggingPro Interview
Over the weekend I did an email interview with BloggingPro. Dropped a few hints about the future, so if you’re curious what’s in store for WordPress and Automattic check it out.
WordPress Firefox Extension
I think a WordPress Firefox extension (add-on) would be pretty cool, I have a ton of ideas for it but I’m curious what you guys would like to see in it. What would make blogging easier for you? Any talented FF extenders who would like to take on the project and get paid?
Alexa Moving
I wonder what’s going to happen to the wordpress.com Alexa, now that we have domain mapping and most of the highest-traffic blogs will move to their own domains.
MU Goes Gold
Just announced the 1.0 release of WordPress MU, and also put a plug for bbPress in there. Releasing feels so incredibly good, it’s almost indescribable. We should do it more often. 🙂
NY WordPress Meetup
Anonymous Blogging
Anonymous Blogging with WordPress.com and Tor, by Ethan Zuckerman. Hat tip: Lorelle.
bbPress Goes Gold
The big news today is bbPress 0.72 “Bix” has been released, the first officially released version of the blazingly fast forum software 2 years in the making. It includes some of the things WordPress has become well-known for, like spam protection, easy extensibility, and WP-like customization.
Cranky Geeks
I was on the Cranky Geeks show yesterday with John Dvorak. So far there are two polar comments on my appearance: “Didn’t quite like the WordPress guy. He seemed disingenuous and what he said was redundant.” “I think that the WordPress guy was great.” I hope that means something is right. We now return to our regularly redundant programming programming.
Good Morning Vienna
I’m in Vienna through Thursday for the Blogtalk Reloaded conference. If you’re a WordPress user please come up and introduce yourself, I have stickers. 🙂
Crazyegging
I was crazyegging for a few days, here are the results: WordPress.org home page, WordPress.org support, WordPress.com forums, and for fun, the Photo Matt homepage.
New WP JP book
Looks like there is a new Japanese WordPress book out, cool! I hope it says good things. 🙂 BTW, you can buy the WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart guide in most Apple stores. I must admit it was surreal to run into WordPress in an Apple store.
Business Week Best
People have been telling me that Business Week named WordPress the top of the best blogging tools of 2006, which is pretty sweet. I haven’t picked up the magazine yet, but this link is the closest thing I can find to the list on their site.