Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Google’s RSS Ads

A blogger applies for Adsense RSS and finds “As I had suspected, during the inital testing phase they are only accepting blogger.com and Movable Type/ TypePad blogs as of this time.” I would love to know from someone at Google (maybe Jason Shellen?) if there was any technical or logistical reason they decided not to support the 140,000+ WordPress users or if it was just a lack of communication, which is entirely possible (and very plausible considering how busy everyone is). I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds and list “WordPress” in the “Other” field. Update: Communication has started. (Thanks, Jason F.!)

Subversioning WordPress Upgrades

Here is the simple script I use to upgrade all the WordPress sites I run on a single server in one fell swoop. Each site is a Subversion checkout of the WordPress trunk so getting the latest changes and merging them with my version is a simple command, however remembering to do each site was a pain. It also helped me figure out exactly how many WordPress installation I’m responsible for upgrading. (Twenty-seven.) Just fill out the array with the site roots of each install (use locate wp-login.php to find them) and run the script on the command like php upgrade-sites.php. I also like to put the time command in front to see how long things take.

High Traffic Sites

Just got this email, “I am the artist manager for Bob Ricci, famous parody artist. Our site www.BobRicci.com (http://community.bobricci.com) caters to more than 350,000 hits a day from fans worldwide. I wanted to let you know that in our years of being online and having to support such a large amount of global traffic WordPress.org is the only software we have found that is able to withstand the amount of traffic and offer us a community/news service in the online marketplace.” Sweet!

North South East West

North South East West is a “view of climate change” and a pretty compelling site to explore. What’s interesting is the entire site is done in WordPress, which seems to be gaining a lot of traction in the non-profit sector. Hat tip: Rob Bevan via email. From the developer: “We used WordPress more as a CMS than a blogging platform, and although there is some chronological content, mostly we’re using static pages, with commenting. 1.5’s theme system really allows developers to fundamentally change what a WordPress site can be, without making changes to WordPress itself… but you knew that already! Thanks for a great platform. We’re going to use it for a whole bunch of other projects from now on.”

WP Cache

I’ve linked it before, and it’s worth doing again: WP Cache makes WordPress perform as well as a completely static-file site, able to handle hundreds of requests per second without breaking a sweat. It also maintains with the conventions that were introduced in Staticize for making selective portions of a page completely dynamic, regardless of caching. Think how much performance would scream if combined with something like lighttpd. We’re going to be looking at rolling in this advanced caching into the core in the future.