Prototype.js != $(). I’ve been thinking about other JS libraries lately, like Moo, jQuery, and Dojo. (jQuery and Dojo both use WordPress for their blogs.) We need to make a final final decision about what JS framework we’re going to stick to for a year or more before we release WP 2.1.
Crippling Vista DRM
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. I’ve been considering a new laptop once Microsoft finally ships Vista and Sony et al start bundling it, but reading things like this seriously makes me reconsider. (I’m a big fan of the TX series.) I’d love to read a differing viewpoint. Hat tip: Simon.
More on Google Tips
Blake Ross has a good look at the Google Tip issue I blogged about the other day, and an interesting suggestion for a better way to do it. Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose.
Mac Theme Development
Blogger Ads above Search Results
I had read a few stories about Google services being advertised above search results as a “tip” but I hadn’t realized it was this prevalent. In their position if I was trying to get more users I might do the same, but for some reason this surprised me coming from Google. (It wouldn’ from Microsoft. Hat tip: Mark.
WordPress Wii Plugin
WordPress Wii Edition Plugin, so you can browse your blog from the Wii browser. I’ve gotten a Wii and it’s definitely the device of the season, it doesn’t do as much as the PS3 or Xbox, but it’s way more fun.
Firebug
Why Blog Posts Matter
Why blog posts matter — 91% of the people who came to the permalink for yesterday’s post visited WordPress.com to see the new design. Online advertising is usually thrilled to get a 1-2% clickthrough rate. This is why I believe that online advertising as we know it is going to have to change dramatically in the next decade, beacuse the folks who matter are blocking it out, emotionally and technically. The shifting of money is also going to be the biggest threat to people media (blogs, etc).
New WP.com Design
We just made the redesign of WordPress.com live. Watch how when you make your window smaller the tags on the sidebar drop to the bottom.
Quoted
“I am always hard to buy for” — Bill Gates in response to what’s on his Christmas list.
Iconistan
Tony Conrad muses on Iconistan.
On Simplicity
WordPress.com Private Stats Now Public
We’ve decided to open up 99% of our internal aggregate stats at WordPress.com to the world, really everything except our PayPal graphs. There are still some todos, such of the language signup information we track, but all of that will come with time.
MT Export Helper
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.
Ma.gnolia Uses Akismet
Google CAPTCHA
Why does google use CAPTCHA? Hat tip: Joe Clark.
Cranky Geeks 2
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.