Whoa, Newscorp

Asides

Ross Levinsohn of Fox Interactive just announced he has bought someone here in the room. No one knows who it is, and it just got kinda tense. He’s announced the haven’t done an acquisition in 4-5 months, and he could buy at least 5 others in the room. 2 billion to burn. Under the Radar has been very interesting. “Myspace is got on average 275,000 signups a day last week.”

WordPress and Lyceum

WordPress MU

I just read that Boing Boing has blogged about a new WordPress-based system called Lycueum. The iBiblio project first contacted me it seems about two years ago, so I applaud them for finally getting a release out. From my examination of the code, it seems it’s exactly what WordPress MU is except they’ve modified every SQL statement (what a pain!) to use a monolithic table structure. We tested this approach for MU, but found it was too expensive to scale past a certain point. With monolithic structures you hit a wall based on your hardware. In MU users are divided and can be partitioned easily, for example on WordPress.com we have the users partitioned between 4096 databases, which allows you to scale very cheaply and efficiently to hundreds of thousands and even millions of users and extremely high levels of traffic. It’s unfortunate the Lyceum folks came to different conclusions and decided to focus their efforts on a fork rather than on the core codebase, especially as the massive changes going into WP 2.1 are going to be difficult to merge, but I still wish them the best and I’ll be watching the project closely and picking up anything interesting they do and bringing it back to WP. (Such is the beauty of Open Source. :)) If nothing else, it highlights that the MU site needs a little TLC.

Spamback

Asides,

About 98% of Trackbacks are spam. Obviously that can’t be addressed with a new spec without breaking backward compatibility. (For added humor, see the front page of the Trackback Development Blog.) The charter of the new trackback abandons the only thing that made Trackback interesting, and incidentally one of the things it was created for, content aggregation and category aggregation and other applications that don’t require a link at all. (Essentially a push application of what everyone uses tags for now, it was way ahead of its time.) In the meantime, they’re re-inventing Pingback with XML-RPC replaced by Atom/REST.

Free Sun Server

Asides

I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.

Better Trackback?

Asides, , ,

There is talk of pushing for Trackback to become a standard. A few of the problems with Trackback are immediately apparent: horrible internationization support, bad auto-discovery, proclivity for spamming, no verification, historical baggae of category junk, bad spec. Fix all these and you get… pingback. Pingback is big enough now to make a blip in Google’s markup survey, and is supported by a wide range of platforms. The question is whether people are going to want to support an existing and robust standard or want to put their name on something new, the global “not invented here” syndrome where everyone wants their 15 standards of fame. (As someone who has been involved in several standards myself, I admit the draw is strong.) What Pingback does need is a better advocacy site, like atom has.

Hack WP for NY Times

Asides

I was at the New York Times last week and one of the things that blew me away were how many WordPress blogs they’re running. I had seen 2-3, but it turns out they have almost 25 running on both sides of the paywall and they’re going to be doing even more with WordPress as time goes on. (There are also some interesting things going on with Times Select.) There’s more good news: they’re hiring. Khoi Vinh writes “A thorough knowledge of weblog publishing software, especially WordPress, is required.” Sounds like a great gig for whoever gets it. Bringing things full circle, Khoi’s site is one of my favorites and an inspriation for the new WordPress.org.

Imposter

Asides

There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.