Pushing a cool ten million. The new database system is working out great.
Blog Appeal
“I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.” I can attest to the first part. Shelley is doing WordPress/blog consulting to raise money for a new camera. If you’re in the market for that sort of thing, may want to drop her a note.
Link Thanks
I just wanted to take a moment to thank those people who give proper attribution (aka a hat tip) when they post about something they found here. More and more lately I’m seeing things that I know started here show up from blogs of people I know and respect with nary a note or link back. Taking the time to properly attribute things can be a drag sometimes, but I think it’s important to maintain the credibility of weblogging as a medium and to reward those who bring new things to light. If you are someone who does properly credit things please know that I appreciate it quite a bit, and I hold you in a higher esteem than more “professional” blogs who are sloppy at best with their attribution.
WordPress.org Search
I’ve ripped out the guts and redone the search on the WordPress.org support forums in the hopes of making it something more people will use. Try it out! The new system searches the wiki (hosted on a different machine), thread titles, recent posts, and does a FULLTEXT post search for the most relevant posts. It has contextual search highlighting (like Google).
When I have some time to get back to this every section will have a “more of this” link to take you to more results (paged). It does this currently with the wiki search, counting the total results and linking to the wiki search directly if there are more than 5 results. Probably still a few bugs to work out. The fulltext query was taking over two seconds to run until I tweaked the JOIN type to get the MySQL optimizer to use the proper index and join order. Everything should validate as XHTML.
A new system is also in place to inject custom results at the top of the page. We’ve been logging searches for the last few months (over a 129,000 so far, about 43,000 unique searches) and I’m going to be working closely with the documentation team to identify which searches are most common and what tailored information would be best to present the user with when they search for targetted terms, be it a blog post, an external resource, someplace on WordPress.org itself, a wiki page, or a specific thread. We can watch trends and spikes in searches to identify any problems in the application itself or features that may be insufficently documented or hard to use.
The work is far from finished, but I think it’s a strong first step into fully integrating search as a support mechanism and bringing the WordPress team even closer to the pulse of the users.
Keyword Idea
Idea of the day: create ad-hoc keyword caches using referrers from search engines for use with internal searches.
Google Doesn’t Read XHTML
Google doesn’t index application/xhtml+xml pages, geez what a mess. I prefer the rigidity of XHTML syntax but I don’t want the mess that comes along with it. Hat tip: Petroglyphs. Update: See comments.
Gallery: 8-18-2004
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Leap seconds
Dealing with leap seconds, I remember the days when 60 * 60 * 24 was good enough for anyone.
WordPress and Smarty
Donncha looks at Smarty and WP, again. It’s been done before, it’d be interesting to have a method that could automatically stay current with the native PHP methods.
New User Pages
New user pages on the WP forums, shorter but with more useful information. (And better code to boot.) Not sure if recent topics and posts by the person is the best way to provide a personal forum aggregator, but I’m open to suggestions.
Good About Page
Keith on A Good About Page. I’ve been giving some thought to this recently, Keith vocalizes a lot of what I’ve been thinking.
Loud Thinking
I came across Loud Thinking because I mistyped the domain I was trying to get to. What a lucky mistake.
Email Bounces
Had a few emails bounce this morning. If one was you just resend it and I should get it okay.
A New Mezzoblue
Dave redesigned Mezzoblue again, I dig.
Forum Idea
What if a forum had a URI structure like a blog instead of a forum?
Blogtimes Usage
People using Blogtimes, mostly the MT version. Blogtimes for WordPress uses the same filename.
Voting Machines
Voting machine glitch during demo, Murphy’s law applies to elections as well. It sounds like Sequoia is trying to do the right thing. I can’t think of a single good reason not to have a hard paper copy of every vote. “Election officials say that putting printers on voting machines would create problems for poll workers if the printers break down or run out of paper, and the paper records will cause long poll lines with voters taking more time to check the record.” Oh no! People would be checking their votes! We don’t want that. I will personally donate to the paper fund if they’re really that worried they’re going to run out.
Tie a Tie
How to Tie a Tie, no reason.
Prodigal Switcher
Kevin switched back to WordPress after flirting with Textpattern.
Bushlies.com
Without discussing the actual politics of the site (please) Bushlies.com is the first use of WordPress to promote a bestselling book I’ve seen. Judging by the comment counts it gets some good traffic.