Mark runs some benchmarks on the new Staticize plugin with some interesting results. The benchmark could stand for some improvement, but the results are still pretty impressive.
Staticize 2.5
Version 2.5 of the Staticize Reloaded plugin is now available for download. Installation instructions are included in the archive. What does Staticize Reloaded do? It is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached. It also allows for some parts of a page to be cached and others not to be, so for example your menu could always be dynamically included from a single file while your main blog content was cached. With Staticize Reloaded you don’t have to worry about rebuilding, stale caches, slow posting times, or any of that. It works silently, efficiently, and trasparently to both the end user and the author.
This version adds the ability to have dynamic functions on a page in addition to dynamic includes. It also adds full support for etags and last modified headers, though you must turn it on in the plugin file. My one tip is that when you redesign or tweak your template temporarily deactivate the plugin. Staticize Reloaded is well-suited for sites on older servers or that receive more than twenty thousand visitors per day. WordPress is so fast anyway I find it’s not worth caching on lower-traffic sites.
Update: The zip archive had a slightly older version of the plugin than the final 2.5 release. Please re-download to get the latest and greatest and fastest.
Technorati Redesigns
Technorati redesigns and looks excellent. Is this the first search engine with completely valid HTML and CSS? Feedback: Have the cosmos link/icon in the results by the name instead of the time posted. Fonts seem a tad small for me. Footer is off-center on results pages. Congrats to Tantek and the Technorati team. (Tanteknorati, heh.) As they continue to address performance issues I can start to use the service regularly again.
WordLog
WordLog.com, a blog about WordPress. (A lot like this one. ;)) Don’t know why I haven’t seen this before. Bookmarked.
vivified
Vivified, another WordPress blog with a nice design. However it has what I would characterize as gratuitous IFR usage. When did people become afraid to use images? Flash is for funny animations and interactive design experiments, not headlines.
Net Polls
The Internet Has Spoken. Funniest thing I’ve seen all day. Hat tip: Simon.
New England Press Consortium
The New England Press Consortium, nice use of WordPress.
Change OS X Computer Name
I finally figured how to change the annoying “Matthew-Mullenwegs-Computer” hostname and such: System Preferences › Sharing › Computer Name. This seems easy but since Simon didn’t know it either I thought I’d share.
Plugin Contest Winners
MT 3 plugin winners announced. Congrats to Jay and the other winners! Now all they need is a plugin that corrects non-utf-8 characters. (Validate that page. It’s a very tricky problem in any language.)
Gallery: 7-24-2004
Auto-imported from old gallery:
5 blogs, 2o minutes
Codergurl installs 5 WP blogs in 20 minutes. With SSH this could have been even faster.
Pir(l)ouettes
Pretty Pir(l)ouettes. Ampersands are good for more than just messing up validation.
W3C HTML Validator on Mac OS X
Experiment
I’m going out of town for a few days and I’m not taking any PCs. We’ll see how this goes.
Bret Primack’s Blog
Jazz and the Net: Bret Primack’s Blog. From All About Jazz, one of the best jazz sites on the web. Running WordPress!
iPod Ouch
Plugging the iPod back into my Mac after loading all the music from the PC seems to have deleted all the music I loaded on to it with xPlay. What a pain…
NetNewsWire Subscription Favelet
NetNewsWire Subscription Favelet that uses Mark’s excellent feed finder. Seems like a good hybrid solution. I have been less than impressed with NNW’s autodiscovery performance. In a perfect world I could take my OPML file (which only contains site URIs, not feed URIs) and it would import and autodiscover every feed. Also there seems to be no WordPress setting for weblogs. I’m new to all this, so some of this may be things I’m missing.
Mediafour XPlay
Color me very impressed with XPlay, which allows you to talk to a Mac-formatted iPod on a Windows machine.
Atom Mime
Tim Bray got application/atom+xml into Apache and IIS. Impressive to say the least.
1.3 For Devs
If you’re a developer there’s some neat stuff in the WordPress 1.3 nightly builds, including the ability to store objects and arrays in the settings system and hook into the main menu. Check it out and share your thoughts on the hackers list.