A nice post on Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0.
Eric Links
Eric does a linklog. In for a penny, in for a dollar. The one thing that bugs me about this type of link blog with the commentary in the title attribute is that Mozilla and family cuts off the title tooltip when you hover over the link. To see the entire message I either have to view source or right click and chose “Properties”, which also has a set length and I usually have to select the text and move my mouse to get it to “scroll.” Is there a better solution?
Stuff
My things are finally here. Thankfully the movers were pretty good, I’d heard some horror stories from people that had me anxious. The Comcast guy gets here tomorrow, and then I should be able to really settle in at home. Things I missed most: bed/pillows/blankets, camera battery charger, shoes, and vanilla candles.
Web Storage Sites
Web storage sites loom as next big thing says CNET… in 1999.
Comcast Cable
I finally got internet hooked up at my house today. I ended up going with Comcast mostly because MJ sweet talked me into it. I just ran the speed test from DSL Reports on it and it came back 3469 down and 230 up. That’s over three megabits downstream, crazy! I could get used to this. Now I can finally get start getting things done from home again. (I had internet before but it was a patchy wifi connection that wasn’t reliable.)
WSJ On WordPress
It’s a new year and new people are using WordPress. On the heels of About.com and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal has launched a new law blog powered by WordPress. Hat tip: Blog Herald.
20 Billion Spams Blocked
Akismet just passed 20 Billion Served.
WordPress Pumpkin
Eric Martin carved a WordPress pumpkin. Happy Halloween everybody. 🙂
GoDaddy facts
Niall finds some holes in a GoDaddy press release about blogging. I have a ton of domains with them, but their blog actually scares me a little.
Facebook Fan
If you’re a Facebook user and a reader of this blog you can now add me to your Facebook. The “pages” feature of Facebook is neat because before I was conflicted because I wanted to add everyone I met at various conferences or WordPress users as a “friend” but then news feeds and such basically become unusable. I’m going to try to use it like a mailing list sending out some travel and life updates, like if I’m going to be in a particular country. Sign up here. 🙂
In Seville, Spain
I’m going to be in Spain this week for Evento Blog España. It will be my first time in Spain or Seville, so if you have any tips please leave them in the comments. I’ll be bringing a huge stack of WP stickers, and if there are any WordPress users in the area I’d love to get together, just drop me an email.
Iceland Film
PHP Advent Article
Sorry for being quiet around here, I’ve been doing a ton of writing for other places. One went live today, Untitled as part of PHP Advent 2009. Since there are no comments on the site, I’ll accept them here.
Joseph Mosby experiments with my trick of listening to a song on repeat to get work done, and digs a bit into the psychology behind it.
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah everybody.
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.
WordPress Cakes
Two cakes to share today: the first is a shared birthday cake we had at our Automattic offsite in Breckenridge and the second was put together by David Link just for the joy of WP (and cake). Yum!
Extraordinary Machine
“I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” The latest from the unreleased Fiona Apple CD. Hat tip: Jess.
Sometimes You Just Can’t Win
The last name “Mullenweg” has elicited various schoolyard permutations over the years, but by far the most enduring has been “Mulletwig,” presumably because mullets are so entertaining. Therefore it is with great trepidation that I point to Mulletwigs.com, “Business in the front, party in the back!” 🙂
It’s worth outlining how I came across this: Email → Politech posting → “It’s the Economics, stupid” post on spam whitelist → scroll down to Hairy Situation → Original Mullet Wig.