Lee.org

No really. Apparently I logged my one millionth visitor on the blog (according to Wordpress Stats) just last month or so.

Joyness

I’m addicted. I know. Here are the plugins currently in use on my site, running Wordpress 2.7.1:

1. Akismet (v. 2.2.3) by Matt Mullenweg.
2. Brian’s Latest Comments (v. 1.5.10) by Brian Meidell.
3. Brians Latest Comments widget (v. 1.0) by Carsten Albrecht.
4. DB Cache (v. 0.6) by Dmitry Svarytsevych.
5. DoFollow (v. 4.0) by Kimmo Suominen.
6. Exec-PHP (v. 4.9) by Sören Weber.
7. FLV Embed (v. 1.2.1) by Yaosan Yeo.
8. Google XML Sitemaps (v. 3.1.2) by Arne Brachhold.
9. Hyper Cache (v. 2.2.3) by Satollo.
10. No Adverts for Friends (v. 0.1a) by Donncha O Caoimh.
11. Plugins list (v. 1.0) by Davide Benini.
12. Recent Posts (v. 1.1.3) by Nick Momrik.
13. Related Posts (v. 2.02) by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
14. Search Everything (v. 5) by Dan Cameron.
15. Search Excerpt (v. 1.2 $Rev$) by Scott Yang.
16. Site Statistics (v. 1.7) by Fauzi Mohd Darus.
17. Smart Archives (v. 2.0) by Justin Blanton.
18. Subscribe To Comments (v. 2.1.2) by Mark Jaquith.
19. Twitter Tools (v. 1.6) by Alex King.
20. Wordbook (v. 0.14.5) by Robert Tsai.
21. WordPress.com Stats (v. 1.3.7) by Andy Skelton.
22. WP-PageNavi (v. 2.40) by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
23. WP FancyZoom (v. 1.1) by Stephen Granade.

Phwew, there sure are a lot of social networking sites. I just installed Wordbook. Hopefully my friends on facebook will catch what’s up in my world with this plugin

WP-Super Cache has been giving me trouble. The trouble is, it keeps caching stuff but it doesn’t actually serve the cached files. I figured it out mostly because the hidden footer at the end of each page kept updating even when it should have been drawing from the existing cache file. And then there was the consistanly mediocre performance.

I had a previous version of WP-Super Cache that worked but after 5 revisions from the developer, I decided to upgrade. My mistake ;-( 

So I’m trying hyper-cache. So far, so good.

I also installed DB-Cache via a suggestion from dbzero.com

I had this terribly annoying Google Adwords problem with my old Wordpress Theme. When displaying a Google Ad in Internet Explorer 7 (not, Chrome, not Firefix, just IE), the font color of the majority of text would change to white. If I resized the screen so that the lower ad couldn’t be seen, the font color would change back to black correctly. But… gah!

I stared at the source code for a while and couldn’t figure out what the frig… so I borrowed another theme and adapted it to Leeness. It’s called Fluid Blue by srinig. I’ve still got a tiny bit of cleanup to fully adopt the theme but it’ll be done shortly. 

Enjoy.

I should say “Installing Wordpress 2.7.1″. It’s all going smoothly but I’ve got so many plugins to nudge.

My Tweeting friends might have noticed that I installed Twitter Tools. It allows my blog posts to be cross-posted to Twitter. And my tweets get cross-posted onto my blog weekly. I think that satisfies my desire to keep everything centrally located on the blog while still allowing for the quick silliness of Twitter.

I switched from WP Lightbox JS to WP FancyZoom. I’m pretty sure its the right decision. I really like the idea of having the lightbox plugin resize the image according to the size of the user’s screen. That way, I can post things in full resolution and not worry that when the user clicks on a thumbnail, the image will expand so much that they have no idea what they are looking at (like one of those Games Magazine Eyeball Bender). I’m trying to future-proof the blog. It would be a shame in a few years if someone looked back on this site and was disappointed that the only copy of an image I had was a reduced-resolution image.

Upon installing it, I notice that when you open images that have text in them, the text isn’t nessesarily legible; it depends on how large your browser window is (example). Hmmm.. hmmm.

I very much like that FancyZoom pre-loads the full-size image when the user mouses-over the image. It makes load-times pleasantly quicker without any fuss for the user :-)

I’ll leave FancyZoom up for a while and see how I feel about it.

In FancyZoom.js, I changed the defaults to make image display speedy like so:

var zoomSteps = 2; // Number of zoom animation frames

I hope the author isn’t too disappointed in my choices here. Setting it like so almost completely eliminates the “super sexy” zoom effect that he is proud of (read the docs, he’s really happy with it!). But it does what I want it to do and I am thankful! That single intermediary image that flashes in the window for just a few milliseconds hints at what’s going on very well without taking up too much time.

(image via)

After an annoying time (and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) trying to voice my concerns with the image uploading interface in Wordpress, I’ve installed a test version of WP 2.7.

Pros:

1. The Add New Post page is customizable so I can put items that I find useful near the top.

Cons:

1. The add image functionality is a bit worse. No improvements and now when you choose to show an image as a “thumbnail”, it isn’t created as a clickable thumbnail, just a small image.
2. There are always minor incompatibilities to fuss over

That’s a score of 1 to 2. The Cons win :-(

I installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin. It is specifically compatible with the WP Super Cache plugin which has worked very well.

With this plugin, if you have posted a comment on my blog, it’ll remember you and you won’t have to see the banner ads that I put at the bottom of every post.

I just downloaded and installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin (1 file). Then put this in my comments.php:

<?php if (function_exists('is_regular_user')) { ?>
<?php if( is_regular_user() == false ) {  ?>
<center>
My Google ad here
</center>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>

Well, that was straightforward. I installed Gravatars in the blog comments.

So now if you want to put your mug shot next to any of your comments on any blog in the world that supports Gravatars, just sign up with Gravatar.com and give them your image.

Here’s how I installed Gravatars.

I added 1 line to my comments.php following this already existing line:

<cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 50 ); ?>

And I added this to my style.css

.avatar { 
float: right;
}

Done.

Apparently I’ve been stumbled-upon.
They sure like them funnies.

Super-Cache is working fine. Though I’ve gotten a few core dumps today. Figuring out what’s causing that will be a bother….

update 3pm: cores still dumping :-(. Just hit 30,000 views of “Motivational Posters” today. It’s funny how the rest of the site isn’t being visited at all; short attention span theater, eh?

update 9-23-08 10am: I upped the Super Cache settings to Garbage Collection every 5,000 requests, set a few pages to be Directly Cached files (Motivational Posters, The Amazing Power of Makeup, homepage). And there hasn’t been a core since last night. 41,000 hits to Motivational Posters so far today, 2,500 to The Amazing Power of Makeup.

update 9-24-08 2pm: I normally use about 1 gigabyte of web traffic per day. This Stumble-upon has brought that to 150 gigabytes/day and 150 thousand page requests/day for the last 2 days. Dreamhost allows me 7 terabytes/month so I should be fine for bandwidth. My Apache Analog stats says that I’ve had only a couple hundred failed file serves out of the approximately 6 million file requests in the last couple days, which is shows Dreamhost is handling the traffic fine.

Since upping the Super Cache Settings, I’ve gotten just 1 core dump at 23:59 last night. I’m guessing that garbage collection and bad luck conspire to cause a core dump every now and then.

To make search results on my blog prettier and more useful, I have installed 2 plugins and added a search.php to my theme. The two plugins are Search Excerpt and Search Reloaded.

All this was at the (very good) suggestion of this post.

Dave, the author of the terrific-fantastic-makes-blog-comments-possible-I’ve-donated-to Spam Karma has decided to call it quits on the project. He’s opened it up as GPL. I certainly hope that someone picks up the slack. Here is Spam Karma GPL edition.

Slightly prettier.

Google Gears helps mitigate the slowness of all the freaking modal windows they keep putting in. Note I say “helps”. Modal windows are bad for performance. This isn’t a heavyweight application, it’s just moving text around. It should be lightning fast. It used to be. :-(

There are changes to how images are uploaded but still no performance improvements. In version 2.3, it took 1 click and 1 drag to insert an image exactly how you want it, in 2.5 and 2.6, you’ve got to jump through several hoops. See here and here. And there is no word on whether Flexible Upload will be getting an update. If I were the author, I would be tired of making updates.

Annoyances:

When writing a post, the title of the post is automatically set the few seconds after you leave the Title window. That makes it a bother to change the title.

Fucking modal windows while uploading images. In version 2.3 you could upload images while writing the post, then drag the image into place. Now it’s a multi-window, multi-step process. This really pisses me off

You must scroll down to the Categories section at the end of every post. Why isn’t it on the right side of the screen where all of this new useless crap is sitting? (I just noticed that the Press This thingamajig uses the old Categories-on-the-side layout)

Feh.

Followup! Arg! The jerks broke WYSIWYG image layout.

Another Followup: In order to be Wordpress 2.6 compatible, I found that my CSS stylesheet has to support alignleft, alignright, and centered. Aparently “align=right” isn’t good enough any more. So I added some image code that I borrowed from the White as Milk 1.8 theme.

Yet Another Followup: Lester Chan is correct in saying that Post Revisions in Wordpress have very little utility and clutter up the database. This very post already has 16 revisions. In other words, the post you are looking at is taking up more space in the database than my previous 3 weeks of blogging combined. That is not right. (one major reason for all the revisions is that in order to view a preview of a post, you have to Save it first).

I have disabled post revisions with Lester Chan’s instructions.

To turn off this feature, add this following code to wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

To change the timing (in seconds) WordPress auto saves a post, add this following code to wp-config.php:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60);

You can also delete all post revisions by running this query in phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'revision';

Be sure to backup your database first before performing any queries in phpMyAdmin.

I changed the autosave to 180 seconds so it wasn’t so irritating and got rid of post revisions. Thanks Lester!

I just set up the video sitemap feature of the terrific Wordpress plugin FLV Embed. With it, you and search engines can now find all the videos on my site by going to http://lee.org/blog/videofeed.xml.

Enjoy

PS, I’m a frog.

Credit where credit is due.
Here are all the Plugins I’m running as of 6-6-08 on this Wordpress 2.5.1 install.

1. Admin Drop Down Menu (v. 2.1 ) by Ozh.
2. Brian’s Latest Comments (v. 1.5.10 ) by Brian Meidell.
3. DoFollow (v. 4.0 ) by Kimmo Suominen.
4. Exec-PHP (v. 4.7 ) by Sören Weber.
5. Flexible upload (v. 1.13 ) by Antoine Choppin.
6. FLV Embed (v. 1.1 ) by Yaosan Yeo.
7. Google XML Sitemaps (v. 3.1 ) by Arne Brachhold.
8. Permalink Redirect (v. 0.8.4 ) by Scott Yang.
9. Plugins list (v. 0.2 ) by Davide Benini.
10. Recent Posts (v. 1.05 ) by Nick Momrik.
11. Related Posts (v. 2.02 ) by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
12. RSS Footer (v. 0.7.5 ) by Joost de Valk.
13. Search Everything (v. 4.5 ) by Dan Cameron.
14. Smart Archives (v. 1.9.2 ) by Justin Blanton.
15. Spam Karma 2 (v. 2.3 rc3 ) by dr Dave.
16. Subscribe To Comments (v. 2.1.2 ) by Mark Jaquith.
17. WordPress.com Stats (v. 1.2.1 ) by Andy Skelton.
18. WordPress Database Backup (v. 2.1.5 ) by Austin Matzko.
19. WP-PageNavi (v. 2.30 ) by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
20. WP lightbox JS (v. 0.8 ) by Safirul Alredha.
21. WP Super Cache (v. 0.6.4 ) by Donncha O Caoimh.

When I switched my permalinks from http://lee.org/blog/archives/… to http://lee.org/blog/… I had several links in my blog with the old “archives” links. Thankfully, the Permalink Redirect plugin redirects hits to those pages with “303″ errors. But I still needed to change the 30 or so posts with those old links. Search and Replace Wordpress Plugin to the rescue. Of course I backed up my database first but it worked peachy keen, changing links en-mass. Here’s the search-replace strings I used. Doing it this way kept some direct links I had to the “archives” folder intact.

href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2008 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2008
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2007 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2007
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2006 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2006
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2005 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2005

etc…

The YSlow Firefox Addon suggested a few performance boosts for the blog.

This seems to cut 1-2 seconds off loading time. Nice :-)

added <?php flush(); ?>
just after </head>

I put this in my .htaccess file (at the root of lee.org). This helps a lot when revisiting my site :-))
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-Shockwave-Flash "access plus 1 month"

It was a bother…. almost an hour of upgrading, disabling and re-enabling plugins.

And I really don’t grok the Add Media buttons. I only let myself upgrade now because the guy who makes Flexible Upload was kind enough to port his plugin to WP 2.5. It still bugs me that the new upload windows are modal. So now I’ve got to sit around and wait for them to finish until I can continue writing. It used to be that I could add images while I was typing. In addition, since it’s modal, I don’t have a chance to place the images exactly where I want them with my cursor as an insertion point. Instead, I just plunk all the images down into the post and then I can rearrange them.