WordPress For iPhone
July 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The WordPress iPhone application has been released. It seems to work well. It supports the following features:
- basic blogging
- tagging
- categories
- password protecting posts
- adding images from phone or camera
- local drafts
A couple of significant restrictions:
- no rich text editing
- can’t add an image to a post adding an image to a post automatically puts it at the end
- no landscape mode
Tags: blog, blogging, iphone, wordpress
MySQL Performance Blogs
March 7, 2007 | 2 Comments
I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with performance tuning in MySQL. Here are a few blogs that I have found highly useful by people who are involved in some of the most serious MySQL based projects on the internet.
Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko: MySQL Performance Blog
Zaitsev used to work as manager of High Performance Group at MySQL. Now he and Tkachenko run a consultant business specializing in high performance MySQL. He is common on the presentation circuit and has made his presentations all available. Tkachenko worked as a performance and scalability engineer under Zaitsev at MySQL. This blog contains great benchmarking and deep understanding of the MySQL infrastructure.
Domas Mituzas: Vaporware, Inc
Mituzas currently works for MySQL and is responsible for much of the scaling and performance tuning for Wikipedia. He also worked to make WordPress much more efficient in the latest versions. His blog has some examples and tips for scaling and performance tuning. Since he has such solid real world experience with Wikipedia, these examples and explanations are truly invaluable to understanding how to work with MySQL in amazingly efficient ways.
Jeremy Zawodny: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog
Zawodny works at Yahoo and is responsible for the amazing MySQL administration tool mytop. When it comes to MySQL, Zawodny is likely the best recognized name. He also wrote the O’Reilly book, High Performance MySQL. He also has some informative presentations available, but they are definitely starting to become dated.
If anyone else knows of great MySQL blogs, specifically that apply to performance tuning, scaling, and optimization, please let me know.
Tags: blog, blogs, Domas Mituzas, jeremy zawodny, mituzas, mysql, mytop, O'Reilly, performance, performance blog, Peter Zaitsev, presentations, scalability, scaling, tuning, Vadim Tkachenko, vaporware, wikipedia, yahoo, zawodny
FeedBurner
May 18, 2006 | 5 Comments
Reading an article about Blog optimization yesterday (I lost the link…), I was pointed at a service called FeedBurner. Basically you install a plugin that takes over managing your RSS feed. So, you’re thinking, “I have an RSS feed, it works, who cares?” Well I thought the same thing and this is what sparked my curiosity.
It turns out FeedBurner rocks!
Before I go to far into why I love this service, first let me say, it is a breeze to install and enable. So, not trying it out is just plain lazy. If you don’t like it, come back and tell me why in the comments, but anyway, it’s easy to install so have at it.
The first of the two main features I like is getting statistics on who’s reading and clicking through to my stuff from feeds. The graphs are pretty and I now have an idea about readership through readers.
The second is the cool stuff they can add to the bottom of articles in feeds. Open up your reader and look at my feed. Along the bottom are some links like “Add a Comment”, “Email This”, “Digg This!”, etc. You can have FeedBurner add all kinds of sweet stuff to your articles, these are called FeedFlares.
My final comment on the service is that the overall style of the interface they use is awesome. Their help text is personable and entertaining while pointing useful things out and giving great help.
Tags: aggregate, blog, blogging, feed, feed burner, feedburner, feedflare, plugin, rss, wordpress
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress
Import Remote RSS in WordPress
March 7, 2006 | 13 Comments
The delivered WordPress import utility for RSS is a little annoying in that it requires you to provide a file. Who actually downloads a copy of an RSS feed to their desktop?
Anyway, when we began alpha testing WordPress MU for deployment at Plymouth State, we realized we needed a version of the importer that would allow a user to simply give a URL of their RSS and have it work.
This is simply a modification of the existing RSS importer, a majority of the code is outwardly taken from that. This will work for both WordPress and WordPress MU.
- Download this PHP file.
- Drop it in your wp-admin/import/ directory.
- Go to the Import link in your admin interface.
- Celebrate!
Please use this plugin at your own risk, no warranties or guarantees are implied with usage!
Tags: blog, blogging, importer, plugin, plugins, rss, rss importer, wordpress, wordpress mu
Rocketboom, A Video Blog Worth Watching
December 15, 2005 | 9 Comments
A while ago Ken got excited about the prospect of vodcasting or vlogging or video blogging. He even tried one of his own (more in parody than earnest).
Yesterday he introduced me to Rocketboom which is an example of this technology. Finally I have a reason to be interested in video blogging. Amanda Congdon deliveres this technology heavy ultra modern vlog daily. Her delivery and expressiveness is quite engaging. She provides what I’d consider a video version of the types of things you may find daily on Digg or Slashdot.
Although, I’m pretty sure not everyone could pull this off. Certainly the fact that Amanda is easy to look at adds to the appeal…
Tags: amanda congdon, blog, blogging, digg, Newsy Goodness, rocketboom, slashdot, technology, video, video blog, vlog, vlogging, vodcast, vodcasting
ecto for Windows Still Blows
December 1, 2005 | 6 Comments
Alex, the lead developer for ecto for Windows, has commented a few times on my ecto for Windows Blows post. I figured they’ve been through a few versions and it was time for me to give them another shot. Alex seems to be putting a lot of care into the product, and as a developer myself, I know how frustrating it can be to get either useful feedback or overly generalized complaints (a la something “blows”). I hadn’t looked at it since August, so why not.
I downloaded it again. Which itself was somewhat difficult. Have you Google searched “ecto windows” lately? The first promising link is misleading as it leads to an old version (1.0.3) which in itself has a link to a broken download. Anyway, I found my way to the homepage and grabbed 1.8.7
On first glance, I’m not satisfied with the spell check, I’d prefer if it checked constantly, sorta Word style. Also, a quick trial on the new keyword feature didn’t actually work, but that is likely because of Wordpress not explicitly supporting it, not necessarily their fault. Another annoyance at this point is that the ping action threw me a non-descript error about “Internal Server Error” no clue why, or how to fix… One last comment, a lot of my posts have relative links to images in the posts. Anyway these could be rewritten to take account of my blogs hostname so they don’t all show broken? On that note, why do none of these previews use my site’s template somehow? Maybe that’s configurable and I just didn’t look deep enough.
Oh crap, I just noticed a final straw to break the camel’s back. My posts in the system that are drafts are showing up in ecto as “Published”. That won’t fly.
I guess I still can’t commit to using ecto for windows (in fact I’m not using it on the mac anymore either) The built in Wordpress interface is simple, and for now that continues to win. Truthfully many of the problems I’m experiencing may be attributed more to Wordpress or the underlying APIs, but either way I still can’t use the product. Nor will I be recommending it on campus as we roll out potentially 30,000 blogs…
Tags: api, apis, blog, blogging, blogs, desktop blogging, ecto, google, movabletype api, review, software review, windows, wordpress