Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Blog Archives

WordCamp Atlanta

As I begin writing this, Jane Wells is delivering her keynote at WordCamp Atlanta, speaking about the upcoming changes in WordPress 3.0. On the one hand, WordPress releases are ‘serial’, so an 3.0 release doesn’t necessarily have any bigger changes than when we move from 2.8 to 2.9. It’s just the next step after the 2.9 release. But, that said, there are big changes coming. One of the biggest is going to be the merge … Continue reading

Merry Christmas!

I had hoped to post about some things before things got too hectic, but that didn’t happen. But I wanted to at least wish everybody a Merry Christmas (or which ever holiday variant you prefer), and a Happy New Year!

I’m speaking at WordCamp Atlanta

I’m pleased to announce that I will be speaking at WordCamp Atlanta next month. I will be presenting an updated version of the Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming talk that I gave at WordCamp Birmingham in September. I think I can squeeze some more details in, and hopefully give some more detailed examples. If you saw the original presentation (or just the slideshow), and you think there’s something else I need to cover, please feel … Continue reading

WordPress As a Documentation Platform

Twice now, the jQuery Podcast has mentioned that the jQuery project is going to migrate its online documentation from Mediawiki to WordPress. Which is pretty cool, because, I happen to like WordPress (duh). It’s also interesting, because when a lot of people build documentation websites, it’s pretty normal to choose a wiki. So, why would they want to switch an existing documentation resource from Mediawiki to WordPress? One of the first factors is probably that … Continue reading

Post thumbnails changes

If you visited my site in the last 9 hours and found it displaying nothing but an error message, my apologies. It’s part of the danger of running my site out of the WordPress SVN trunk (i.e., beta code), and taking advantage of new features. My site automatically pulls in the latest code changes from SVN at midnight. And it seems that sometime yesterday, all of the post_image_* functions were renamed to post_thumbnail_*, and I … Continue reading

Suggestion: WordPress Option Namespacing

I happened to be poking around in my database a while ago, particularly in the WordPress ‘options’ table for this blog. There’s an awful lot of cruft hanging around from old plugins that I don’t use anymore. I cleaned a few things out, but something hit me as I was perusing all those options: I can’t always tell which options belong(ed) to which plugins, themes, or to the WordPress core. In many cases, plugin authors … Continue reading

Welcome to the new server

After much flailing about and gnashing of teeth, you should now be seeing this site served up by my new webhost. My original plan to use FastCGI + PHP CGI didn’t pan out (for some reason). But with other improvements to my configuration, I think that the new setup should work pretty well. After it’s had some time to burn in, and I have the chance to twiddle some more knobs, I’ll try to post … Continue reading

Server Reconfig Redux

After a couple of failed attempts at switching to the new server setup, it seems I’m going to have to fall back and punt (at least on a portion of it). With the help of Frederick Townes, I have what should be a really screaming-fast web server setup. But for some reason, it seems that the Apache Worker MPM + FastCGI (mod_fcgid) + PHP CGI combination is not stable. At least, it’s not for me. … Continue reading

New Server

I’ve completed my migration to the new server, as mentioned in my previous post. I’m going to give it a little time for any problems to shake out before I do any heavy testing, but please let me know if you notice anything that doesn’t work correctly. Update, Dec 2: I’m trying again, after some server configuration help from Frederick Townes (W3 Total Cache author). So far, testing with ApacheBench has looked good.

Server Reconfig

This blog will be moving to a new server very soon. If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a thing. But just in case, I figured I’d give a warning, so that if you try to visit and you get an error, or the site won’t come up, you’ll know to just come back again later instead of thinking that my site was an early victim of the 2012 apocalypse or something. I’m doing more … Continue reading