Site Problems

Over the last few days, it’s possible that you might have tried to visit this site and gotten a blank page. It’s not you, it’s me. Or more precisely, it’s my server, and my attempts to eek a little more performance out of it.

The problem seems to come from APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I’m not absolutely sure why it decides to crap out on me like that, but I suspect that the real root of the problem might be some old supporting libraries on this server that need to be updated. I might try fiddling with the APC configuration again later, but in the mean-time, I’ve disabled it again. Over the past week, I’ve probably only gotten a little more than half of the hits that I might of had otherwise, so I’ll probably wait for another quiet period before I try enabling it again.

WordPress 2.1 Released

Hot off the presses is the latest feature release of our favorite blogware: WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. You can find a bore-you-to-tears detailed list of bugfixes and feature changes in the Milestone report over on Trac. But here’s my version of the short list of changes:

  • Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code editing: You can now easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWIG (AKA: RTE, or “Rich Text Editor”) and the old-style editor with quicktags.
  • Autosave: When editing posts, your changes are automatically saved every two minutes, as long as you’ve set a title.
  • Spellcheck: The RTE now includes a spelling checker. I just tried it out, and it works pretty nicely! Click on a flagged word to see possible corrections.
  • Blogroll categories have been completely redone in a way that integrates them with regular post categories.
  • “Home” page: You can now use a WordPress Page (sometimes called “static pages”, though that’s a misnomer) as your front page, instead of the usual list of latest blog posts. This makes it easier to treat WordPress as a Content Management System and less like a system specifically for blogging, for sites where it makes more sense to arrange things like that.
  • Import/Export: There is now a native WordPress Import/Export tool included. This will make it easy to migrate a site from one server to another, or even set up environments where you could have “test”, “staging”, and “production” servers. In fact, I think that’s a ripe idea for a new plugin…
  • Comment Management Improvements: Mucho improvement to comment management. Comments are now a top-level menu item, rather than a sub-menu of “Manage”. Paging is improved, you can now easily flag comments as moderated or as spam. And make sure you also take advantage of the new Akismet 2.0 plugin, which has some great improvements of its own.
  • Database Optimizations: An expert from MySQL helped optimize the database queries, which should help improve page building speed and reduce server load.
  • And much, much, more… There are lots of little user interface improvements, optimizations, better error handling, extended features, and under-the-hood goodies for plugin and theme creators.

I’ve upgraded two of my blogs, plus Susan’s blog from WordPress 2.0.7 to version 2.1, and both upgrades went off without a hitch. I haven’t upgraded this site yet, because I’ve still got some old, ugly hacks that I’d like to update into proper plugins. I had also hoped to launch a redesign when I upgraded, but I haven’t made as much progress on that as I wanted to, so I’ll probably do the redesign after-the-fact.

Atom Publishing Protocol Clients?

Does anyone have a suggestion for a blog client that implements the Atom Publishing Protocol API? I’d prefer a client that runs under Linux, but I could also deal with a Windows-based client using Wine. I’d particularly like to find something that actually attempts to deal with media resources (images, sound files, etc). I’ve got a couple of Firefox extensions (Atomic and Yulup), but they both seem to have shortcomings that prevent me from using them for in-depth testing.

“Testing what”, you ask? Hopefully, you’ll find out pretty soon…

Hopping on the OpenID Bandwagon

I’ve added OpenID authentication here, thanks to the excellent WordPress OpenID Plugin from VerseLogic. If you already have an OpenID identity, you can now use it when commenting here, and your name will be flagged with an icon to signify that your identity was confirmed. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up with any of several OpenID providers. I use MyOpenId.com for mine.

If you want to read more about what OpenID is about, try starting with Simon Willison’s excellent post, How to turn your blog into an OpenID. For the flip side, learn what OpenID is not: An OpenID is not an account!

WordPress 2.0.7 Released

WordPress 2.0.7 has been released (yes, I know I missed announcing 2.0.6, but I was on vacation). The major focus of this release was a new security patch under certain versions of PHP with register_globals turned on, plus a fix in Conditional GET support under certain combinations of IIS/PHP-CGI versions (AKA the “Feedburner bug”). There are a few other minor bugfixes in there, as well.

As always, all users are encouraged to upgrade. You can download the new version in the usual place.

We interrupt this silence for a brief message…

I’m a working stiff with three kids and an hour-each-way commute. I think that’s all the explanation needed for the long break, right? 🙂

It’s not like I didn’t have anything to write about. Since my last post, Jamie had a birthday, Mary did some really cool stuff with squids for a science project (and I can’t believe I forgot to take pictures!), Claire started walking, I had to give our dog an emergency midnight bath, and Susan started finals in her grad classes. Plus I’ve had plenty of stuff going on at work that might have been worthy of writing about (and some of it was even good! 😉 ).

It just comes down to being busy, and having higher priorities. But fortunately, it hasn’t been the bad kind of busy, for the most part. Just the average, run-of-the-mill kind of busy that fills your life without leaving much time to write about it.

Suffice it to say that I’m still here. I do intend to write some more posts soon. I’m hoping to do some more fun stuff with WordPress (I started to look at a minor optimization for the post-custom fields, but haven’t had time to finish it up). I’m still tinkering with a theme change for this site, which I hope to get ready in time for an upgrade to WordPress 2.1. I’ve got a ton of photos that I need to upload to Flickr. There’s…stuff.

But first, I have to work on organization. Something that I’ve been studying a lot lately. But that’s a topic for another post….

Blogging is like that

Cover art for Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

You know how sometimes a song comes along and gets stuck in your head? But in a good way. Not in that “Oh my God, if I don’t get this song out of my head I’ll go freaking insane” way. More in that “I could listen to this song on repeat all day long and not get tired of it” way. I need to find all those songs in my collection and burn a CD of them.

Anyhow, ‘Soul Meets Body’ by Death Cab for Cutie is one of those songs for me right now. I particularly like this bit, which reminds me of blogging, or of writing in general:

In my head there’s a Greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
Where they’re far more suited than here

Yeah. Blogging is like that.

WordPress 2.0.5 Released

Earlier this evening, while my family and I were enjoying dinner at a local Japanese steakhouse, WordPress 2.0.5 “Ronan” was officially released to the world. This latest release consists mainly of minor bugfixes, minor feature enhancements, and a couple of database speedups. There is also a minor security fix.

There is a known bug related to sites running under FastCGI, but a workaround is available in the form of a plugin.

Upgrading is painless, so hop to it!