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Handling WordPress configuration when you're pointing to symlinked files. This flummoxed me for a bit. Solved!
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Eric Heisserer shares some notes on the adaptation of Story of Your Life into Arrival. Some good notes on adaptation (and: a clarification of why it was such a successful one) in here.
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This all looks really sane: proper, package-managed WordPress deployment. Except: it relies a lot on slightly unofficial packages, which makes me nervous. Hmn. Filed away for reference.
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"The template used for a custom post view is decided by the ‘get_single_template()’ function in the wp-includes/theme.php file. And it basically tells locate_template() to look for single-’post_type’.php or single.php. So the simplest way to customise the way a custom post is displayed is to add a template file to your theme with the name single-xxxxxx.php" Oh. That makes life simpler.
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Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.
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"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).
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Quick tutorial in add_meta_box – the way to add custom fields to WordPress forms.
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More clever stuff with dedicated post types in WP3; notably, adding custom fields to custom post-type forms.
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Oh boy. Espgaluda on the iPhone; authentic bullet-hell for your fingertips. I have a feeling I might end up with this.
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"Why would we want to play around with custom fields, or add stupid meta boxes in the Edit Posts page and then teach our clients and/or content managers to use them? Why not just get rid of all those stuff and have them seperately in your main menu, and the meta boxes are customized to match the exact needs of certain post types." Which is exactly how I use WordPress in commercial installations, and every time I hack around this, I long for proper Top Level Things. This is a great feature, and it's going to make my life considerably easier. Let's hope they don't screw up the 3.0 release.
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"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.
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"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.
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"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.
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Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.
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Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.
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David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.
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Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.
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Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.
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"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".
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Jolly good – easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!
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"Are all these industries in such terminal decline that they’re grasping around for any revenue stream or way out? Or is this the converged future, where business and culture are one and the same? Not only can’t I tell whether things are real or marketing vehicles any more, I can’t even determine what’s being marketed." Chris has a point.
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Which is the sensible way to do things, and this feels about right.
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The title says it all. Proper good, especially the sheer volume of A Lot Of Guys With Drums, and the way the brass replace some of the keyboard and bass parts.
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"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.
Your guide to surviving the Digg avalanche with WordPress
26 November 2008
My recent talk about what might happen if gamers ran the world made Digg yesterday, and went a bit big. Big to the point that I got a nice email from my host pointing out that my PHP processes were killing the entire shared host that I’m hosted on, and that I needed to rectify this immediately.
The fires were mainly calmed by installing WP-Super-Cache, which did pretty much what it says on the tin. That said, I did learn a few things from the incident. In no particular order:
- WordPress’ PHP processes for rendering a page are really, really intensive. Most of the time, that’s not a problem, but when you’re being bombarded with hits, it’ll take it’s told. Flat HTML might be the way forward.
- Super-Cache isn’t exactly difficult to install, but it requires permissions in lots of places. The best advice I can give is to walk through the installation instructions carefully, and when it doesn’t work, go over the troubleshooting guide in
readme.txtone step at a time. The few issues I had were resolved by walking through the troubleshooting process. - Most importantly, a combination of the two parts above: you should assume that at some point, you’re going to need this kind of caching, and you’re going to need it fast. Installing and configuring WordPress plugins on a server being bombarded with hits really isn’t much fun. Instead, install the caching plugin of your choice when you set your server up, and make sure it’s working at that time. Then, when the horde descends upon your lowly shared host, you can head straight there and click “enable caching”, rather than having to fight fires for an hour when you really should be working, or in the pub. This also means you can configure the thing to not cache your feed, which is a useful thing to be able to do; I’m about to head off and do that now.
Everything appears to have cooled off now, and I’m not getting any more emails from Joyent about my usage. To Joyent’s credit, they were helpful at explaining the problem and tolerant of the time it took for me to fix things, which was appreciated. And next time I get an absurd amount of traffic, with any luck, I’ll be ready for it.
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WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine∞ written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.
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"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme." Looks great.
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Now that's what I call a UI. Nice idea!
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"Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there's a game that just is a database!" This looks awesome.
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"A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection – and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more." I love Stephen Fry.