libertus

“Smiley” Peformance Monitor plugin for WordPress

As there have been reports of dramatic slow-downs after upgrading to WordPress 2.0.4, and my blog is still running 2.0.3, naturally I wish to investigate these reports prior to upgrading. I could wait for the WordPress developers to do this, but I’m impatient. WordPress 2.0.4 contains a critical security fix that I wish to apply, among others. I don’t want to sacrifice performance for a tiny amount of extra safety.

I previously investigated the memory use of WordPress 2.0.2. I shall build upon that work to introduce execution timestamps and database queries into the performance graph. I shall then directly compare the performance of 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 on the same dataset - my blog, of course!

(more…)

Or, in this particular case, a futile attempt at outright deception.

Menu and plugin tweaks indeed! If I believed that, I might never have noticed the ever-so-vital change to line 364 of admin-functions.php.

Yes, indeed. Praise where praise is due. Microsoft has made available for download a Truetype scalable font designed for programmers. It is monospaced, clear, readable and anti-aliases well. I’ve been using it for a while now on both Windows and Linux.

The kicker for programmers is that the punctuation glyphs are oversized, so avoiding the common problem of having to squint at the screen to tell the difference between a comma and a full-stop,

Behold, and download, Consolas. A picture tells a thousand words.

(more…)

Today I launched a plugin for WordPress 2 to provide fine-grained and broad-brush access control over your posts, using the existing password-protection system, custom post meta-data and options.

The availability of Access Control plugin for WordPress was first made public by way of this post on the wp-hackers mailing list.

Automatically Backup All Wordpress Databases On A Server by Niklas Lindblad.

Wow! Another thought inspired by The Cathedral and The Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond. This time, lessons 3 and 2. If you are not a geek, this post contains Outreach links especially for you.
(more…)

A thought inspired by this message on the wp-hackers mailing list by Mike Purvis, and The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, a few chapters of which I read recently for the first time. Lesson 9 sprang to mind. Then this did. An old defeat.

(more…)

I’m a sensitive soul with computers. Whilst I appreciate the incredible power and capacity that modern computers provide, I cannot help but remember those hazy days during my youth when I learned how to program. My first computer was modest by today’s standards - a Sinclair ZX81 with 8Kb of ROM (including a built-in BASIC interpreter) and 1Kb of RAM. That was enough for some but I didn’t really get started until I had 16Kb of RAM. That was enough for me and my skills at the time. I proceeded to write computer games.

WordPress is a personal publishing system designed to work on modern servers. Servers are enormous. The server that hosts this blog has 125,000 times more RAM than my first computer. My blog may use only 8MB, a limit enforced by the programming language that the blog uses; PHP.

So how does WordPress fill this tiny pocket of the big machine? Today I’m looking at the memory footprint of WordPress 2.0.2. How efficiently does WordPress use its most precious resource?

(more…)

Paying attention to printed page appearance.

A new plugin is running here which offers in-line post editing. It will offer a lot more soon. See also: blogramthing, blog-ram-thing, The Blog RAM Thing? posted 14^th March 2006.

(more…)