This past year has been the best one of my life. I’m so happy that I get to spend every single day with you and Rowdy. I can’t think of a better person to wake up to in the morning or go to sleep with at night. You are my heart. You are the subatomic particles that make up my entire universe. You are my density. You are my everything and I adore you.
Here’s to the next year and the rest of our lives. Happy anniversary, my little churro.
Even though W3 Total Cache seems to have become the more popular and robust option for WordPress caching, I’ve stuck by and continue to recommend WP Super Cache.
Why? In a word: simplicity.
Now I could write a big long entry on why simplicity trumps a crapton of options and flexibility, but I’d rather have a look at the options screen for each plugin.
We’ll start with WP Super Cache:
This is all you see when you visit the settings page post install. If you really wanted to, you could just turn caching on and call it a day. Of course, you could (and should) go poking around under the hood a bit – so let’s look at the Advanced tab:
So that’s a bit more extensive — and in some places, downright nerdy — but all of the crucial options stay above the fold. Furthermore, the blue button after the first set of check boxes and radio buttons does a pretty good job of saying “this is where all the really important stuff ends”.
Now let’s compare that to the options that W3 Total Cache presents to users post install:
While that’s pretty straightforward, it’s also a lot for someone who’s new to the plugin to take in. Not only that, it doesn’t really make it all that clear what the user should try if they’re getting started.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a me thing at all. As much as I could be a hater, I’m talking from experience here.
You see, I deal with a pretty significant number of WordPress users over the course of my work week. And there’s always a handful that are running W3 Total Cache that have enabled some combination of Varnish, CDN & CloudFlare. The only problem is, they don’t actually have access to any of the those services.
In most cases, they were told they needed to install a caching plugin, pronto. It’s not their fault if they’re taking a shotgun approach to using it. It’s the plugin author’s fault for not making things clearer.
So until W3 Total Cache gives end users a better out of the box experience, I’m going to keep running and recommending WP Super Cache. If you’re tired of being buried under an avalanche of options that you never use, I suggest you check it out.
Update: Frederick Townes responded on Twitter and claimed that W3 Total Cache was incomplete and sporting the “advanced” UI. Hopefully they’ll be able to roll out something a little more end user friendly soon.
Now that the most recent versions of Safari & Firefox support proper hyphenation via CSS3, I kind of want to implement it on my sites. But thanks to Microsoft Word, I also have some really strong feelings against auto-hyphenation.
It only appears to be on sale for the next 6 hours tho. And even after the AUD to USD conversion, it’s still pretty close to $40. So if you want it and don’t mind shelling out a little money, act fast.
Me: You’re a Latina. You have a culture. I’m a WASP. Nerd culture is all I’ve got. Her: You’re grasping at straws. Me: I might be, but those straws are +2 to my constitution.
While I never intended for it to be anything more than something a few friends would laugh at, all of this attention is compelling me to add a couple new features. Hopefully I’ll find a little time in the next week to do both a “work safe” filter and a “submit a word” form, but I’m not going to go and make any grand promises.
At the end of the day, I’m just happy that people are finding something that I made funny (and/or useful) and I don’t want to squander that. So if anyone has suggestions for features, let me know!
Update: I’ve gone ahead and made the whole site work safe by cutting the instances of “fuck” and “shit” out of the database. Now you can use the output for whatever work related designs you’d like.
Update: I put a “submit a word” form up yesterday, but we ran into the submission limit for the free account on Wufoo. I’ve since replaced it with a form I slapped together in Google Docs. I really hope I can get some time to go thru the suggestions soon and hand pick/add some of the better ones to the site. Thanks again for all the love, everyone!
Since I’m downright stubborn about switching to Chrome, I was really happy to see that someone had tried to emulate its location bar with Safari Omnibar. It’s got a little way to go still, but it’s got enough promise for me to keep it installed.
Now all I have to do is break my habit of hitting CMD + L followed by a quick Tab to get me to the search field and I’ll be golden.
For the folks who don’t have the time or the technical knowledge to change over to the Post Thumbnail support built into WordPress, WordThumb (a secure fork & rewrite of TimThumb) should make tightening up your sites a bit easier. [via]
So Google’s Page Speed Service looks pretty great – but if you get into the beta and upload a lot of media to your WordPress site, you’re going to run into a few snags. The cap for their caching proxy is currently set at 2MB. And while that’s fine for most folks, it’s not really going to fly for photobloggers and the like.
Fortunately, there’s a workaround…
All you need to do is create a subdomain (like admin.domain.com) and point it at your current WordPress install’s directory. If you don’t know how to do this, your web host’s support should be able to help you out.
Now you’ll notice that when you visit that new URL, you’ll get redirected to your main domain. WordPress needs to know to not do that, so just add this code to your “wp-config.php” file:
It doesn’t really matter where you drop it, but I like to put this sort of stuff after the MySQL information. Then just save out the file, kill your browser cache and try to visit your subdomain now.
So long as things don’t keep trying to redirect you, log into your WordPress Dashboard (admin.domain.com/wp-admin/) and you should be able to post and upload files without any issues.
With all of the hubbub around TimThumb, it’s probably a good time to point people to this handy guide on replacing it with functionality that’s already baked into WordPress.
If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you probably don’t know that I launched a new project last week. So take a minute and go check out Hipster Ipsum. You know, if you want to.
I’ll admit that it’s kind of stupid — and making fun of hipsters is way played out by now — but this is one of those ideas that has been kicking around in my head for a while. And rather than just letting it flop around in my brainpan until someone else made it, I decided to carve out a little of my free time and actually ship it.
I’m pretty happy with the results too. Here’s some of the text it’s generating:
Jean shorts aliqua magna mollit. Whatever est leggings put a bird on it aesthetic sint tempor butcher. Keytar gluten-free fuck sustainable. Portland aesthetic chambray, Readymade nulla 8-bit bahn mi Austin keffiyeh Four Loko letterpress. Veniam skateboard deserunt vinyl nisi fugiat. Lo-fi accusamus sapiente, pariatur tofu aesthetic do leggings deserunt organic quis consequat.
I’m sure that there’s plenty of hipster cliches that I’ve missed. So if you check out the site and see any that I might be missing, don’t hesitate to let me know!
Approve it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=approve&c=0
Trash it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=trash&c=0
Spam it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=spam&c=0
Currently 0 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel: http://example.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=moderated
Now I didn’t go and redact any information there — the emails are totally void of any comment data outside of the moderation links. That’s not right at all.
So why does this happen? The answer is actually really simple. Almost embarrassingly so.
To put it as plainly as possible, when comment moderation emails start showing up as blank, the wp_comments table has gone missing. If you look at some of your more popular posts or your comments panel, you’ll notice that everything is missing.
It’s almost like your mom doesn’t even read your blog.
Sometimes the table has completely disappeared, sometimes it’s just in need of a repair — but either way, you need to restore it to working order to make your comments happy again. And since hosts vary, I’m not going into the grizzly details of running that restore. I’m sure there’s plenty of nerds on the internet who’d be happy to help tho.
Addendum: I’d like to hope that you’re backing up your install and database regularly. And if you’re not, maybe your hosting company is. Any worthwhile host will. But you should never ever depend on a single point of failure. I like to keep around 3 to 5, but I’m sort of paranoid.
Remember, there’s never such a thing as too many backups!
After a year of running this domain under nginx with XCache, I’ve decided to roll things back over to Apache for the time being.
While nginx has been great when it came to system resources, I’ve never been able to get it to play nicely with Super Cache. I mean, things were caching just fine — but expired stuff hung around forever. And while I like my tweets, photos and Pinboard links from a few days ago, I’d rather show my visitors fresh content.
Besides, I’ve seriously been itching to use mod_pagespeed and PHP 5.3 on my personal site. And since neither of those things are available under the DreamHost install of nginx, my hand was forced.
But not all hope is lost! Being the huge nerd that I am, I’ll probably switch back to nginx once PHP-FPM support gets added into the DreamHost PHP 5.3 install.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRa2HUEN4po
I seriously love the version of “Generator ^ First Floor” that the PS22 Chorus did here. It’s pretty damn epic.
Then again, it doesn’t hurt that the Freelance Whales are hanging out and backing them up. Great, great, great song.
There’s no denying that the hectic rush building up to our beautiful wedding was a bit maddening for the both of us. And I can still be a pretty hard person to get along with sometimes. But looking back on everything that’s happened, I’m happy we got to go thru every last bit of it side by side.
I mean, we finally moved in together and got married. Short of having kids and buying a house, we did some of the most adult things a couple can possibly do. And now that we’re right on the cusp of 2011, I can’t wait to see what the new year brings.
Sweetheart, I love you so much. And I can’t believe that someone so beautiful would even give a schlub like me a second glance. Every day I wake up and I’m happy that I get to have an adventure thru the rest of my life with you. You’re like Short Round to my Indiana Jones*.
Except, you know, you and I get to have sex… ;)
Anyhow, here’s to making our own path. And to making this next year better than every previous one that came before it.
Sarah Cosper, you are my heart.
Love,
Jason
* Let’s be honest, I’m probably the one who’s Short Round in this relationship…