2009-11-29T15:32$ svn del Chinstrap
D Chinstrap
2009-11-29T15:32$ svn ci -m "Day 2: The Trident"
Deleting Chinstrap
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 3.
2009-11-29T15:32$ ls -h

As the midterm assignment in an acting class, on 11/18/2009 I acted in a play called ”fresh off boat (F.O.B.)”, which depicts the hardship and prejudice faced by first generation immigrants in the U.S.

The figure I played was “Steve”, who was trying to demonstrate that he was not a traditional greasy, dirty, and clumsy foreigner.

TechCrunch drops in this fray with an article comparing the comScore numbers of WordPress.com and Twitter.com, which show an accelerating growth for WP.com and flattening for Twitter. I’ll talk about the data itself later, but first wanted to point out a point many overlook when trying to create a battle between the mediums.

New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

Features like WP.me, post by email, Twitter publicize, RSS Cloud, P2, email subscriptions, and more stuff in the cooker is trying to tie these things together more because people who do one are highly likely to do another.

As for the accuracy of underlying comScore data I would say they probably are precise but not accurate, meaning that whatever flaws they have in collection now, for example for WP.com they don’t count the custom domains or RSS readers and for Twitter they don’t count API usage or desktop clients, they’re at least self-consistent in how they do things over time. Some months they show us flat our internal stats showed growth, and vice versa. Ultimately it’s not worth anyone outside of comScore arguing how they collect their data, it’s better just to use it as one reference point alongside Quantcast (my fav), Alexa, Google Trends, Nielsen…

How tweets get imported into a blog is still an open question for me. I’ve seen lots of ways people have attempted it but when a blog becomes an activity stream it becomes a weak version of all the things it aggregates, less than the sum of its parts, because of the loss of context.

2009-11-26T13:16$ cd /head/hair
2009-11-26T13:16$ du -ch . | grep total
 11.34g	total
2009-11-26T13:16$ svnadmin create /Repositories/hairectomy
2009-11-26T13:17$ svn import . file:///Repositories/hairectomy -m "init: the hirsute"
Adding mustache
Adding beard
Adding hair Committed revision 1.
2009-11-26T13:17$ ls -h

Day 1

2009-11-27T13:02$ svn del 'Fu Manchu'
D Fu Manchu
2009-11-27T13:02$ du -ch . | grep total
 10.49g	total
2009-11-27T13:03$ svn ci -m "Day 1: The Chu Manfu"
Deleting Fu Manchu
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 2.
2009-11-27T13:03$ ls -h

Tonight, on WordPress.com, we launched Email Subscriptions.

You can now subscribe to this blog via email and get nicely formatted posts delivered in your inbox whenever I publish something new. Just put in your email address into the sidebar widget on the right, titled “Email Subscription”. If you are logged in to WordPress.com it’s just 1-click, but anyone can subscribe, you don’t need a WordPress.com account to use this.

With various options like RSS readers, Twitter, and Facebook — I’m still impressed by the usefulness of receiving certain updates by email. Maybe out of habit from my NY subway days, but I still read paidContent.org daily summaries via email every morning.

Like paidContent, what’s also cool about this new email subscription feature is that you can elect to receive digests:

When a user subscribes to a blog they will receive an email containing recent blog posts. The subscriber can select how often this email is sent (the delivery frequency – immediate, daily, or weekly), as well as when this email is sent (the delivery window – a specific day and hour).

If you’d like to learn more, check out the announcement post.

An appetizer before the big turkey day event.

An appetizer before the big turkey day event.

This car is so pretty (and rare) that a $1 million price tag seems almost kind of reasonable – in a ‘if I was a billionaire’ kind of way

Dieter Rams

Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

• Explain image URLs in TypePad and why they differ
• How to export my Vox blog?

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.

As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”

In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

From left: Matt Martz (sivel), Jeremy Clarke, Shane Froebel (^BuGs^), Jane Wells, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Beau Lebens, Andy Peatling, John James Jacoby (jjj).
Photo by Chris Cochran.

I’ve been using reMail, a great little email search app for the iPhone, and it’s proven very handy. It has all the features you wished the built-in iPhone mail search would have, and the app is now free for google apps/gmail users.

The reMail app was updated recently with a new UI and some other new features, and I noticed a new screen called “Usage” which I took a screen shot of below (and edited out the bottom portion which shows the most popular email addresses for emails searched):

Notice anything familiar ? Seems like reMail has copied the whole ‘game’ aspect of the popular foursquare service, where app/search usage equates to different levels, much as foursquare does:

I like the direction of showing usage stats in reMail, as it feeds into all of our obsessive thirst for stats.  But in this particular instance, I think reMail could have focused on a more interesting sets of stats instead of putting in work to make it a game — but who knows, maybe this is helping with their usage numbers.

In any event, if imitation is the highest form of a compliment, foursquare should be feeling pretty good

Bandcamp adds support for physical goods.

Thanks to Naoko McCracken the WordPress Beta Tester plugin is now fully translatable and also has a Japanese translation out of the box.

WordPress Beta Tester with Japanese translation enabled

Hopefully this will make it easy for Japanese WordPress users to get involved in the Beta Testing of WordPress 2.9 in the coming weeks. If you would like to submit a translation for your language then you can download the pot file from the WordPress plugins Subversion repository here: wp-beta-tester.pot. If you send me the po and mo files I will add them to the repository and release an updated version of the plugin.

Late night NYC snack

WordPress.com now supports geotagging. Every blog and every post can have their own real world location.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.

Get WordPress 2.8.6.

Today a short piece “10 blogs to make you think” I wrote for CNN.com was published

I started blogging because I love writing. While the nature of Automattic is such that I’m writing all day long to communicate with my colleagues but writing for communication is different from the state of mind you’re in when you sit down to tell a story or change someone’s perspective. (Though perhaps it shouldn’t be.)

I started blogging for writing, I kept blogging for comments. It turns out what I love isn’t the act of writing itself, which has never come easy to me, but the conversation that happens afterward. Collectively in tech we become infatuated with each new medium be it blogs, widgets, social networks, micro-blogs, but in the end it always comes back to people talking to each other and eventually the novelty of the format fades.

As a final note when I write now I go into the WordPress editor because I know the auto-save will make sure my text is always safe, it produces clean and simple HTML, and I lean on After the Deadline. (Which now helps you rock the diaeresis New Yorker-style.)

1. It is the sexiest and most elegant laptop I’ve held or seen. Feels like it’s from the future.
2. It feels almost too light, I actually threw it up and caught it, particularly with the normal-sized battery.
3. I got the champagne color, which was a good choice.
4. The ethernet port works in a really interesting way.
5. Speed of browsing, installing, everything feels pretty good with Windows 7, but it’s obvious the graphics card is pretty underpowered. The moment you turn transparency on or get a flash video on Blip going it starts to stutter a bit.
6. That said, I could imagine using this as my primary machine for short and medium trips.
7. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to in a way I haven’t run into before: the space bar is hard to hit. The keyboard is very compressed in vertical space so your thumb falls below where the space bar is, and you have to retrain your hand to be in a different position which isn’t as comfortable. The shift button can be hard to hit but that’s much easier to get used to, I’ve done it on other small keyboards. I’m not sure why they made it so small, it feels like it could stretch out a bit more.
8. Other big annoyance is the trackpad — it’s really narrow. Windows machines do the trackpad scroll on the right and bottom edges of the pad and I find myself triggering that accidentally because the tracking area is so tiny. Again, lots of apparent space toward the bottom of the laptop just a really narrow tracking area. This is easier to get used to than the keyboard, though, and the trackpad feels nice like most Vaios and unlike the Voodoo Envy.
9. I love that it has two USB ports, and a regular VGA connector instead of some weird micro-display-port you need a dongle for. (An Apple decision that bugs me almost as much as the recessed headphone connector on the original iPhone.)
10. Screen is gorgeous, like all recent Vaios.
11. Did I mention it’s drop-dead gorgeous? It’s the first laptop I’ve had in 5 years that I don’t want to put stickers on.
12. Hardware-wise, way better than the Air.

So while it won’t be replacing my Z890 as primary workhorse for now, the X is so light I might take it on my next few trips and use it as a day-top. I’m especially excited by the prospect of the 14 hour battery life (probably 10 in real life use) giving me freedom from power cords through even a whole day at a WordCamp. We’ll see in a week or two if I’m able to comfortably adjust to the too-small keyboard and trackpad.

If you are attending WordCamp NYC this year and have ever upgraded WordPress, please consider volunteering for an hour at the Genius Bar.

“The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone [¹] is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.”

By Spitzgogo_CHEN. Titled "Niece & My Nokia 6230i (by Nikon D70)". CC by-nc. Flickr Hosted.

Jason goes on to describe some of the activities you can do at the same time as using iPhone applications, and the advantages one hand operation has — go read it and come right back.

The article reminds me of a concept that mobile computing buffs Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao suggested to me a few years ago, which really clicked for me.

You hold a phone with one hand.

Seems wicked obvious doesn’t it! It’s sorta what Jason is talking about though. If you use old school phones and dumb mobile phones with one hand, wouldn’t a “smartphone” need to be usable one-handed² (or less)?

If I recall, at the time Boris and Roland were educating me about the death of PDAs and stylus based³ “smart phones”, but it’s just is relevant to the current generation of devices, particularly as Jason describes, these smartphones taking on more roles — camera, gaming, etc.

It doesn’t seem Boris, Roland and my discussions translated into online artifacts, but I did find one silly comment I made early 2007⁴ , “One hand holding and navigation will be interesting, but it is important that it does it well, because I read somewhere that defines a smart phone ”. The iPhone does it well.

I’ve always gotten a kick out out of see people go from talking on a SideKick to typing with a flick of a wrist, or sidetalking Nokia N-Gage⁵ style, but why haven’t these hip tools caught on?

Should we be surprised that easy one handed operation feels good?

I suspect cognitive processes and social norms particularly in public settings play big roles:

• You use a phone with one hand and you always have.
• There is a casualness to using a phone.
• You often don’t give it your full attention.
• You need a hand free to interact with your environment.
• You require alertness in a public setting. One hand free in case a predator strikes.

• It’s embarrassing to give a device your full attention, particularly in a public setting. Particularly if you are an adult playing a game or otherwise not being productive.
• It’s rude to not pay attention to the people around you.
• We are social creatures.

It seems to me that it’s only natural.

1. Jason links to a footnote that reads 'In this essay, I'm using "the iPhone" as a convenient shorthand for "any of a number of devices and smartphones that offer similar functionality to the iPhone, including but not limited to the Palm Pre, Android phones, Blackberry Storm, and iPod Touch". Similar arguments apply, to varying degrees, to these devices and their manufacturers but are especially relevant to the iPhone and Apple; hence, the shorthand.'
2. Marco Arment walks us through his left handed operation of the iPhone
3. Daring Firefox John Gruber’s comment on Jason’s article is “One-handed operation wasn’t feasible on stylus-based systems.”
4. response to Boris’s January 09, 2007 article “iPhone is a tablet“
5. Nokia N-Gage demise was recently announced.

We stayed around the corner from the Canal end of Bourbon Street. I’m a bourbon enthusiast. My current obsession is the Antique Collection, five small-batch whiskeys released once a year from the Buffalo Trace distillery. I already had bottles of all but the most difficult to find, the George T. Stagg bourbon. When Zoe and I toured that distillery this summer we found none for sale within 100 miles. When I tried to pre-order Stagg from my local store I learned that the distributor’s entire allotment was already allocated.

Bourbon hunting is a serious game. It’s like Pokemon. So when we sat down for a late dinner Friday night at Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House I had to ask for Stagg. The waiter asked the bartender and was told they were out. I shrugged and had a Sazerac cocktail instead.

On the way to lunch the next day we stopped again at the Bourbon House for a drink. This time I sat at the bar and scanned the bottles myself. I saw antlers. I was going to get my drink!

The bartender picked up on my enthusiasm and we talked about this and other bourbons. She put the bottle on the bar for my inspection and handed me the distillery’s letter of pedigree. Then she gave us the name of a liquor store in the French Quarter that might carry it.

After lunch we found the store. They had three bottles of Stagg on the shelf. I asked whether they limited the sale of rare whiskeys. Nope, just buy what you want. So I got a case (three bottles) and walked straight back to the Bourbon House to thank the bartender. She made my day and then some.

I later found out via Google and Wikipedia that George T. Stagg is nicknamed “Hazmat” when it is more than 70% alcohol (140 proof) which is the maximum concentration allowed by the FAA on commercial flights. The 2009 proof is 141.4. Stop by for a taste but let’s not talk about how I got these bottles back home.

If you are a video blogger on WordPress.com, you will be delighted to find out that now you can customize your video player with your own brand logo and color. Log on to your admin panel, and configure your video player logo URL and color from Settings=>Media.

Here is an example:

Currently this feature is available to VIP video blogggers only. Contact WordPress.com support for details.

Step 1: add this to the top of your entry point php file

if ( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '127.0.0.1' ) { error_log( ' :: ' . getmypid() ); sleep( 10 );
}

Step 2: use curl on the localhost to make the request

Step 3: (this assumes your error log is /tmp/php-error-output) run the following command in a second (root) terminal window

strace -p $(tail -n 1000 /tmp/php-error-output | grep ' :: ' | tail -n 1 | sed -r s/'^.+ :: '//g) -s 10240 2>&1

Good luck…

Thord Daniel Hedengren, one of the writers for Blog Herald, put out a plea for help on twitter and was pointed in my direction.

He was faced with a WordPress dashboard which looked like this and wasn’t much use:

WordPress 2.8.4 dashboard without all the styling

This evening I hooked up with Thord and with the help of his server administrator we tracked down the issue and thought it a good idea to spread the message to help any one else out there who has a similar issue in the future.

I started off by looking at the headers returned by the php file which concatenates all the CSS files together and noticed something strange:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.7.62
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:34:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/css;charset=“utf-8″
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.0
Expires: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:34:47 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Vary: Accept-Encoding

As you can see here the Content-Type header looks a little strange, it has a charset specified but the value being returned is not a valid charset and it looks like this is probably why Firefox is refusing to apply this css file to the page.

This was starting to look like a server configuration issue so we got in contact with the server admin and we tracked down the errant configuration to the php.ini file.

Within the php.ini file you can set a default charset to be used if one has not already been specified for the request this had erroneously been set in the file with some smart quotes rather than normal quotes and so php was outputting the smart quotes as well as the charset name into the HTTP header.

Now the headers look like this and Firefox is happy to display a fully styled WordPress dashboard:

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.7.62
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:39:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/css;charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.0
Expires: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:39:17 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Vary: Accept-Encoding

In short, check the configuration you use for default_charset in your php.ini file and don’t use any quotes unless you need to the following works fine in my testing:

 default_charset = utf-8

 http://wordpress.org/support/rss/tags/plugin_slug http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/plugin_slug?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss

The first of these contains all the support forum posts relevant to a particular plugin and the second is all the code changes that are happening in the plugins repository.

To keep track of these you have a couple of choices.

Firstly you could subscribe to them in your feed reader or if like me you like to receive emails for this sort of thing you can setup a cool tool called rss2email on your pc/server to email you new posts/changes.

TechCrunch has a short post reporting Dr. Kaifu Lee’s next career move. The post made fun of Google Chinese translation. Well, I decided to take 20 minutes off my busy schedule, and translated his letter in English.

Farewell to Google

Kaifu Lee

Time flies and it’s been another four years. In retrospect and looking back at the four years I spent at Google, all the happiness, successes and challenges kept on flashing in my mind like a movie. In this touching farewell moment, my heart is filled with gratitude. In the past four years, Google China has steadily grown into a stable, mature and well-managed company.

During the whole four years, I’ve strived to bring to China the sprit of Google – equality, innovation, fun, and audacity. This process has not been easy, but we adhered to our beliefs and values steadfastly with intensive perseverance.

We have focused on perfecting Chinese search, and have suppressed the temptation to develop more cool and ostensible products. Today, the quality of Google Chinese search is the most accurate, most comprehensive, and most real-time among the peers. We have also developed several dozens of new products, expanding the territory of Google China. Among those, Google Maps, Google mobile search, Google mobile maps, Google translations are the best in China. In addition, we introduce the music search, which allows users to enjoy the copyrighted but free music for the first time, creating a new model for free music download in the whole world.

I am particularly impressed with the conducts of our employees, who developed timely products to help China combat devastating snows, earthquakes, and hurricanes, confirming my believe and that Google China employees love not only Google, but also China, and that they possess not only creativity, but also loving hearts.

I always smile heartily when I walk into some café shops, and see young people using Google integrated search, or looking up the real time traffic maps, or listening to copyrighted Google music, or selecting an iGoogle ‘skin’.

Google is both a great and lovely company, and I’m very grateful for this life-time opportunity to build Google China from scratch. I’ve learned a lot in the process – Internet technology, innovation models or values.

I have no regret on what has been achieved at Google. However, there is still one regret in my life and I want to tackle it. In the past 20 years, I have had the privilege to experience Apple and Microsoft in the PC era, to experience Google in the Internet era, and to see all three world-class companies growing and become successful. I have had the privilege to do the most creative work when both the silicon valley and Zhongguancun were ascending. My knowledge in the tech arena and my insights learned are my most valuable assets. I deeply hope to pass these assets on to young people in China.

My next step is to, together with young Chinese entrepreneurs, create new technological marvels. I want to take initiative to do some overall planning. I have reached this stage in my life that my heart tells me that it would be too late if I procrastinate.

So, although Mountain View, CA offered me an olive branch and hoped me to stay for another four years, I have made up my mind. Deep inside my heart, I want to help young people fulfill their dreams, and in the process, fulfill my own entrepreneurial dreams.

This past weekend, I was finally relieved from business strategies, career transitions, and knowledge transfer. I will comb my thoughts over this weekend, and soon will share with you my next plans.

Whenever I think about this step, I think of Steve Jobs famous saying:

“have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

A few days ago we released an updated look for Gravatar.com. We really felt that the old front page was cramped, stuffy, and heavy. So we worked hard to lighten it up, make it more immediately informative, and gave everything a little more room to breathe. Playing a starring role on the new front page is our introduction video (which I like to call Gravatar, the Motion Picture.) Anyhow this is just a small update from Gravatar-land. We hope you’ll enjoy the new look while we cook up some cool stuff for you in the future.

–DK

My Google Summer of Code 2009 student, Justin Shreve, has done an excellent job creating a new search API for WordPress. We hope this API will be integrated into the WordPress core because it would simplify replacing the core search functionality and encourage developers to create many more options for searching blogs.

Justin’s Search plugin is actually a package of three plugins. The first plugin installs the API that lets other plugins do the searching. The other two plugins use the API to provide search systems that we think will please most users who are dissatisfied with the built-in WordPress search results: MySQL Fulltext and Google Custom Search. (The Google plugin requires a Google account.) For the search-savvy, Justin also wrote a Sphinx-based plugin, Sphinx Search. This last one involves installing additional software on the server.

I’m running the Fulltext plugin on my personal blog so you can try it. Enter a search in the sidebar. On the search results page you can refine your search by specifying whether to search posts, pages, and comments. You can also sort the results by relevance, date, or alphabet. The Advanced Search link leads to a form where you can specify author, categories, tags, and date range.

Self-hosted WordPress users can install Search. (It is not available for WordPress.com… yet.) After activating the main Search plugin you must also activate one of the other plugins: MySQL Fulltext, Google Custom Search, or Sphinx Search. We are anxious to know what you think of it. Justin plans to continue to improve the search system so he will need lots of user feedback.

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Now you can watch Gravatar, the motion picture! Which was put together by the ever helpful Michael Pick. If you’ve ever had trouble explaining exactly what Gravatar.com does to your friends, family, neighbors, long lost friends, and that dude down the street, then this is the screen cast for you!

404 Gravatar Not Found?!

It may not be a groundbreaking feature, but there is some a small new addition to the Gravatar API. You can now specify a default value of 404 to make the image… well… return a 404 not found error if there is no image for the given email address. This probably wont change the life of you website developers out there, but it just might make it easier for you application developers (you know… the people who have to actually compile their code before it works…)

Did You Know?

Today we have TWO “Did you know” tidbits for the price of one.

1. This little tidbit is often a surprise for developers to find out, but you can use https://secure.gravatar.com/ [...] to link to an SSL encrypted Gravatar. This is especially useful when linking using Gravatars from SSL encrypted web pages.
2. You can pre-fill the email address in sign up form for Gravatar.com to make it a little bit easier for your users to know what to do. Just add the email address to the end of the sign up URL like so.

Sightings in the Wild

1. Where.com’s “WHERE wall” web service has been using Gravatars since the word “GO” for displaying user avatars. They had one small hiccup, but we got in contact with the developers (who were super nice and down to earth, by the way) to get the situation rectified.
2. We recently heard that doMelhor (which, I’m told, is the leading Portuguese digg clone) recently enabled Gravatar support for avatar display.

That’s all I have for now but, as always, there is more to come from Gravatar.com

Cheers!
DK

On order to protect email servers from a possible denial of service attack from the blog by email feature of WordPress I have committed a change today to ensure that WordPress will not contact the mail server more that once every 5 minutes however often wp-mail.php is accessed.

Message displayed when rejecting request

The 5 minute interval, is itself, configurable using a define in your wp-config.php file it you wish to set a longer or shorter interval.

You would configure this by adding the following to the wp-config.php:

 //Set the minimum interval for wp-mail blog-by-email POP3 connections to 10 minutes define('WP_MAIL_INTERVAL',600);

This feature will be available in WordPress v2.9

• bbPress 1.0.2 addresses a number of issues which have come up since the 1.0.1 release, including a problem where the voices count could get out of sync.
• bbPress 0.9.0.6 is the first “legacy” release of the bbPress 0.9 branch, which will be maintained for security until late 2010.

Both releases fix a long standing bug which was affecting the way spam was being reported via the Akismet plugin. These releases are recommended for all users of both bbPress branches.

Download either (or both!) from the download page now.

SEOMoz has posted some original research on effect of CAPTCHAs on conversion rates:

With CAPTCHA’s on, SPAM and failed conversions accounted for 7.3% of all the conversions for the 3 month period. With CAPTCHA’s off, SPAM conversions accounted for 4.1% of all the conversions for the 3 month period. That possibly means when CAPTCHA’s are on, the company could lose out on 3.2% of all their conversions!

In other words, a significant proportion of frustrated customers simply abandon their attempts to get past the CAPTCHA. (And, notably, some spam still got through!)

We’ve blogged before about the usability problems of CAPTCHA-based forms, and it’s good to see some real-world data measuring those effects.

Version 2.2.6 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is released. WordPress users may upgrade using the Plugin Update feature, or by waiting for the forthcoming WordPress 2.8.2 release.

This release contains minor fixes only. Upgrading is recommended but not essential.

Changes since 2.2.5:

• Fix a global warning introduced in 2.2.5
• Add changelog and additional readme.txt tags
• Fix an array conversion warning in some versions of PHP
• Support a new WPCOM_API_KEY constant for easier use with WordPress MU

The download is available here.

Sometimes RSS isn’t fast enough. We’ve been experimenting with faster blog subscription delivery using Jabber to push the messages. When you use Jabber to subscribe to blogs you get the news as soon as it is published. Now almost every post and comment on WordPress.com blogs is published this way and you can subscribe to these streams using almost any Jabber client. Messages are delivered typically within one second of publication. You can also publish to your blogs by typing instant messages. Soon comments will be appearing in Jabber chat rooms.

Let me break it down. Jabber (XMPP) is an instant messaging protocol. There are dozens of free clients (programs) that can connect to Jabber services, thousands of Jabber servers, and millions of daily Jabber users around the world. Even some phones can connect to it, including the iPhone with an appropriate app. So you can probably use Jabber. The primary exception is people behind company or government firewalls that block XMPP ports, but we’ll have a web-based solution for them soon.

Before I give you a link I have to tell you that this service is experimental. If you use it, you are a tester so please wear your white lab coat. A few dozen people have been using it for several months with very few hiccups, but hiccups are still to be expected. Even so, most of us at Automattic rely on it daily to surface and accelerate the discussions on our private blogs. Finally I must tell you that we have not yet worked out all the business angles, so the feature set and limitations may change to accommodate our inevitable need to feed the monkey.

Now I give you im.wordpress.com, which I demonstrated at the CrunchUp last week. Every WordPress.com account is automatically linked to a Jabber account on im.wordpress.com. We have compiled instructions for setting up some popular Jabber clients.

If you want my personal recommendation for a Jabber client, my choice for Mac OS X is Adium. If you already use iChat, just stick with iChat. Some of my coworkers who run Windows have chosen Pidgin. I also sometimes use Psi, which is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Here is some info for people familiar with XMPP. This service is based on XEP-0060 (Publish-Subscribe) acting as a front-end for WordPress blogs. It started as a simple firehose for our commercial partners and grew from there. People subscribing with Jabber clients don’t need Pubsub. They send simple commands to a chat bot and their items are delivered as XHTML-IM from the blog’s URL. The bot speaks XEP-0060 on their behalf. If you can speak XEP-0060, you can connect to pubsub.im.wordpress.com and subscribe to nodes. The nodes for this blog are /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/ for posts, /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/comments/ for all comments, and /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/real-time-wordpress-com-subscription/ for comments on this post. Node discovery and item discovery and retrieval are not implemented. Reasonable subscription and traffic limits will be imposed. If you are looking for a complete feed of all our blogs and comments, try the firehose.

This is a recommended update for all users of bbPress 1.0. These issues do not affect users of bbPress 0.9.

Yesterday we had a session about scaling, servers, and WordPress at the 1st WordPress Developer Day in San Francisco. We used a P2 blog on WordPress.com which allowed people to ask questions and then Demitrious, Chris, and I answered them. I went back and posted some follow up answers which means that the site will hopefully serve as a reference to others looking for answers to these questions.

We are looking at switching some of our servers from AMD Opteron Barcelona quad-core processors to the new Intel 5520 Nehalem processors. These are both 4 core CPUs, but the Intels utilize hyper-threading, so the OS sees 8 cores per CPU. It wasn’t that long ago that the first thing you did with a hyper-threading-enabled CPU was switch it off in the BIOS, but I have heard good things about Intel’s reincarnation of hyper-threading, so I decided to give it a shot.

I ran some real-world stress tests against these servers, adding them into the WordPress.com web pool and seeing how many requests per second they could serve before becoming 100% CPU bound effectively falling over. The types of requests served are varied; a lot are rendering web pages, but there are also quite a few image resizing operations thrown in here as well, as we spread this image work evenly over the 2500 cores in our web tier. Everything is php executed via fastcgi. I was a bit skeptical that there would be much of a difference between the two processors, but the numbers proved me wrong — the Nehalem’s are impressive.

2 x AMD Opteron 2356 Barcelona Quad-core 2.3Ghz
40 requests/second at 87.5% CPU utilization

2 x Intel 5520 Nehalem Quad-core 2.26Ghz
78 requests/second at 94% CPU utilization

Few things that I thought were interesting:

• On a per request basis, there isn’t much of a difference between the two. They both generate a given page in roughly the same amount of time.
• As CPU utilization approaches 100%, The Intel’s scale rather linearly, while the AMDs seem to struggle over the 85% range.
• The load averages were pretty high during these tests (35+ on the Intel box), but request times didn’t seem to suffer.

Has anyone else seen the same sort of results or maybe something to the contrary? These 2 configurations are roughly the same price, making it seem like a no-brainer to choose the Intels for web applications.

PHP 5 introduces autoloading classes. The way WordPress is currently structured, I don’t think we’d get much benefit from switching to autoloading. There aren’t that many classes in core WordPress that don’t need to get loaded on every page load.

With some restructuring, though, we might be able to cut down on the number of bytes of code we load on every page (and we could get rid of some class_exists() and require_once calls).

We’d want an autoloader, though, that could handle plugin files as well as core files.

Idea: an autoloader that can load classes from some deterministic path (e.g., the usual $classname.class.php or what have you) but that can also register classes at specific paths.

if ( !defined( 'WP_AUTOLOAD_CLASSES' ) ) { define( 'WP_AUTOLOAD_CLASSES', function_exists( 'spl_autoload_register' ) );
} if ( WP_AUTOLOAD_CLASSES ) { /**
<ul> <li>PHP 5.1.2+</li>
<li>Called once per class during setup (each time</li>
<li>with two args) to tell it where the class is</li>
<li>located.</li>
<li>Don't need to call for a class if that class</li>
<li>exists in some easy deterministic path.</li>
<li>Called (with only one arg) when looking for a</li>
<li>not-currently-loaded class.</li>
<li>/</li>
</ul> function wp_autoload( $class, $path = null ) { static $classes = array(); // Being called by PHP's autoloader if ( is_null( $path ) ) { if ( isset( $classes[$class] ) ) { /* Use include, not require. That
<ul> <li>way we get a more meaningful</li>
<li>Fatal error: class does not exist</li>
<li>/</li>
</ul> include( $classes[$class] ); } else { /* Look in some default path(s) for
<ul> <li>appropriately named files.</li>
<li>/</li>
</ul> } return; } // Being called by us $classes[$class] = $path; } // Register it spl_autoload_register( 'wp_autoload' );
} else { /**
<ul> <li>PHP 4 (PHP 5.1.1-)</li>
<li>Just require each file.</li>
<li>/</li>
</ul> function wp_autoload( $class, $path ) { require_once( $path ); }
} // Core classes in WPINC probably wouldn't have
// to be explicitly registered, but as an example:
wp_autoload( 'WP_Error', ABSPATH . WPINC . '/classes.php'
);
// OK to call multiple times per path
wp_autoload( 'Walker', ABSPATH . WPINC . '/classes.php'
);
// ... // In some plugin file
wp_autoload( 'My_Plugin_Foo', plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ) . 'foo.class.php'
);

Update: To clarify, I don’t mean to imply that this idea would improve WordPress performance. It’s just an idea, not a proposal. I haven’t done any benchmarking or even naive experimentation.

Conditionally including files involves tradeoffs that need to be evaluated per app. Also, as Jacob Santos points out in the comments below, conditionally including files from conditionally defined functions is way out there.

I might call the idea clever, but it’s not necessarily good

Consider this blog retired. My new home is at http://josephscott.org/.

For more info check out the announcement on the PollDaddy blog and Toni’s blog.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Lenny and Eoin while hanging out with the rest of the Automattic crew (which includes the Intense Debate guys) in Colorado. It’s been good to get to meet more of the Automattic group as it continues to grow. Most of Automattic (all the ones in Colorado) are pictured at the bottom of this post.

• Automattic
• Novell – OSTC
• Crowd Favorite
• Bluehost
• Twelve Horses
• Jake Spurlock

And a big thank you for everyone that came to the event. Our estimated attendance was 135 people. This number might be a little bit low, it’s our best estimate at this point.

With the big day having come and gone, I’ve been thinking about what thinks went well and what I might have done differently. The scheduled probably should have just included 10 (15?) minute breaks between each session. Balancing between developer desires and user desires was still a big issue, going with multiple tracks would have helped that I think.

On the plus side doing things through EventBrite and Paypal was good. Lunch worked out well (I really wanted to make sure no one felt like they didn’t get enough food), especially having it served by the folks doing the catering (The Smokehouse). Having key specific things handled by volunteers, like registration (thanks Clint, Sheri & Shauna!) was a huge help.

What about you? If you were at WordCamp Utah what did you think went well and what could be improved upon?

After reading through some of their information on their new “service” I found a link indicating that I could opt out (not that I ever opted in). I’m not sure what they were thinking here though, instead of the “opt out” taking me to a page where I could opt out, it took me to another documentation page on their new service. I had to dig through three or four layers of “opt out” links before I got to a page that would actually turn this off. Which of course reset my DSL connection again about 5 minutes later. We’ll see where this ends up.

The search results they were showing for failed DNS queries were from Yahoo. I wonder if Yahoo is paying Qwest to do this.

Have you ever saved a post on your blog only to realize later that you accidentally erased a critical paragraph? Ever worked on a blog with multiple authors and needed to keep a log of who changed what and when?

WordPress should store a history of all your posts. You’d get protection from accidental changes, and you’d be able to see a clear timeline of the evolution of each of you posts.

Happily, WordPress is awesome! In the upcoming WordPress 2.6 release, the feature exists and rules!

And check out the pretty colors!

Managing thousands of posts and dozens of drafts will be much easier in the upcoming WordPress 2.3 thanks to some revamped backend code and admin interfaces.

First, the interface changes. In Manage -> Posts you can currently look for posts by search term, or browse by month or category, but only one of these things at a time.

In WordPress 2.3 (or currently on WordPress.com), you’ll be able to filter by search term, post type (draft, private, scheduled for future publishing, or published), author, month published, and category. You’ll also be able to combine any or all of those filters and do them all at once:

so you’ll be able to ask for all published posts written by Lion-O during May of 2007, filed in the “cartoons from the eighties” category, and matching the phrase “Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living”. That was a hard list of posts to come by until 2.3.

Manage -> Pages will be getting a similar face lift; you’ll be able to filter by search term, author and page type (draft, private, or published).

Better draft management, in particular, has consistently been one of the most frequently requested improvements in WordPress, and these changes are a big piece of that.

Neat huh?

Secondly, the back end changes. The WP_Query class can now select posts by post_status (draft, future, private, publish). This makes it trivial to use query_posts() and wp() for such queries; no more need for kludgey filters and hacks.

WordPress 2.3 comin’, at you soon. Be there!