Tag: Blog software

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Varnished WordPress

As this blog comes closer to the 10th year anniversary, my blogging software choices continue to change. So far the path has been: Livejournal -> Movable Type -> WordPress -> Drupal 5 -> Pressflow Drupal 6. Since I had some time on my hands lately, as an exercise, I decided to upgrade to Drupal 7, but after a few hours gave up in complete disgust. Drupal community is very proud for keeping its technical debt very low, but they rarely talk about who pays it.

It turned out to be quicker to export everything to the latest version of WordPress. I still like Drupal, but latest WordPress has some really nice features. I also took the time to install Varnish and trick out my sites with reasonably advanced caching via Memcached and APC. I also switched to Percona MySQL just for kicks.

Webmaster Tools Crawl stats

I’m still working on theming the blog, and tweaking, so things will break from time to time.

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The New Blogging Manifesto – Or a 3 Ways (4 Ways) To Make Blogging Easier

I noticed that twitter sapped much of my blogging mojo, and I am not happy about that. Wasting a perfectly good photo from my iphone on a twitpic feels painful: it takes an extra effort to view it, and a triple effort to annotate. Here’s my message to Twitter: images should be seen but link urls should not. It’s the other way around, you wildly successful jerks.

Castrating my thoughts with a character limit is unpleasant as well. How much information do I need to sacrifice for the ease of posting? Twitter is like Procrustes, a Greek mythological dude who would chop off the legs of his guests to fit the length of his bed. Twitter’s procrustean limits mess with my procrastination. See, a painful pun like this is impossible on Twitter.

Facebook has much saner character limit and link/image handling, but I really don’t want to place my junk in the “walled garden” of “a host of a party who goes through the pockets of the coats his guest hang up” (I don’t remember the source of the second metaphor, but I like it a lot). I got tired of twiddling settings every time Zuck’s army decided to opt me into yet another privacy nightmare. I dumped my old account and created a new one that I only use for work-related testing and development.

So, over the weekend I redesigned deadprogrammer.com. Here are my new rules for blogging:

1) The blog post input form goes on the front page. I’m basically aping WordPress’ P2 theme. Having a post form staring you in the face instead of being a few clicks away is amazing. It changed the way WordPress developers blog, and I’m hoping it will do the same for me (it seems to be working).

2) Big images. I’m tired of small images. The screens are big, the bandwidth is cheap, almost everybody has a fast connection, my camera takes amazing pictures that lose much of their life when squeezed into 600 pixel width. Then New standard width is 1000 pixels.

3) The P2-style post form is the first step on removing friction out of posting. But that’s a topic for another post – I need to keep my missives manageable. I’ll break things up: there will be pithy posts, and medium length ones, and then there will be long David Foster Wallacian ones (I just need to figure out the best way to do footnotes).

4) Facebook and Twitter will get posts from my RSS feed. That’s all they are good for.

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Back to Livejournal

I did a bit of posting in Livejournal’s community related to my hometown and received more comments that I accumulated at deadprogrammer.com in a couple of years. The posts are in Russian, but I believe they will be interesting to a significant portion of my readers, especially the comment part where I debate merits (or lack thereof) of speedos, man purses, and other things.

Одесские наблюдения

Возвращение

Монета

Два вопроса

Привоз

The rest of you please enjoy these two pictures from one of the posts:

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Pro Drupal Development

Pro Drupal Development is strongly recommended for any PHP programmer who wants a truly in-depth look at how Drupal works and how to make the most of it.

— Michael J. Ross, Web developer/Slashdot contributor

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. With it, you can create a variety of community-driven sites, including blogs, forums, wiki-style sites, and much more. Pro Drupal Development was written to arm you with knowledge to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. The book assumes that you already possess the knowledge to install and bring a standard installation online. Then authors John VanDyk and Matt Westgate delve into Drupal internals, showing you how to truly take advantage of its powerful architecture.

Youll learn how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters. You’ll learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you. Of course, your Drupal-powered site isnt effective until you can efficiently serve pages to your visitors. As such, the authors have included the information you need to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high-load situations. Also featured is information on Drupal security and best practices, as well as integration of Ajax and the internationalization of your Drupal web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal at all, then you need this book.

  • This book is written by Drupal core developers.
  • Drupal architecture and behavior are mapped out visually.
  • Common pitfalls are identified and addressed.
  • Chapters provide regular discussion and reference to why things work they way they do, not just how.
  • The front matter features a foreword by Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder.
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My Return to Blogging

I am finally free of lousy Dreamhost. I also switched from WordPress to Drupal. There probably will be some glitches and missing urls, and the design will stay in the current stock “Garland” theme, but I am back.

I also apologize in advance for rss feed glitches that might happen – I am still tweaking the site.

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Oy, Again With The Moving…

Using Dreamhost is quickly turning into nightmare. It’s a cheap, full featured and generous web host, except only good for websites that do not matter (and I think that mine do). There is no upgrade path to a virtual private server (which is one step below a dedicated machine both in price and performance), their overall uptime is not something I’d trust, and their blog is just driving me nuts. At the suggestion of a friend I’m moving over to Webintellects.

As a web developer I specialize in content management systems. I have wasted many years of my career on Microsoft technologies, although my personal website was always built using open source tools. In recent years, when faced with the twin horrors of Sharepoint and MS CMS, I just could not go on any more. I just can’t imagine an entrepreneur who would willingly use this stuff to build a business. I quit my job of almost 6 years, took some time off and went on to a job that allows me to use open source tools. We’ve had quite a bit of success with Drupal, a leading open source CMS.

WordPress is a great tool for blogs, but it makes good sense for me to start using Drupal for my own sites, as well as at work. Drupal grows at an astronomical rate, improving in leaps and bounds. I have a couple of modules almost ready for contribution (once I make them a little neater and better documented). Drupal is very scalable, very well designed and has a huge following. I could not be happier with it as a developer.

In the five years that my website existed in blog format I moved 3 times. Livejournal -> Movable Type -> WordPress. Now it’s Drupal‘s turn.

I apologize in advance for any annoying symptoms of the move, like refreshing of the RSS feed where already read articles might show up as new, etc. Please bear with me.

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A new poll

I played around a little with Advanced Poll, a free perl script that is automatically installed by Dreamhost, only to realize that it’s not particularly advanced. You can’t even have a dropdown-stlyle multiple choice question! Also, I could not find a way to make it work in an RSS feed. Then I installed a Democracity plugin for WordPress, which, while a bit easier to work with, is even more limited in features. Do you, my loyal readers have any suggestions or do I need to write the stupid poll software myself?

Meanwhile, the current poll is a pretty simple question. Go vote.