Pie Palace

As alluded to last week, Blogawa is undergoing a reskinning. The new site will be pretty much the same in terms of functionality, except that it should look a bit nicer. The only major change will be the use of Gravatars to provide avatars for authors.

The URL for the RSS feed will change. I should be able to set up a forward to send your RSS reader to the appropriate place, but I may not. So if you find that your feed reader breaks, come back to blogawa and resubscribe.

Aaaany day now…

For those who don’t know “QuickPress” is the admin widget that allows you to blog from your Wordpress dashboard. The latest Miniposts revision (0.6.10) adds a minipost checkbox to the QP widget. Thanks to Lan for suggesting this.

Have you ever wished, fellow blogger, that you had a way to tell your readers when you comment on somebody else’s blog? I have. Whenever I comment on dubroy.com (for example), I’d like my blog to show that I did that.

I’ve put together the Elsewhere plugin to do that magic. When you comment on a blog with Elsewhere installed, that blog will ping the URL you entered in the ‘Website’ field on the comment form. If that website has Elsewhere installed, a link to your comment will be displayed in your sidebar.

Miniposts 0.6.8 is now out. It’s another fix release that removes post duplication issues, cleans up the preferences page, and fixes a couple of bugs with the smiley code that nataan contributed.

The big news is that the miniposts plugin is now hosted on Wordpress autoinstallation site, meaning that installation and upgrades should be easy peasy. Since this is my first hosted plugin, I’ve taken a quickie screenshot, so I can remember when my plugin’s average rating was 5/5:

Piepalace.ca has been spanked by more than its fair share of hits recently. Usually, I would just assume that I’m really popular and leave it at that, but Dreamhost has been getting increasingly upset at the load these hits are putting on their server.

Some simple analysis (with the help of the Dreamhost support wiki) has shown a couple of weird trends:

• 207.58.129.221 really likes me.¹ It downloads my RSS feed 800-1100 times a day.²
• The Aspie Quotient test is pretty popular. It gets literally thousands of visits a day. It’s basically a static page that relies on javascript for processing, but I’m afraid that Wordpress is still falling down under the load.

I’ve blacklisted our friend at 207.58.129.221, and I’m using WP Super Cache. Hopefully this will lessen my load to appease Dreamhost.

Can anyone recommend a decent apache logfile analyzer? Preferably something that runs on the commandline and doesn’t leave HTML turds all over the place.

1. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks IP addresses by the number of requests they’ve made. (back)
2. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks URLs by the number of requests they received. (back)

Blogs are pretty neat. They allow a user to produce a stream of time-specific posts, that automatically appear in subscribers’ RSS readers. But every post on a blog looks the same.

That doesn’t make sense. Let’s say that I write movie reviews on my blog – I want every review to include the movie poster, a link to the movie’s website, and a star rating. With Wordpress, I’d have to hand craft every post to contain that information. Hand crafting is easy to screw up, boring to do, and hard to change in future.

What if we give each post a skin? When the user is writing the post, they can say “this is a movie review”, and Wordpress is smart enough to ask for the website link, star rating, and link to the movie poster. When Wordpress serves that post up, it’s wrapped in a special blob of HTML that renders the links and stars properly.

You’ve noticed that I’m talking movie reviews. Does that ring a bell? Perhaps about microformats? If we’re careful when we sculpt the skin for our review, it can include a hReview, meaning that a web crawler can detect a review and index it appropriately.

chameleon is a first cut at skinning. It’s missing a little javascript goop (to show movie posters and hide some stuff on the post editing page), but it’s functional, supporting hReview and hCalendar by default.

I’ve put together a new version of Miniposts2. It’s now Wordpress 2.5 compatible, and supports filtering miniposts from feeds. Along the way I found the migration doc useful. And I came to discover that Wordpress doesn’t really maintain any kind of backward compatibility between minor revisions.

I was making a quick CSS tweak when I noticed that I’d acquired a few new friends. In the friends listing, I had a new a friend named “buy viagra”. A looking closely, I saw that I had another new pal named “buy cialis”. I thought it odd that both Mr. Viagra and Ms. Cialis had the same first name, and that I’d forgotten meeting them.

Operating under the assumption that I’ve been hacked, I’ve upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress and twiddled a few passwords. Hopefully this should keep me hacker free for the near future.

If anyone notices any odd behaviour, please leave a comment here.