Harvard Law serves some pretty high usage blogs, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache weren’t sufficient for their needs, and so Dan wrote a plugin to serve cached files with Nginx. The cool thing is that it (seems to) serve these cached pages without touching WordPress at all. I’m going to play with this on the next slice we set up it; if it works as advertised, then this is the caching solution we need for the rare possibility that one of the sites gets hammered with traffic.
Archive for the 'Low Priority' Category
High Performance WordPress II
View more presentations from Barry Abrahamson.
Per last night’s outage, here’s how you suspend a cPanel account from the command line:
/scripts/suspendacct 'username'
If the cause of the usage spike is unknown, however, it won’t necessarily let you diagnose it.
Munin is a “networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and ‘what just happened to kill our performance?’ problems.” According to Max, you can install children on multiple servers and have them report back to aggregated data on a parent. It’s useful for monitoring site performance because you can configure notifications if the site load goes above a certain number, etc. This would be worth looking through at some point in the near future.
Ryan Sholin did a review of Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora today on IdeaLab. I like his points at the bottom so much that I want to record them in perpetuity:
- From Aardvark, we learn the value of reaching people wherever they are, however they consume and communicate information. Push notification on my iPhone during my commute home? Sure, I consume information that way.
- From Hunch, we learn that if we hand a person a multiple choice quiz, we can record the results and let our algorithm learn something about them to bring to the table when they ask their next question.
- From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don’t assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You’re building next year’s tools, not last year’s.
All three together? Mmm… delicious.
It’s this week, so I think we’re probably too late this year. We should make sure it’s on our radar next year though.
For future reference, the proper format to the command is:
scp -rv source_dir/* username@domain.com:/full/path/to/target/directory
More on Wikipedia. I had it backwards originally and copied a lot of files to the wrong place.
Hometown News Service is a hosted content management system for small to medium local newspapers. They have an application into the Knight News Challenge as well where they want $250,000 funding to continue developing their CMS, make it easy to deploy, and then open source it. They have 75 paying clients right now and 12 employees so I’m not entirely sure how this fits into their strategic goals.
Asked a couple of days ago. This is exactly the type of bridges we want to be making because we are hosting campus magazines too that probably have really valuable advice. One big question is how you make these bridges more intuitive; right now it requires one of us knowing the right person to connect the asker to and shooting them an email. Related to this, I think it might be wise to start thinking about a good taxonomy for Highrise. It will be a system we have to maintain but we can quickly find the right person by topic.
One of the time-consuming parts of an archive transfer currently occurs when we migrate a database with a large number of authors and attempt to add each author as a user. Personally, this is my preference because it means we keep the integrity of the data as true as possible (the other option is to assign the post to the default user and then store the author data as a custom field). The import slows down, however, as the number of users in the database increases largely, I think, because WordPress isn’t optimized to handle a large number of users, let alone content from a large number of users.
As such, I think it might be worthwhile to make it standard operating procedure to import authors as custom fields and then have a secondary script that checks the custom field for author information and then creates the user if the author doesn’t exist or assigns the post to the author if the user does exist.
Related to the time required to migrate archives, I wonder if we should go back to importing the content directly into the database and bypassing the creation of WordPress eXtended RSS files. If we did this, we could likely automate more of the process. Thoughts?
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