Chris Meller

From WordPress to Habari

2008-10-09T13:27:50-04:00

Back in February I started becoming interested in this new blogging project called Habari. I, like most people, had been using WordPress for years on what passed for my pathetic excuse for a blog. Over those years I went through phases of love and hate for WordPress as they branched out and tried new things. Often it seemed that the good came hand-in-hand with the bad. While striving to improve their product and push adoption to the masses, many changes seemed to forsake those hard core users who had been loyal all along. With the creation of the wordpress.com hosted platform and the funding of Automattic to continue to improve and pursue these ventures, things really began to take a turn for the worse. The line between open source and commercial venture began to blur, and continued development seemed to focus on the hosted aspect, rather than the self-hosted community. Some features did trickle back down, but the gap continued to grow as time went on. Along the way, something totally unrelated to WordPress and the blogging world happened. My coding skills improved. While I had previously been content to harness the awesome power of the WordPress plugin system, I now felt the need to branch out and spread my coding wings. Realizing that the WordPress code base was a mess of PHP4 code, global functions and variables, and lacked any documentation at all, I became frustrated trying to make changes. Since that time, WordPress has attempted to make strides in the documentation and global functions areas, but for the most part the codebase remains as messy as ever. Looking for alternatives, I happened to stumble upon Habari. Several people I'd known from the WordPress IRC channel had begun to frequent their IRC channel as well, and I migrated over mainly to have more people to chat with regularly. As I became more familiar with the people involved and started participating in some of the arguments happening around functionality and usability, I began to become more and more interested in the product as a whole. Habari is totally PHP5-based. It doesn’t sacrifice functionality to appease a few misguided souls who believe PHP4 was the perfect development platform for an open source application. It’s also focused on providing the most reliable and flexible blogging experience possible (for example, it supports MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres out of the box). This kind of dedication to providing a system that will (eventually) run on any combination of technologies is really what sets Habari apart from most of the other platforms available. It's not just about the database systems it supports, because that same approach is taken with everything: make it modular so people can substitute in their own pieces to create a system that works for them. At the same time, close attention is paid to the quality and reliability of the code written to support these features. Not only is it heavily object-oriented, but it's also very flexible (the two do generally go hand-in-hand) and of a high quality, which improves extensibility and performance greatly. Don't believe me? How about an example? Here's a Pingdom response time graph of my blog moving from WordPress to Habari on the same Slicehost VPS:

Response times go from 900 - 1,250 ms on WordPress to 550 - 600 ms on Habari with the same content (and actually both were running their respective K2 themes) on the same server. Not only did Habari cut response times in half, but it is also much more consistent. Those 300 ms spikes are no longer a problem, it's smooth sailing the blogging seas onboard the S.S. Habari. If you haven't given Habari a look, or have only tried an older version, I encourage you to test drive the latest development code straight out of SVN. It's leaps and bounds beyond the 0.5 release and growing closer and closer to a 0.6 release every day. You should also take a few minutes to stop by the #habari IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and say hi - our community is half the value.

Welcome to Habari

2008-10-08T14:38:48-04:00

That's right, I've switched... There are broken links galore. I'm slowly moving towards fixing them.

New Slice Goodness

2008-09-13T13:52:59-04:00

I recently started to get annoyed at Debian because they seemed to go a bit overboard at being "cautious" when it comes to approving new versions of packages (Postgres 8.1, seriously?). Originally I'd gone with Debian over Ubuntu just because it seemed to make sense: Ubuntu is based on Debian, why not go straight to the source? Well, no more. You're now seeing the new Ubuntu-powered Babble, on a fresh new slice of goodness. Yay, hurray, drinks all around...

If Men Were Angels

2008-08-30T13:16:18-04:00

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. - James Madison

Make Your iPhone Stellar!

2008-08-13T11:10:01-04:00

I've always loved space (hey, I am a Star Trek nerd after all), and found images of space particularly amazing¹. Staring up at the stars was always one of the most relaxing things I could envision, and planets were just amazing sights. The default wallpaper on the iPhone is a beautiful picture of our home planet Earth, centered so you can gaze upon that beautiful ball any time you want. That's all well and good, but what if you don't want to look like a loser using the default wallpaper? What if you want a little added variety in your life? Well, that's what I wanted, so I scoured the internet and tracked down the best images I could find of our beautiful solar system. Some slicing, dicing and resizing later and we've got a beautiful collection of 9 planets ready for adding to your iPhone and perfectly sized to be a drop-in replacement for our lovely planet.

Ready to Grab some Stellar Bliss?

The easiest way to get all these beautiful images is to hop over to my Flickr set and pick out the ones you want. I've also provided a quick-and-easy zip file if you're as addicted as I am and want to grab them all!

iphone_planets.zip (865kb)
iPhone Planets Flickr set

More to Come?

I would love to add some additional stellar phenomenon, assuming I can track down some quality imagery, so stay tuned for the possibility of more images to come. If you'd like to contribute your favorite Astronomy Picture of the Day in iPhone wallpaper form, please post a comment with a link!

Resources

I collected the images from all over the web, but NASA was obviously a huge help. Most of these were sliced up from some of their planetary size comparison images. Google image searches provided the rest. The iPhone Wallpaper Fireworks Template was also a huge help in getting everything sized and aligned properly to show up exactly in the center of the iPhone's viewable background area. If you're making your own iPhone wallpaper, I highly encourage you to grab a copy!

Little known fact: I have a moon globe. ↩