Chris Meller

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

I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.

Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.

After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links¹.

Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.

In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩

I had the opportunity to do some quick WordPress plugin hacking tonight¹ for Jim Whimpey. As a “payment” of sorts, he gave me a coupon code for the site he was working on: Panedia Desktop Wallpaper.

Being an Aussie company, obviously, most of their wallpapers are from Australia. Boy do they have some absolutely beautiful scenery down under. Check out the two I selected for my machines:

For my desktop, I got a huge 3200 x 1200 pixel version of Brisbane’s beautiful night skyline:

And for my MacBook Pro, I got a beautiful 1680 x 1050 pixel copy of the Robe Coastline:

Stunning wallpapers. Totally worth $25/year to constantly get new beautiful scenes in this kind of quality. I also love the interface that auto-picks the best format for your OS and resolution. Very well done.

1. I added an additional search option to the Search Everything plugin, enabling it to return all posts in a matching category. ↩

I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now¹, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.

Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache² and PHP, I was good to go.

The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.

The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.

The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.

All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement³.

I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.

If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.

One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon⁴, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.

So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…

1. About 6 months, but don’t tell anyone. ↩
2. I never expected it to be that different than other distros. ↩
3. Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme. ↩
4. I use their massive storage for backups as well. ↩

It appears somehow the uploads directory I had on my Dreamhost account got wiped out. Nothing important there… except my Garland theme release. Since several people have been asking me about it lately, I thought it was time to wrap up a fresh release.

If you’re looking for the Garland theme for a stand-alone Wordpress blog, you’ve come to the right place!

In theory, this release shouldn’t be any different than the previous one, but I can’t promise that - I don’t recall having made some of these changes previously.

I’ve tried to get in touch with Matt to see if there is any way to get these changes into the Wordpress.com themes repo, but I have not yet heard back from him. In any event, please let me know if you notice any problems!

Changes

In a nuttshell, the changes are purely superficial - URLs mostly. The path for reaching the theme on the Wordpress.com servers differs from that of standalone blogs. Additionally, jQuery is not available on the admin pages of the current Wordpress release by default, while it is on Wordpress.com.

SVN / 2.5 Notes

While testing on the latest copy of trunk, I noticed that the plugin is unable to register its admin page. This is because the page for theme-related config has changed from ‘Presentation’ to ‘Design’ during the admin redesign project. Whether this will be true of the 2.5 release or not, I have no idea.

If you’re trying to run Garland on the bleeding-edge of Wordpress, you’ll want to change ‘Presentation’ to ‘Design’ in the 3rd to last line of functions.php to make sure it knows the proper page to hook into.

Download

Snag ‘er here: garland-standalone_1.5.zip