In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.

Posted June 5, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Technology. Tags: audio, audio comments, comments, podcast comments, Riffly, video, wordpress. Be the first one.

The Viddler Wordpress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.

Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.

Posted June 4, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Technology. Tags: comments, Viddler, video, video comments, wordpress. One Comment.

What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?”
Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed.

What about APC?
Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely to the PHP version, so Automattic recently switched from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

Databases?
MySQL scales well and is easy enough to use that there’s little reason to consider other DBs for WordPress content. Other applications may have different needs. Note: FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. Single-table key lookups in MySQL are faster than getting the data from Memcached.

Caching?
Automattic uses Batcache for full-page caching (.002 to .003 second), Memcached persistent object cache, very limited MySQL query cache (never larger than 256MB), sufficiently large key buffer.

HyperDB?
HyperDB solves DB scaling problems.

Backups
User-data backed up every hour, if something changed. Every blog backed up every 12 hours. Dedicated MySQL slaves do LVM snapshots for backups.

Posted May 31, 2009 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: optimization, performance, systems, WordCamp, WordCamp 2009, wordpress. Be the first one.

Why BuddyPress? “Build passionate users around a specific niche.”

Do you have to become a social network? “No, look at GigaOM Pro,” a recently launched subscription research site based on BuddyPress.

But, yo do get “BYOTOS: bring your own terms of service.” That is, you get to control content and interactions. And your service won’t be subject to the whims of a larger network like FaceBook (or vagaries of their service — think Ma.gnolia)

It’s pretty easy, Andy says, to create a custom BuddyPress component, and there are already a number at the BuddyPressDEV Community.

Posted May 31, 2009 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: BuddyPress, social software, WordCamp, WordCamp 2009, wordpress. Be the first one.

jQuery 1.3.2 is in WordPress 2.8, but the most exciting changes are in the automatic concatenation and compression of scripts via the script loader.

Andrew Ozz says “This feature can easily be extended to include scripts added by plugins and to use server side caching, however that would require some changes to the server settings (.htaccess on Apache).”

I have yet to figure out how to extend that feature to scripts in my plugins, but I’m working on it.

Posted May 31, 2009 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: javascript, performance, wordpress, WordPress 2.8. Be the first one.

90% of WordPress blogs he sees are spam. But for those who aren’t spammers and want to do better in Google….

“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues…WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.”

Still, he recommends a few extra plugins:

• Akismet — reduce spam comments
• Cookies for Comments — reduce spam comments
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• WP Super Cache — improve performance

“We crawl roughly in order of PageRank…higher ranked sites get crawled faster and deeper.”

“What is PageRank? The number and importance of links pointing to you.” But “avoid BO (backlink obsession). You want to be relevant and reputable.”

Relevant is what you say on your page/site.

Reputable is what others say (link) about you.

Be relevant: Blog about what you love. Blog about what you’re really good at doing (or, I suppose, what you want to be really good at). Blog in your own voice. Write often, write every day.

Think about the keywords that users will type. Include them naturally in your posts

Avoid jargon mismatch. Be sure to include language that non-expert users may use to find information. Include relevant information for beginners on the front page. Try Google Keyword Tool to understand what people are searching for.

Recommends /%postname%/ permalinks. And use slightly different terms in the permalink and title. Other URL tips:

• Use categories that are also good keywords
• keywords in URL paths
  • dashes best
  • next best is underscores
  • no spaces is worst
• Should I change old URLs? No.

Ferris’s law: don’t do it if it’s not fun.

Gaining Reputation?

• Be interesting
• Update often
• Apply Katamari Philosophy — start small, build up, don’t over reach. Start in a niche, then “ambigining” that niche.

Build an audience:

• Provide a useful service
• Do original research or reporting
• Give great information
• Creative niche
• Write some code
• Live blogging
• Make lists
• Create controversy
• Meet folks on Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Make a video

Consider using:

• Google website optimizer (a/b testing)
• <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>

In your content:

• Identify and leverage “evergreen” content
• Show related content
• Avoid shortcuts and scams
• Avoid paid posts

Keep your WordPress updated! Don’t let spammers hack your site.

LifeHacker: productivity porn, read about it more than you do it

Posted May 30, 2009 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: Matt Cutts, seo, WordCamp, WordCamp 2009, wordpress. Be the first one.

Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.

Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:

Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” - probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

After adding this to the one of my websites I saw a quite big increase in pageviews. It turned out that the visitors happily continued to browse around the website.

Posted May 27, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: google, google image search, image searching, seo. Be the first one.

The homeland security press is just getting wind of Joe Weston-Webb’s attempts to deter vandals with nonlethal weapons, but the story became all the rage in Britain when it broke last year.

The stories hit all the timely bits: Joe got burgled, so he announced plans to install a catapult. A what? A catapult. Why? To launch chicken droppings at miscreants. Unfortunately, the local constabulary warned him off, and the catapult wasn’t ready when burglars returned. Or, it could have been that the catapult didn’t work. But, aside from the fact that Joe does floors for Strictly Come Dancing, the real story is that Joe previously used to put the dung tossing, home defense catapult in question to launching his wife, Mary, across the River Avon in 1976. Joe’s bio tells more.

Joe’s years spent building catapults and other contraptions (and a cannon not yet converted for his home defense), hasn’t worn him out on experiments, or from re-using those circus acts to protect his property. But what of his wife? “She’s 54 now and far too big to fit into the cannon in any case,” Joe is reported to have said.

Mrs Weston-Webb was one of Mr Weston-Webb’s squad of “Moto-Birds”, travelling the world driving motorcycles and cars over ramps and water features. While injured with a broken arm, she climbed into the catapult her husband is now employing to defend his warehouses, before an expectant crowd of 30,000. “I flew across 160ft of the Avon,” she said. “Unfortunately the net was set at an angle and I bounced into the river.”

Mrs Weston-Webb stood by her husband as he attempted to build a car with wings that would fly from the edge of a quarry (it didn’t) and a ramp that would take a double-decker bus across the Avon.

And she stands by his decision to lay booby-traps. “We just feel so helpless,” she said.

Posted May 22, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless.. Tags: catapult, Grumpy Joe, home defense, Joe Weston-Webb, Mary Weston-Webb, River Avon. Be the first one.

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at Amazon, a used book store, or your parent’s book shelf. Still, it’s available on the web as PDF, at least two text files — one, two — And even as a podcast (subscribe via iTunes).

Lots of people have re-traced the journey described in the book, at least one person has posted a travelogue about it to the web. Henry Gurr has posted Pirsig’s own photos, and Christoph Bartneck pointed out many locations in Google Maps:

• Minnesota > Minneapolis > Breckenridge
• North Dakota > Ellendale > Hague
• South Dakota > Herreid > Mobridge > Lemmon > Bowman
• Montana > Baker > Miles City > Laurel > Red Lodge > Cooke City > Yellowstone National Park > Gardiner > Bozeman > English Department at the Montana State University > Missoula > Three Forks > Butte > Anaconda > Philipsburg > Hall > Lolo Pass > Billings
• Idaho > White Bird > Riggins > New Meadows > Cambridge > Brownlee Dam
• Oregon > Richland > Baker > Unity > Dixie Pass > Prairie City > Dayville > Mitchell > Prineville > Bend > La Pine > Crater Lake > Klamath Lake > Medford > Grants Pass
• California > Crescent City > Arcata > Leggett > Mendocino > Caspar, CA, Point Cabrillo Road - The Climax of the book. > San Francisco, CA, Haight / Divisadero - The corner on which Chris died.

NPR interviewed the author at the book’s release in 1974, when he was living in Minnesota.

Posted May 20, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Books, Movies, Music. Tags: download, Robert M. Pirsig, Robert Pirsig, zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Be the first one.

Posted May 15, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless.. Tags: funny, herding, sheep, video. One Comment.