Authentication Hacks

My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post summing up the project.

Plugins Mentioned

• wpCAS (long description)
• Alternate Contact Info
• WordPress Ticket Framework
• wpSMS (long description)

Scriblio

I was most excited, however, to talk about Scriblio, a plugin that turns WordPress into a library catalog with faceted searching and browsing. Those slides are online as well (.MOV / .PDF). The core plugin is in the repository, but I’d recommend people join the mail list if they’re thinking of diving in to it.

Scriblio Sites I Demoed

• Collingswood Public Library
• Colby-Sawyer College Archives
• Beyond Brown Paper photo archive

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.

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.

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

It’s not WordCamp Paris (running on 7 February), but WordCamp Edu Northeast is today. I’m there to meet up with fellow WordPressies and talk about extending WordPress with Holladay Penick and Dave Lester.

Squeezing the three of us into a single time slot requires quite a bit of cutting, especially if we hope to have time to answer questions, so I’ll be focusing on Scriblio. That means I won’t be talking about how we’re going to use BuddyPress or replace significant portions of our university portal with it. Still, my slides are available as both QuickTime and PDF files.

It’s worth mentioning wpCAS (plugin directory page) in this context. I maintain the plugin and we use it to integrate WPMU with our central authentication infrastructure.

I’ve long been a fan of WordPress, and my feelings on open source are clear, but here’s another reason to love WP: A list for the commercial portal software we now use had seven messages last week, most of them asking for help and few of them getting answers. WP-Hackers, the development list, had 179 in the same period. It’s that kind of activity that supports the development of new features and the rapid fixing of bugs (or not, in the case of the commercial product).

Slides: QuickTime or PDF.

The huge problem with open source software is that there are no sales numbers to show how many people are using it. We know that WordPress.com hosts over three million blogs. We know EduBlogs powers nearly 200,000. But how many sites are hosted using the original, downloadable, self-installed and managed version of WordPress?

Now, the automatic update notification system in WordPress gives answers to that question and others. Most hugely: over 2.6 million sites are hosted on WordPress.

I hadn’t heard of Global Voices Online, a community generated global group news blog, until Jeremy Clarke spoke of it at WordCamp. And I didn’t think the site, with it’s do-good premise, worked until I actually explored it for a while. But, well, it’s a bit fascinating.

Global Voices grew out of a one-day conference in December 2004 at Harvard Law School which brought together bloggers from around the world to discuss ways in which the new medium could foment global dialogue at the grassroots level.

The notion is that volunteers and paid editors are scouring the blogosphere to find native voices around the world. And then these volunteers and editors summarize the news content among those bloggers and post the stories to Global Voices — in English. The aggregation is human driven because, they say, it leads to better results and the local knowledge of the the human aggregators allows them to spot news among new sources more quickly. The example case is personal-oriented bloggers who become front-line news reporters when news-worthy events strike home.

They’ve got funding from the Harvard Berkman Center, MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Reuters, and all their content is posted under a Creative Commons Attribution license. All this blogging stuff is interesting to the WordPress community here at WordCamp, but the fact that they’re also running it on WordPress allows Clarke to offer some specific tips: “use author profile pages to promote your authors,” “reuse, reuse, reuse code, reduction happens naturally,” and others. It turned out to be a better session than I expected.

Emil Ong is the Chief Evangelist and a lead developer for Caucho Technology, the developers of the Quercus PHP to Java compiler. The idea, I guess, is to write in PHP, deploy in Java, which some people say is better supported by the “enterprise.”

Ong claims 26% performance improvement over Apache + mod_php + APC. That sounds great, I suppose, but it’s less than what Chris Lea suggests is possible if you simply replace Apache with Nginx.

“Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” –Chris Lea.

Why? No forking. No loading of unnecessary components. Fast CGI. And to prove it’s not as complex as you might think, he’s installing it live. The session has eight minutes left, can he do it?

Yes, he did. The big concern is in managing permalinks without .htaccess, and it turns out it’s not so difficult. Does he have a cookbook for this? Darn, no time left for questions, I’ll have to ask later.

I’ve been pretty aware of the risks of SQL injection and am militant about keeping my database interactions clean. Mark Jaquith today reminded me about the need to make sure my browser output is filtered through clean_url(), sanitize_url(), and attribute_escape(). Furthermore, we all need to remember current_user_can(), check_admin_referer(), and nonces.

Will Norris talking about things OAuth, OpenID, and Diso at WordCamp. Demonstrates/fakes an OAuth authentication and authorization process with WordPress for iPhone app.

Does this matter? OAuth support is slated for WP 2.7, and people are finally getting smart about linking all this stuff without throwing passwords around “like confetti.”

Aaron Brazell at WordCamp is talking about search and finability “not SEO.” Riffing on Ambient Findability, he asks:

• Can people find your blog?
• Can people find their way around your blog?
• Can people find your content and services despite your blog?

Remember:

• Your blog serves as a nexus for information about you.
• You serve as the nexus for trust and relevance.

Going Further? Make your social content outside your blog searchable, findable via your blog. Brazell conveniently recommends using Lijit, which does just that.

Liz Danzico of Happy Cog Studios spoke today about her consulting with Automattic on the design of the WordPress admin interface.

As with so many of the presentation today, I’m really hoping the slides will be published soon, as there are some great ideas coming out.

Liz spent a lot of time watching WordPress users at blog. At work, in cafes, and in their homes with coffee and cigarettes, Liz saw real users of all types doing everything they do with WordPress. The slides show some of the results, but I couldn’t see all the details.

She also spoke of the recent trend in using nouns in user interfaces (again, the slides showed some interesting examples), while WordPress organizes things around verbs (“write” and “manage”). Existing WordPressers responded poorly to a wireframe of a noun-ified admin panel, but I thought it looked kind of interesting (though I can’t say that it would actually be better).

There was more, lots of great ideas, so I’m hoping to see the slides again soon to shake my memory.

Liz Danzico, design, application design, wordpress, WordCamp, WordCamp 2007

Scriblio is based on WordPress, an open source content management system, and the community that uses, supports, and builds it is what makes it great. WordCamp started last year, when the community was about 750,000, and it’s even more important now that it’s grown to nearly two million.

The first day of the schedule focuses on how to better use the software, and included a great session by Lorelle VanFossen. Tomorrow is more technical, with discussions about performance, usability, and development.

What’s it all mean to Scriblio? Part of the Scriblio design philosophy is to make it easy to take advantage of advances in technology and practice that are serving all internet users, not just library users. The community has ramped up the WordPress development and release schedule, by building on top of that we get to spend our time figuring how to use the technology to serve our patrons without having to build a library-specific version of it.

[tags]WordCamp, WordCamp 2007, WordPress[/tags]

Robert Hoekman, Jr is speaking now on Designing the Obvious, his book and philosophy:

These principles include building only what’s necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity.

I just added the book to my must read list, but what I’m hearing here sounds like instructions to a sculptor: chip away all that is not David.

Designing the Obvious, Robert Hoekman Jr, design, web applications, WordCamp, WordCamp2007, WordPress

I’m at WordCamp again. This time I dragged Matt and Zach with me. Dan Kuykendall, author of PodPress, is first on the schedule, and I’m just now learning how he’s built in support for a variety of media types (more than MP3) and for premium content.

Those who showed up early got to pick over last year’s t-shirts. This year’s shirts are way different, having given up the somewhat cleaner and simpler design of that has characterized WordPress so far. Yeah, I’m complaining about t-shirt design, I can admit there are bigger challenges in the world.

WordCamp, WordPress, conference, WordCamp 2007

Woot! WordCamp kickoff party at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher (no doubt selected in part because homophone to Automattic), at the ferry Building.

But does it make up for missing Wikimania, the LibraryThing Bar-b-Que-Thing, and Napoleon Dynamite night at The Twig?

kickoff, Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, WordCamp, WordPress, Taylor’s Automatic Refresher

Matt Mullenweg announced WordCamp in San Francisco, then ten days later Abby announced the LibraryThing cookout in Portland (Maine). Both are set for August 5. The LibraryThing event promises free burgers and potato salad, while WordCamp attendees will enjoy both free BBQ and free t-shirts. I’d like to go to both, but rather than have to make some decision about which one I’d most like to go to, I’m leaning on the fact that I’d already bought my flight to SFO when the LT event was announced.

Anyway, it’s casual Friday here, so this post is really just an excuse to (again) link to the funniest BBQ-related video I’ve seen in a while.

bbq, cookout, hamburgers, librarything, potato salad, wordcamp

As noted here, I’m going to WordCamp in SFO in early August.

Matt describes it as a BarCamp-style event (where “’BarCamp-style’ is a code phrase for ‘last minute’”) with “a full day of both user and developer discussion.” I’m just going for the free t-shirt, of course, but I can imagine a number of folks will get a good value out of the sessions and discussions that will likely run, especially all the developer stuff.

Also, if you’ve got some suggestions about what else I should be doing in San Fran, leave a comment or contact me with any suggestions.

blog software, blogging, conference, San Francisco, SFO, travel, WordCamp, WordCamp 2006, WordPress, WordPress Developer’s Conference, WordPress Developer’s Conference