Technology

In recognition of the divisive and increasingly meaningless nature of x.0 monikers — think library 2.0 and the web 2.0 that inspired it — I’m doing away with them.

When Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with disdain about the AJAX happy nouveaux web application designers and the second internet bubble (and he’s not entirely off-base) and starts claiming he’s moving to Web 3.0, then it’s a pretty clear sign that we should give up on trying to version all this.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something big going on, but it doesn’t respect version numbers and it isn’t about AJAX or social software. And as much as designers and developers want to take credit, we cant. I’m not the first to say it, but let me repeat it without the baggage of these x.0 monikers: people are making the internet a part of their daily lives and in doing so it is changing us. With or without a label, that’s what we need to talk about.

I have over 1000 posts here at MaisonBisson, but even so, the table with all those posts is under 3MB. Now I’ve got a project with 150,000 posts — yes, 150,000 posts! — and the table is about 500MB. An associated table, structured sort of like WP’s postsmeta, has over 1.5 million records and weighs in at over 100MB (not including the 150MB of indexes).

Up to now I’ve been a “throw more hardware at it” sort of guy — and in a server with only 1GB of RAM, that’s probably the best solution — but I also think it’s time I learned some MySQL optimization tricks. Zach‘s been pushing me to get mytop installed for quite a while, and I finally got around to it.

mytop is a console-based (non-gui) tool for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL 3.22.x, 3.23.x, and 4.x server. It runs on most Unix systems (including Mac OS X) which have Perl, DBI, and Term::ReadKey installed. And with Term::ANSIColor installed you even get color. If you install Time::HiRes, you’ll get good real-time queries/second stats.

I’m not running it here (only because I’m too lazy), but I was happy to find Arne Brachold’s Del.icio.us – Bookmark this! WordPress Plugin. It puts a sweet Bookmark on del.icio.us link whereever you call this function: <?php dbt_getLinkTag(“Bookmark on del.icio.us”); ?>

Arne also wrote the Google sitemap plugin I use (though it turns out I’m a few versions behind).

For those people still using Gallery, here’s the last straw: Rasmus Lerdorf got to playing with the Flickr API and quickly wrote up a script to migrate his photos from Gallery to Flickr. He’s didn’t post a script or anything, he’s just saying it’s easy to do.

A lot of things are easy to do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they get done. So it’s probably a great relief to somebody that Paul Baron got on the job. Paul didn’t do any coding, but he posted a rewarding challenge to a Flickr forum, a Flickr member responded (and took home 200 bones for his trouble), and now Paul is sharing the solution with you.

So what’s the holdup now?

My hosting provider sent along the following message:

We have experienced a DDOS attack today January 4th, which resulted in latency across the entire network. During this time your domain, email, ftp and other services may have appeared to be offline, or intermittent. Our techs have been working as quickly as possible to block the attack and get the network back up to speed.

I was relieved to know that the unexpected downtime was the result of something I’d done. The problem, and I can feel for my hosting provider here, is that DDOS attacks aren’t so easy to block (while also leaving the network open enough to be usable), so I wouldn’t be surprised if performance here is rather variable for a while.

Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.

WordPress 2.0 is out and available for download now. I don’t know how the development team did it — I mean with the holidays and all — but here it is. And now I have to admit that I haven’t even played with the betas, so I’ve got no clue how bsuite works with the big 2.0. For all I know it works just fine, or it drops all your tables and sends your browser history to your mother, so please take caution.

But WP2 has a lot of things I want too, so I’ll be checking things out and making any necessary changes to bsuite as soon as possible.

Zach got a call from the Serena Collage rep who rattled off this list of customers in New England:

• Boston College
• Northeastern
• Bristol Community College
• UMass Lowell

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

• Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
   
• Collage appears to have good content reuse features
   
• OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
   
• Drupal: open source and turning heads

Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.

Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to jump to other search engines.

Garrett Murray’s ManiacalRage is an interesting blog on its own, but he’s also doing some good AJAX on his search interfaces. Look first at the archive search. But also take some time to appreciate the new content search. Sure, you’ll have some complaints, but it’s his site and not yours and there are some ideas there that are pretty interesting and useful.

My Treo rocks. Part of my love for the new gadget is how I can now AIM on the run without SMS. Sure, I risk frostbitten fingers as I walk across campus and I’d probably be a lot better off if I just called the person, but…but…

Anyway, Everything Treo was near the top of my Google query with a roundup of three commercial IM apps for Palm. But none of the reviewed apps seemed all that great, and I sort of expected to find a free client. The Treonauts review wasn’t much help either, and I was about to give up when I found Atomig Cog‘s Toccer, a completely free, still-in-beta AIM client. It’s plenty capable and seems to be in active development (five releases since mid-August).

A couple features I didn’t think about before I started looking include directly connecting to AOL (some clients use a proxy), background receiving (because fully-synchronus IMing is frustrating), and support for the five-way nav clicker.

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:

We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…

OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.1 will be supported by Internet Explorer 7, among other software, so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. Also new is the ability to specify suggested searches, such as spelling suggestions and related queries. (link and emphasis addded)

Woot! I’ll be doing something with this soon.