WordPress, W3 Total Cache, and MaxCDN

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache

Two great tastes that taste great together.

A match made in heaven.  For a long while using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) was something only the big boys did.  The CDN market was pioneered by Akamai who remain one of the major players, and companies like Akamai tend to want to deal with other big companies.

For a long time this type of arrangement put the use of a CDN out of reach for the average net user. But these days there are numerous CDNs for every conceivable type of content.  Video, images, CSS and JS files, you name it, it’s out there.  Still though using a CDN is sort of a pain, you have to either upload all your content to the network, or configure the network to pull it automatically from you but then you have to go and change each and everyone of your URLs.

Luckily, WordPress users have an elegant CDN solution in the form of W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN.  Let’s dig in a little and see what exactly a CDN is, how you can set one up, and how you can make it work for you.

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Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

The Twitter Trap

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Twitter Fail

The Original Twitter Trap

I’ve been setting up a blog for my wife recently and one of the functions I wanted for the blog was to post a tweet when she makes a new post.  Hardly breaking any new ground there! I ended up using the excellent WP to Twitter plugin by Joseph Dolson which expertly and extensively provides the functionality to enable this.  In the past configuring the plugin to your Twitter account would have been as simple as entering in your username and password.  But Twitter has disabled that old system sometime ago and have rolled out OAuth in it’s place.  Here’s what Joseph has to say about about the new method:

The process to set up OAuth authentication for your web site is needlessly laborious. It is also confusing. However, this is the only method available from Twitter at this time.

I certainly agree with his take on it!  It’s worth exploring some of the reasons behind this switch and how Twitter is attempting to lock down their platform and trap us by limiting our interactions to Twitter approved experiences.

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Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , , ,

Claiming Your WordPress Blog on Technocrati

April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Technocrati Logo

Attach your Technocrati Profile to Your Blog

Technocrati used to have a link that embedded a particular code.  These days they ask you to put a claim code, like this J5VQXYV57DWC, in a blog post after you request the initial claim.  Claiming the blog is a fairly easy process where you tell Technocrati a bit about your blog like it’s feed url and what the blog is about and I strongly suggest you consider it for your own blog.

After you’ve submitted your blog info you’ll get an email telling you how to get the Technocrati code.  Once you’ve embedded this code into a blog post you’ll return to your Technocrati account page and go into the Claim Blog section once more.  In there you’ll see a button asking you to verify your Technocrati claim and you just click that.  Shortly afterwards you should receive an email telling you that Technocrati successfully found the code on your blog and then it’ll go into a queue for verification.

And that is pretty much it!  And if you suspect I’m doing this process right now you would be correct.  Rather than just having a cryptic code on my blog I thought I’d explain a bit about the process.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

Amazing Mercury Photo

April 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Microblog

WordPress 3.1 Post Format Support in Prose Child Theme for Studiopress Genesis

April 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

Post Formats in Prose

WP 3.1 Post Formats in Prose

I’m new to StudioPress’ Genesis theme so I was looking for a small project to help familiarize myself with it. When I purchased it I decided I would also purchase a child theme. Since my personal tastes trend toward minimalism I ended up choosing the Prose theme which this blog is using. Then all that was left was trying to figure out what useful thing I could do to tip my toe into the world of Genesis framework development.

I didn’t have to wait too long luckily when I saw that Studiopress had already released the Tapestry theme: a tumblr style child theme using the new post format feature in WordPress 3.1. I thought it would be nice to have a microblog on my own site that was separate from this one for the quick and silly stuff. So this little project was born.
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digitalized what?

April 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

My sister’s proto-blog.

Filed Under: Microblog

Oh Miyamoto

April 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock-n-roll.

Shigeru Miyamoto

Filed Under: Microblog

Hosting Your Own Services

March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Service Hosting

Hosting your own services has lots of benefits.

Hosting your own services is becoming increasingly anachronistic as time goes on.  When you have huge players like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo providing everything under the sun there doesn’t seem to be much point in it. However, there are some unique benefits to hosting your own email, your own blog, your own web applications, your own whatever.

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Filed Under: Sysadmin Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Case for 11g

March 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Jungle

Oracle IPM 11g is the latest version of the venerable Image and Process Management product but the product has a long history.  IPM was developed by Optika in the late 90s with the name eMedia as a workflow enabled replacement for an imaging solution named FilePower.  The eMedia brand was phased out at version 2.0 and replaced with the Acorde name.  We still have some clients who are successfully running Acorde installations to this day.

Optika was bought out by a company called Stellent and the product went through another rebranding phase this time as Imaging and Business Process Management (IBPM).  It was at this time the version was bumped up from Acorde 4.0 to Stellent IBPM 7.5 to bring the product in line with Stellent’s overall product versioning.

Finally Oracle buys Stellent and brings the Stellent Content Server and IBPM products under their umbrella.  Content Server turns into Universal Content Management and IBPM turns into Oracle Image and Process Management 10gR3.

So we’ve finally arrived at IPM.  A key thing to remember that during this period of development and rebranding is that the product remained essentially the same.  It operated on the same principles and was architected in the same manner.  Not to say there weren’t improvements between eMedia 1.0 and IPM 10gR3 but these improvements embodied natural evolution of the product.

This is true no longer; IPM 11g has changed the game.

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Filed Under: ECM Tagged With: , , , ,