On the 22nd of April, I (Liz) was lucky enough to be able to speak on scaling WordPress and servers at the New Zealand WordCamp.

The people there were great, and i ended up meeting and talking to many fascinating people about all sorts of code, servers, set ups among other things.
I was a little nervous that i only had 30 minutes to fit in a lot of information, and i had to dumb it down a fair bit for those with less technical knowledge to make it understandable.

I did manage to fit the talk in with no problems at all, it only took 45 mins, plus question time! Nobody seemed to notice the missing 15 minutes from their clocks luckily, and everyone appeared to understand and have great questions about how it worked.

Because scaling is really specific, the hardest part i came up against was really trying to describe something, and explain something, in a way that was non-specific. Anyone who knows servers, knows that there is no one solution to suit everyone. How ever there are a few common areas you can usually look into.

For WordPress one of the bet things you can do is deactivate and DELETE any unused plugins or themes. Get a developer to check them, a broken one can take down your entire server easily! Not deleting them leaves a potential security hole should that plugin be discontinued, those files are still accessible via the web remember!

A few things identified were setting up things like a Cache (or Cache Plugin), enabling the wordpress object cache in wp-config, and moving as many things offsite as possible.
By moving things offsite, i mean things like video content, photos, music etc.
Why spend hours of your time setting up a shockwave/html5 video player, converters, and using disk space to play video when you can just use youtube? This is what they do for a living, they have extensive programmers who specialize in this, so it stands to reason they are very good at it, and it will save you a lot of money and time.

The same method works for Photography, Music, or any other large files if you can do it. It will save you a lot of pain and money later on down the track.

Another key thing for scaling a single server larger is setting up HyperDB, then having 2 separate databases on other servers. This offloads database offsite, but without the difficulty of having to setup MySQL replication.

If you are using WordPress and want to know more, check here for your nearest WordCamp http://central.wordcamp.org/

Anyone who knows me, knows that i’m most definitely NOT a feminist , i’m usually the first person to say some feminists go over the top. However, when i see it blatantly, i usually will call it, and not tolerate it.

One thing that does make my blood boil, is people who cross over female pornography or near naked pictures, with Tech. These things are NOT related. Females in Tech do not generally just rip off their clothes and pose with half a can of paint on their face.

Sure, some females in technology do this, but most do not. I also play ukulele, im not seeing anyone posting ukuleles on their I.T. blogs or feeds? Just because somebody may model or do other things as well as I.T., does not make it related to I.T.

The worst part about this crappy idealism in I.T., is that men somehow start expecting that females in I.T. ARE these sorts of people. It’s embarrassing and awkward when a guy hears you work in I.T. and asks for a picture.

So yesterday, i was a bit ‘WTF’ when i saw a picture of a near naked women go past in my google+ stream. Now, I have nothing against pornography, nor near naked females, models, or anything of the sort at all. I just have a problem when its posted by what is supposedly a Technology related page. In this case, it was  TechWebCast

I took a breath and carefully worded a question and my objection to the image in question, only to be laughed at and have it trivialized by the guy that runs it Brad Chasenore . After i commented a second time, to explain that it was seriously objectionable, he removed the post.

Original Post:  

I was rather annoyed at the treatment, but did not want to make a huge deal of it at the time, so i private messaged him asking why it was posted in the first place. I am always a believer in educating people rather than screaming at them, i figured perhaps he just did not realize how important this is to people?

In that conversation i felt that, again, he did not seem to really care, and seemed to try and imply somebody else posted it, but did not reply when i asked who. I went to his profile and found he had posted several other similar images of the same and another women at the same time from his own profile.

At this point i was still a little peeved off, but i can live with that, i was going to let things lie, i had mentioned something in passing to a friend Randi who also is female in Tech that i was a bit miffed . At this point in time, i was happy to let things lie, block him and forget about it all, accepting that he’s just a another idiot who does not get it. I had hoped for an apology, but had accepted that was not going to happen.

Private Conversation:

Randi made a small post about it which said

“So after all the controversy about geekli.st, they got a ton of signups. I guess +Brad Chasenore is trying to do the same thing with +Techwebcast … but in a far less interesting way. Learn some unique marketing techniques, buddy.”

At this point , he +1′d that, reshared it, and asked what that meant and what it was about, Several people commented asking about it. Randi mentioned to me this had happened, so i checked it out. I posted a link to a screenshot i had taken, because people were asking what it was about.

This was when Brad pitched in and must have decided to go all out and say ‘If you dont like what i post dont look’.

Brads Post  

For me, that was the tipping point. It’s one thing to make a mistake, its another to be deliberately offensive and sexist, especially when you represent a Tech Podcast and have a larger Technical audience than average.

So i post this, in the hope that others will see the stupidity that most women in technology area have to deal with , and would prefer not too.

Another related post by Brad  

And he shared my post (and deleted it)

I have a really awesome Dell studio 17″ laptop. It works brilliantly with Ubuntu since the day i got it, however during an upgrade at sometime, it suddenly stopped suspending and hibernating.

This was annoying more than anything, but still fine. I hunted for months high and low for an answer, and could find nothing in any log files. I saw many complaints and bugfixes of which non seemed to work.

The machine suspended fine, it just never came back from that. It sat with a blank screen until i power cycled it to get it going.

So, i had 4 days off work, and decided to get to the bottom of this silly bug. I could only assume that it was something preventing it from resuming, either kernel, module, or software.

Again, nothing in the logs anywhere. Finally i stumbled over this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/748994

In the comments the following fix worked brilliantly for me.

Steps:

1. Create new file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-suspend.conf with the following two lines:

blacklist firewire_core
blacklist firewire_ohci

2. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u

3. Reboot and check that the modules were not loaded by running: lsmod | grep firewire

4. Suspend the machine and bring it back up.

5. Hibernate the machine and bring it back up.

Both suspend and hibernate work now.

If you want a wordpress plugin that feeds your PUBLIC posts to your blog in a widget – test mine for me and let me know how that works for you

go into ‘Add plugin’ and search for ‘google plus feed widget’ and it should be at the top (made by Liz Quilty). Direct link is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-plus-feed-widget/

Unzip into your plugins dir. Enable the plugin in wordpress, then go to your widgets menu. Drag it where ever you want it, and make sure you add your Google ID into its config (otherwise it defaults to mine).

Let me know any bugs, addons or similar required .

See it working just over there —>>

Somebody mentioned that it was hard/impossible to do this, and i know that a few people will want to. So i figured i would hunt about and see if it was possible, and it is! It’s not even too difficult!

First of all, go to http://plusfeed.appspot.com/ – it gives you an rss feed of all your public posts (this will only work for public posts sorry). My URL for my rss feed is http://plusfeed.appspot.com/114228869493885222559 , yours will look similar, just grab the id number from your profile page URL and add it after the domain.

Now go to your WordPress , login, to go Plugins > Add New . Search for and find the plugin called FeedWordPress and install/activate it.
Now it should show you your feed in that syndication tab, you can click the ‘update now’ button to load the last few posts.

Now you will notice a new menu bottom left called ‘Syndication’, click on that, then add in the URL above from plusfeed.appspot.com into the box named “New source”. It will confirm the look/feel, and add it. Now you can click the ‘update’

Updating

Now click on the Feeds and Updates menu below it, look for the drop down box and choose ‘Look for updates after page loads’. You can do updates before the page loads, but this means if a person comes to your blog they are sitting waiting for the page to load whilst it does background grabbing of data.
From here you are away working, feel free to fiddle with other settings.

I found i prefer the link to go to the blog post rather than link to the google+ link, so i go to Posts and Links menu, and scroll down to Links, then choose ‘The local copy on this website’