smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Wordpress rolls to 2.0.5 ‘Ronan’.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

View the bug fixes and Mark Jaquith’s run down of the changes.

We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.

Congrats Ryan! Hope the baby and mum are both well. :)

There are times where the standard wordpress loop, is a simple, effective and well documented solution to generated a page, or a series of posts. It safely hides all the mySQL query language away in reusable, modular PHP expressions and can be called at the drop of a hat, as needed.

However, it’s downfall is that it’s based on grabbing n amount of posts based on the options set — which then requires expressions run against the results to further prune out unwanted data, such as excluding a post based on a category, or date. This, then, creates a scenario whereby there is a sizeable performance hit as the wordpress db is hit with, for example, a request for 10 entries, of which some may be thrown out during the_post() loop.

I’ve noticed over the last month or so the level of site feedback had diminished to zero. Being the ever curious geek, I decided it was time to identify whether I’ve become “teh suck”, or some other gremlin had chosen to press spanner to works.

A quick skim of the feedback form looked ok — the email was sane.. Next step was to log into the (mt) provided webmail ((.. the new (gs) ajax powered webmail rocks, as it happens.)) and.. you’ve got mail!.

.. and so it begins.

Round 5 has started with a bang - 100 Sites In 15 Minutes » 9rules Network Official Blog.

Well updates won’t come this fast, but I thought it was cool to say that we got 100 submissions in 15 minutes.

My submission is in, along with, by now, a good deal many more. I think it’s pretty safe to say this will likely be the largest round in 9rules history.. Good luck to those who have submitted and as I’ve mentioned before, I look forward to discovering a great many more diverse and creative voices through the 9.

All done.. welcome back.. the ‘foo is now clustered, baby!

Brace yourselves..

I’m about to migrate to the new (mt) grid server technology that has just gone release.

A recent addition to my ipod podcast list has been the wordpress podcast, which is a great way to keep tabs on news and events surrounding wordpress development and the community in general.

In the latest episode - Episode 8: Dealing with splogs, posting by e-mail and more a goodly number of plugins are covered, including sig2feed and a little coverage of the joy that is splogging.

After pinking the foo for much of October, via Derek’s pink for October theme it’s time to dress the ‘foo in it’s latest colours ready for 9rules last round of the year.

In a little over 24 hours the doors to round 5 open, to which this author will be applying ((being not the least bit nervous in the process)). For those also looking towards October 25 with the same intent, I can heartily recommend reading tyme’s round 5 q&a for a few useful pointers.

Having just upgraded to
Firefox 2.0 RC3, I note with some amusement that the ‘bug’ affecting firefox’s default
google homepage has resurfaced.
I’m not exactly sure when this new concept of using an ever so bright neon yellow sign that screams “help help, I’m being hijacked!” came into being, but I’m pretty sure it will be […]

I received a nice present in the email inbox this morning — no, not more Viagra deals, but something that shows an increasing bend towards blogging as prime real-estate for advertisers.
Performancing Partners offers publishers a new, smart way to get paid for blogging.
Given I also use performancing statistics to help round out the ‘metrics’ […]