Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
WoW – Wordpress on Windows
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 3 — Speeding up publishing.
Sep 7th
Yesterday while publishing a new entry into my blog I started getting PHP timeout scripts. At first I thought it was a plug-in I just installed for testing and removed it, yet publishing was still sluggish. I then remembered a new change I made. I had enabled a boatload of ping servers in wordpress. I went in and removed these ping servers and immediately my site publishing speeds increased back to normal.
So, if you have a large number of ping servers added recently and find your blog publishing is failing it’s very likely this is the problem. Fortunately, there’s a solution and it’s name is “WP-No Ping Wait“. Turns out I wasn’t the only one affected by this and a detailed write up about this issue can be found here: http://asymptomatic.net/2006/02/13/2260/why-posts-…
Additionally, GrabPERF plots the page load of ping-o-matic here: http://www.grabperf.org/homepage.php?page=scatter&…
Finally, here’s my list of ping servers, it’s no wonder my blog was timing out.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://1470.net/api/ping
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 2
Sep 5th
In this article, I’m going to talk about the Rating system I have on my site. You’ll notice each article has a series of stars listed below the title.
Like this:
These stars are the rating for that article. Each visitor is able to rate an article from 1-5 by simply moving their mouse along the image and clicking. The page reloads the image inline and updates the rating in realtime, no page loads or anything (sounds like AJAX doesn’t it). This is extremely useful and a very easy way for people to leave article feedback without going through all the steps of posting comments, etc.
This particular plug-in was created by GamerZ and is called WP-PostRatings (pretty original, eh?) and be found here.
Installation was straightforward and easy, upload the folders and activate it under the plug-ins feature in wordpress’s admin area (I’m really loving wordpress as a blogging engine).
The trickiest part of using this app is editing your theme. It seems in wordpress the themes are pretty standardized but still very open to the designer and as such many of these plug-ins need to be edited in. The nice thing is that adding them in is always very easy. Pretty much every one of these plug-ins say open your index.php file in your theme in an editor, look for this line
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
and Add this line anywhere below it:
<?php if(function_exists(‘the_ratings’)) { the_ratings(); } ?>
The beauty of this is that just where to put that line is really anywhere. So there’s a lot of trial and error to figure out just where anywhere looks best and each theme it’s going to look better in a different location.
Now the downside to this is if you change themes . . You change your plug-ins as you’ll start fresh and have to go in and add them anywhere again.
Ofcourse it may seem I’m simplifying the install of this plug-in but I’m not it’s an extremely easy to install and use. But it doesn’t stop there. This plugin gets even better. Under options you’ll find this plug-in has two options tabs. One provides your post ratings logs and stats, (I’ve had 6 users vote on 5 different articles so far). Under Ratings Options you can adjust the display type of the ratings image, who is allowed to rate (registered users, guests,etc) and the text Template allowing you to provide feedback to your visitors on various metrics like the number of users that have voted, the percentage, the max rating, etc.
There are additional features I’m not currently ‘Pimpin’ but I’ll be rolling them out soon, like highlighting the highest rated article and most rated article. So help a brother out and rate some articles.
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 1
Aug 24th
For this post series (my first post series) I want to highlight some of the wordpress plugins and extensions I’m using. As noted I’m running wordpress on MySQL & PHP on a windows 2003 server running IIS6 hosted at AppliedI.net. Oh and since acronyms like WIMP (WTF? WIMP?!?!) are hot these days I have officially coined my own for this series: WOW! for WordPress on Windows! WOW! (I wanted to use HOT DAMN! But just couldn’t come up with the right set of words 
)
Probably the first thing that stood out when you visited my blog was the theme I’m using. I’m using Vistered Little Theme. One of the nice features with this theme is the great backgrounds. You can select the backgrounds by clicking on one of the small thumbnail squares up in the left column. To upload your own background image you simply upload an image to the backgrounds folder and reload the home page and your new image is one of the available backgrounds. The backgrounds are listed in alphabetical order so you can adjust which background appears as default by selecting it above.
Another nice feature about this theme is that you can customize the location of the status bar on the right hand side from within the theme options.
You can also adjust the skin around the various blocks. I personally prefer the default skin as the others are well ugly in my opinion but then it’s my blog and my opinion.
One thing I found difficult with this theme was getting a handle on which page to edit to extend it. Some of the other plugins I’m using required special blocks and such so I had to get a handle on that first. Really there’s just two files I ever edit in the theme editor, the “Main Index Template” and the “Sidebar”. I edited the sidebar to add the various special features like weather, clustrmaps, my tagcloud, etc. I edited the Main Index Template for things like my rate this post, number of views per post, etc. The nice thing about this theme is that each block is setup in it’s own CSS div block so it’s really quite easy to get a handle on how to edit it.
All in all, the theme is very impressive visually and definitely gives the “WOW” effect and if nothing else the themes in wordpress were reason enough to switch to wordpress from the CommunityServer application I was using before.
