Appearances

The Header option allows you select which image should appear in your header with ease.

The Background allows you to define a color for your background or an image, it doesn’t seem to allow for more controls than that with the default theme.

The Menu option allows you to create a custom menu system. Definitely a nice touch. You define your elements, and include the custom menu as a widget into your theme.

The theme included is definitely an improvement over the older themes. It’s a more general design that you see in alot of wordpress sites, and should suit most of everyone’s basic needs.

Creating Posts

When creating posts you can define a featured image. The image will appear on your homepage and category listings, custom header, or other location if your theme supports.

Memory Requirements

My biggest issue the new version, which is still an issue with the previous versions, is the memory requirements. A fresh install of wordpress takes up to 10 Megabytes of memory to run for a single page request. That’s insane. The wordpress team really needs to make some headway on improving the memory requirements of wordpress. I’ve read their recommendations on the subject, and they all boil down to increasing the memory limit for php (especially when you use quite a number of plugins), or getting a bigger box. This is only a half-solution, and doesn’t solve the entire problem. The other option of caching the php code is fine, but that increases the running httpd processes on your server, there by eating up more memory.

Conclusions

I’m seeing some good improvements with wordpress which makes me continue to use it. When it comes to memory requirements thought, I’m not too thrilled. I hope to find another system with the same or similar functionality and customization. If you’re on a shared host, the memory issues can bite you later on when your site gets popular, of if you’re running too many plugins.

I hope the wordpress team really addresses the memory usage issue, and makes some more performance improvements to WordPress. I would recommend to them the following:

• Caching the wp_options table to a file on the filesystem and/or support for memcache.
• General support for memcache.
• Move the rss_feed data that gets left in the wp_options table and move that to another table.
• Not to clone the wp_query object. I don’t know why they do this, but having two of them just takes up more memory.
• Eliminite the older code in the codebase. There are numerous references through out the files for old pieces of code that have been superseded by the same function under a different name.
• Allow for more exposure of the underlining data from posts, comments, and other areas, so there aren’t as many plugins that get created.

The new OS will improve upon Vista, and will be available to devs in beta version soon. Honestly, I think Microsoft needs to slow down on all these releases. I’ve been using Vista for just about 18 months. These turn around cycles don’t allow for sufficient time to work out the kinks properly and to include the features that people want if you don’t allow for proper feedback. Vista has probably one of the worst releases of any Microsoft OS due to the number of issues with stability and support at launch time. Most of the issues have been resolved, but I still have some issues with my OS running a 64 bit platform. Stabilize the OS before you go off and work on something new, because if you haven’t fixed your current OS by the time you work on the new one, aren’t you carrying over the issues and bugs I’m experiencing?

I’m sure the motiviation for this is money, and to help push the transition to the new platform for all the businesses who said no to Vista. Look, if you get it working better, you will see the move.

Blah, I’m done on this topic. Time to go back to my command line interface on linux.

This is great. I’m using putty and wintabber daily to work on and manage a number of linux machines. It makes organizing all these windows efficient, and I don’t have to spend the money on

Some other new features to note:

• Tab placement: allows you to position the tabs to either the Top, left side, right side or bottom.
• Tab appearances: give you the option to style your tabs, either as a flat look, visio style, excel style and more.
• Color coding the tabs for easy identification.
• Will read your old putty profiles for easier access.
• large icon support.

Download the newest version here.

One of the easiest things you can do, if your modules are dynamically loaded, is to comment them out. When ever a module is active, it takes up some memory in every instance of Apache that runs. When I get more time, I will give a more thorough analysis as to which modules are safe to disable based on your needs, but for right now I’ll give you some general guidelines of what to look for. If you find that a something doesn’t work when you have disabled a module, turn it back on.

Modules:

Disable the modules you know you don’t use. It’s simple to just comment them out.

• userdir_module: this module supports user’s with a website folder. If you’ve ever seen something like http://www.example.com/~chris/  that’s a userdir. If you have a development environment, this is usefully to leave this on if you use it. If not, disable it.
• cgi_module: this module does the handling for /cgi-bin/. If you still use cgi-bin for any of your scripts, leave it on, otherwise, disable it.
• Any module that starts with proxy. If you use any of the proxy modules, leave them on, other wise disable them.
• There are a number of modules that deal with authentication that you can disable, but there are one or two modules you need in that group because they provide code to some other sections of apache that if you were to disable them, you will notice some issues.
• dav_module and dave_fs_module: Unless you use web dav for editing content on your website, disable them.
• Depending on how you installed apache, it will install modules for specific programming languages like PHP, Perl, Python, and other things. If you don’t need those things, disable it.

I’ve used this methods for years, and have found a great reduction in memory usage. Some cases shaving off 2-5MB per process.

I’ve setup the websites on this box to use wordpress, mysql, php, and apache. When I had just one site, I noticed that my memory usage seemed a bit high. It’s a combination of the default settings for mysql, and the memory requirements for wordpress. Fixing wordpress would take some time and that’s really for another posting, so instead, I decided to attack mysql, since that was the bigger culprit of my memory woes.

I have 256MB of Ram dedicated to my VPS, and with the one site, I was using about 170MB. That seemed excessive. I did some digging online for some information about improving the memory usage for MySQL. Here is what I found.

• If you are not using the berkeley database engine, disable it in your configuration file for mysql. You can do this by adding the entry “skip-bdb” under the [mysqld] section. This will tell mysql to not support this database, and it will not load what it would normally need for it.
• If you are not using the inno database engine, disable it in your configuration file for mysql. You can do this by adding the entry “skip-innodb” under the [mysqld] section. This will tell mysql to not support this database, and it will not load what it would normally need for it.
• Another thing I did was add the entry “skip-networking”. This tells mysql to not open itself up to outside traffic. If you’re running a database soley for the server it’s sitting on, then you don’t need the networking support.
• Below are some other entries I’ve added to optimize the performance for a small environment. This will lower your query size, there by taking up less memory:
  • query_cache_limit = 256K
  • query_cache_size = 4M
  • key_buffer = 1M

When I find the original link I will post it. I was able to drop my memory usage on the box from 170MB to 45MB. When I added two more websites, it went up to 85MB. So far so good.

So I noticed the more link and was wondering what it did. I created a test post, clicked the link, and it visual adds this line bar with a more link. I published the blog, went to the homepage and noticed, anything above the more link is shown, anything below it is not. Cool. Definitely a good feature to have. It allows your user to scan the entries when they view them on the homepage and when they view by category, then they can read the entire posting when they click more.

I’m happy.

At first, you think, well that wasn’t much of an interview, she really didn’t give a good overview of anything, and was a little annoying. Well, that’s why I asked you to play it a second time. Maybe you caught the tag line that said “She’s not real”.

Again, “She’s not real”. That entire video is a computer generated character. No, you can get her phone number, because she doesn’t have a cell number, because she doesn’t have a credit card or a credit score, because she is NOT REAL. It’s pretty damn amazing.

Now, if you have a keen eye, and watch it a 2nd time, you notice slight imperfections around the eyes. Something about them seem slightly odd.

Now keep in mind that the animation is based on an real actor’s performance, and that data is what drives the generated character. Her movement is great, which is based on the actor which would explain that.

Check out the company website for more information: http://www.image-metrics.com/

Btw, if you dig into the website, you will see links to other examples of their work. They did work on a Gnarls Barkley video. I’ve seen the video, and was highly impressed by it. Scroll down the page to see the link for the video.

ImageMetrics

Zoom In and Out on a webpage

Do you find the text on a webpage too small or too big? You can use these keyboard shortcuts to change that.

To Zoom In, Hold the Ctrl key and press +

To Zoom Out, Hold the Ctrl key and press -

Bookmark a page

Are you on a page that you would like to bookmark for future use? By holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the letter d, you will get a prompt to save the page as a bookmark.

In firefox 3, you can use your mouse to bookmark a webpage with a single click. In the url bar of the browser, you will see a start to on the right side. Clicking on it, will bookmark your page.

Using Tabs

Tabs are a great feature to firefox. They allow you to have many pages open at the same time, can you can easily navigate them, without cluttering up your screen. Here are some tips for using them.

Open a new empty tab:  Hold the Ctrl key and press T

Open a link in a new tab: Middle click on a link. If you can’t middle click with your mouse, right click the link, and select “Open Link in New Tab”.

Close a tab: Hold the Ctrl key and press W

Reopen a closed tab: Hold the Ctrl and Shift keys and press T. You can do this multiple times if you have closed other tabs. It will reopen tabs in the order of most recently closed to last closed.

Switch tab to the right: Hold the Ctrl key and press Tab

Switch tab to the left: Hold the Ctrl and Shift keys and press Tab

View firefox in fullscreen mode

Have you ever wanted firefox to take up the fullscreen, and show more of the webpage, and less of the menu bar and other items? By pressing the F11 key, you can!. If you ever want to get out of fullscreen mode, press the F11 key again. It works great on websites with large designs that take up most of your screen, and it’s useful for other sites like photo gallery and even google maps.

View your download list

Did you ever download something but wasn’t sure where it was at? If you downloaded with firefox, you can look at your download history and you will probably find it there. Hold down the Ctrl key and press J and this will open up the download history list. You have some options from there that will be of help. If you right click on an item, you will see a list of options:

The options include

• “Open” that will open the file you downloaded.
• “Open Containing Folder” will open the folder on your computer, where the file was saved to.
• “Go to Download Page” will take you to the webpage where you downloaded the file from. This is great if you ever wondered where you got a file from.
• “Copy Download Link” will copy the link into memory. You can now paste it into the Location bar in your web browser, send the link to a someone you know by Instant Message or by Email, or what ever else you want to do. Just remember to Hold down the Ctrl key and press V, this will paste the link to where you want to put it at.

Other Shortcuts

Scroll down the page: You can press the “Space Bar” or press the “Page Down” key to do this.

Scroll down the page: Hold down the “Shift” key and press the “Space Bar” or press the “Page Up” key.

Refresh the page: Hold the Ctrl and and press R.

Go back one page from your history: Hold the Alt key and press the “left arrow”

Go forward one page from your history: Hold the Alt key and press the “right arrow”. This only works if you have went back in your page history.

I will add more useful tips in the coming weeks.