If you are into blogging with WordPress you might have heard a lot of chatter about a new caching plugin called W3 Total Cache. I’ve been a loyal WP Super Cache guy for a long while now, so I’ve been ignoring the hype.

Until now.

W3 Total Cache is fast. Like, stupid fast. But since I hate when people say things like that and then don’t give me numbers, here are some stats from my favorite monitoring site, Pingdom.

Keep in mind, those relatively high numbers (~800ms) includes all the overseas pingdom servers, e.g. London, Frankfurt, Coppenhagen, Stockholm, etc. The actual stateside numbers are even more impressive.

Here’s another screenshot showing an obvious dip where I made the change:

From my Chartbeat dashboard I am now rendering my homepage in less than half a second, where it was taking nearly four seconds before.

Seriously. If you run a WordPress site and you frequently get hit by Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, or any of the other meritocracy sites–or if you just want to improve your Google ranking–you should consider switching to W3 Total Cache.

Next up I’ll be doing a writeup on moving my static content to Amazon’s S3 CDN (which is something that W3 Total Cache also supports natively) and doing real-time performance tuning using Chartbeat. ::

[ W3 Total Cache Download ]

Ever wanted to take a piece of WordPress functionality and put it in a non-WordPress portion of your website? Like, for example, pulling your WordPress Sidebar and dropping it into a custom page of yours?

Well, here’s how to make it work.

The Wrong Way

Many have tried doing this simple include below and have met with failure. What they did was add the include by itself, like so:

[php][/php]

This ends in a fail whale because PHP doesn’t know what to do with that request. Within a WordPress page it’s fine because you already have the required headers loaded, but in your own custom web site they aren’t there.

So we’ll add them.

The Right Way

[php]

[/php]

If you include the WordPress blog header first (wp-blog-header.php) and then invoke the piece of code you want, you’ll be able to add WordPress functionality anywhere you want on your custom pages!

The code above (get_archives) allows me to display my entire blog archive on any page of mine I want — even outside of a WordPress-generated page.

This lets you get tons of functionality from WordPress, including:

1. Get a list of all your links
2. Pull your tag cloud from your posts
3. Pull your WordPress sidebar into a page

…and there are dozens more here.

This is how I have created the page you’re reading this on. The entire page is custom code; I only have a couple of pieces of WordPress embedded within it — the loop, and my archives toward the bottom on the right. This gives me the ability to seamlessly blend my WordPress content with my custom content at dmiessler.com/study and dmiessler.com/writing.

It’s the perfect combination — custom control + WordPress functionality.

Ping me at daniel@dmiessler.com with any questions…

Links

[ WordPress's get_archives | wordpress.org ]
[ WordPress Template Tags | wordpress.org ]
[ The WordPress Loop | wordpress.org ]
[ The WordPress Codex | wordpress.org ]

If you haven’t upgraded yet you may want to look into it. There are tons of new features in 2.6.

(actually, I’m at 2.7 ;) )

Links

[ Latest WordPress Download ]

After this last WordPress upgrade (2.6) I decided to clean up the script I use and post it here. It’s not as fast as using svn itself to upgrade, but I prefer to pull the latest version via svn, but drop it in manually — at least for now.

Anyway, I’d be cautious about running this until you’re very comfortable with the commands being executed. Until then, just use it as a list of instructions; even that will save tons of time vs. remembering the commands each time you want to upgrade.

Here’s basically what’s happening:

1. Pull down the latest, cutting-edge copy of WordPress
2. Back up your existing webroot
3. Delete your WordPress related content from your webroot
4. Copy the new WordPress content to your webroot
5. Replace your backed up content into the new install
6. Re-apply the permissions on your webroot
7. Test

And here’s the script:

!/bin/bash

Daniel Miessler's script for updating WordPress using SVN

Set variables

WEBROOT=/path/to/your/webroot

Change directories to your updated wordpress folder (create if necessary)

cd $WEBROOT/wordpress_svn/

Delete any old stuff in there

rm -rf $WEBROOT/wordpress_svn/*

Download the latest version of WordPress via SVN

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .

Change back into your webroot

cd $WEBROOT

Backup your webroot (Really, really make sure this works before continuing!)

cp -a $WEBROOT ../htdocs_backup

Kill off all your Wordspress files in your webroot

rm -rf $WEBROOT/wp*

Copy in your updated WordPress files from the SVN folder

cp -a $WEBROOT/wordpress/* .

Replace your backed up/customized content from your backup

cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/plugins/ ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/themes ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/uploaded_content ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-config.php .

Re-apply proper permissions to your webroot

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
find . -print0 | xargs -0 chown apache

Finally, clear your cache and navigate to your site's admin page

update the database and make sure your plugins are working

http://$yoursite/wp-admin/

For any questions, email me at daniel@dmiessler.com

And let me know if you have any questions.

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Tons of new features.

Get a copy before they run out.

[ WordPress 2.3 Download ]

In the blogging world we often hear the words “pingback” and “trackback”. We vaguely understand them both to mean linking to someone else’s content, but what’s the difference between them?

The short version is that trackbacks are the old, manual way of doing this while pingbacks are the more modern and automatic way. To use a trackback one generally had to:

1. Get the trackback URL for the other person’s content
2. Put that URL into your blogging software’s editing interface
3. Write an excerpt for what you said about their content

Pingbacks are much easier. All you have to do with a pingback is:

1. Links to someone else’s content

That’s pretty much it since pingbacks are enabled (both incoming and outgoing) by default on most major blogging engines. Here are a few other differences:

• Trackbacks contain more content, i.e. the excerpt, where pingbacks just have the source and destination links
• Pingbacks are less prone to spam than trackbacks, as incoming software checks to see if the source link actually exists before it allows it to be posted
• Pingbacks use XML-RPC while trackbacks use a standard HTTP POST

So that’s about it: pinbacks are essentially the newer and less time-consuming way of doing trackbacks. For more information on the subtleties of blog linking technologies check out the Wikipedia article on linkbacks.:

Here are my current goals for optimizing my WordPress blogging process using TextMate.

• Keyboard shortcut for starting a new post (TextMate or Quicksilver)
• Keyboard shortcut for linking to Wikipedia, Google, etc. (TextMate or Quicksilver)
• Clear out the default content for new Markdown posts; leave only what I want.
• Answer image alignment issues? How is this handled?
• Remove “General” category from default categories when posting.
• Learn snippets and create some for commonly typed text.
• Ensure pings and trackbacks are working.
• Setup a system for automatically resizing and optimizing images for posting to the site. (Right-click extension from desktop or Quicksilver)
• Become a God with TextMate shortcuts in general.
• Develop additional WordPress functionality using TextMate.
• Make everything I figure out and/or develop available to the community.

[ Posted using TextMate ]

Well, that didn’t take long. One word — WordPress.

If you use Safari you can’t use the WordPress editor to post to your blog. You can’t add images. You can’t even insert line breaks between paragraphs. It’s a soup sandwich.

This is a deal-breaker for Safari until WordPress gets its act together.

Until then I’ll be using Camino. The tagline is “Mozilla Power, Mac Style”, and that’s fairly accurate. It’s 70% as nice feeling as Safari, and it has 70% of the power of Firefox.

It’s not a total win but it’s good enough until one of those become a complete solution. I’m betting on Safari since the main holdup is actually on WordPress’s side.

Life goes on.:

[ By the way, if you use Camino all of your Firefox Quick Searches will automatically work after you import your bookmarks ]

So I finally got around to fixing my comment display issue. Thanks to all that pointed it out.

And for anyone interested in doing their own WordPress theme, skip the random posts on the issue and go right to the WordPress documentation. It’s the most complete and extremely well written.