Mike Cohen

A benefit of switching to WordPress

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I upgraded a local copy of MacMegasite to WordPress 2.7 beta 1, which took less than a minute and didn’t break anything. A major Drupal upgrade like that would result in hours or even days of pain trying to fix everything it broke.

I probably won’t upgrade the live site to WordPress 2.7 until at least the release candidate is available, but I’m sure it will go just as smoothly.

This illustrates the big difference between Drupal and WordPress. Drupal makes no attempt to preserve backward compatibility with themes & modules. They even consider it a virtue, making bigger advances possible. Unfortunately this causes lots of pain for people running Drupal-based sites and makes it very difficult to update.

WordPress, on the other hand, manages to maintain full compatibility between releases, yet they still manage to make a big advance in capabilities.

Happy Birthday, Grace

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Grace Slick, from Jefferson Airplane (and later Jefferson Starship) is 69 today. When I was in high school I thought she was incredibly hot. I still think she was one of the greatest rock singers ever. She had one of the most powerful voices with great control.

WordPress CPU usage

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It looks like I’m about to have my first GPU usage overage charge since I switched to MediaTemple due to a large usage spike during my switch from Drupal to WordPress.

Most of the heavy usage occurred during the actual switch and soon after the switch. Although WordPress has a reputation as a CPU hog, I was able to get the usage down to where it was before I switched.

As you can see in the usage chart below, enabling Zend optimizer helped, but enabling WP Super Cache really got it back down to where it was before the switch. Unfortunately WP Super Cache disables the WPTouch plugin, which reformats the page for an iPhone or iPod Touch.

One interesting thing I noticed is that 404 error pages use almost twice as much CPU as successful page requests, so I added static pages for a few invalid incoming links, which also made a big difference.

GPU Usage Report
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Half Empty

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Although everyone is optimistic that Obama will win the election easily, I just can’t share in the euphoria. I’m still very afraid that McCain could win or steal the election. Remember 4 years ago when everyone was certain Kerry would win? We all saw what happened then. Convince me it won’t happen again.

For the last week I’ve been a basket case. I’m constantly on edge, and whenever I see McCain or Palin in the news or see one of their attack ads, I completely lose my temper and start cursing & screaming. I just can’t relax until it’s all over and Obama wins, but I’m very afraid that it might not happen.

links for 2008-10-28

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