I’m working on a new site relating to Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act compliance (it will replace the useless site that is currently up at grammleachblileyact.com) and was looking for breadcrumb functionality and a better way to manage outputting links from the Blogroll on the links.php page.

I had searched for a good WordPress breadcrumbs plugin a while ago, and the ones I found didn’t really impress me. I’m really happy with the one I ended up finding this time. It’s called Breadcrumb Navigation XT and it does exactly what I was looking for. I’ll be using this probably for any future needs when it comes to breadcrumbs and WordPress.

The second plugin that I found was related to fixing how WordPress currently outputs links using the default get_links_list() function used in most links.php template pages right now. I had used on the XyzAnt.com links page another WordPress function (wp_list_bookmarks()) that only works for WordPress 2.1 and higher, and is still undergoing active development / documentation. That function, however, only allows you to output the description, and doesn’t appear to include the functionality to show notes. Since there is a larger amount of allowable text for the notes field, and that is what I needed, I still needed to find (or write) a solution to outputting all links, ordered by category, displaying the notes field as well as link title, url, image, etc. This is the plugin that I found that does just this (found it after writing about 80% of the same functionality myself). It does just what I was looking for, shows all the categories that contain links and the links within each category.

Plugin author’s latest post about WordPress 2.1 support: Link Library now supports Wordpress 2.1

Popularity: 6% [?]

For quite a while, RSS2.com has been slow. Ever since it hit, oh, around 1.4 million items in its database (now up over 2 million) the queries that were responsible for building the home page view had gotten slower and slower.

The old design

The problem was one of normalization, and the desire to not have data going into two places. The design originally worked this way:

1. Look up the latest posts. Find all the latest ones that have a distinct feed_id. This was running against the feed_data table, which now has over 2 million rows.
2. Next, look up the feed information for each feed_id found. Originally, I couldn’t figure out a way to do this all in one query. So this was another 10 individual SQL queries, looking up information about the feed needed to display on the home page (like the name of the feed, URL, etc.) This query did a join of the feed_data with the feed_info tables. This is what took progressively longer and longer, the more rows in the feed_data table.
3. Next, combine the results of finding the 10 most recent posts from the 10 most recently updated feeds into an array using PHP, then pass those results from the Data Access Object (DAO) to the presentation layer for output on the home page.

This ended up being really, really slow on the homepage load (like over 2 minutes). This was obviously too slow. I implemented caching at a number of layers to mitigate the problem, which made for a very speedy second page load, but the first one was still way too slow.

After consulting with my friend Ben, he agreed that it was an inherently expensive query to run. We agreed that it needed to be re-architected to be able to significantly improve performance.

The new design

The new design required creating a new table dedicated to the home page posts where, when a RSS feed is read, it inserts the most recent new item into the new table.

The new process works like this:

1. RSS feed is read. Any new items are first inserted into the main feed_data table, and the feed_info table is updated as well with a last checked timestamp.
2. Next, the new table is updated, using a MySQL REPLACE command, with the combined feed information as well as item information
3. The complicated 11 queries that used to be run are now replaced by a dead-simple single query that will only ever have to search through the total number of feeds in the system (currently 753 rows), instead of the over 2 million rows before.

These new changes have made using RSS2.com much more usable again, and it is way faster. The homepage loads in under a 1/2 second now, just like it should.

Check it out: RSS2.com - Really Simple News For You

Popularity: 3% [?]

Nice article on ALA about how to create a layout using almost pure CSS where there is a fixed-width sidebar and a dynamically resizing right-hand main content area without using Javascript to dynamically resize the page.

All right, class. Using CSS, kindly produce a liquid layout that contains a fixed-width, scrolling side panel and a flexible, scrolling main panel. Okay, now do it without JavaScript.

Check it out: A List Apart: Articles: Conflicting Absolute Positions

Popularity: 3% [?]

Some excellent articles here about good web building practices.

Welcome to Web Devout! This site is aimed at promoting the health of the Web by providing web developers and the public with the knowledge and tools needed to help the Web move forward.

Check it out: Web Devout

Thanks for the pointer, Ben.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Bruce and I just finished getting the template finished for the new FastWallpapers.com site.

Check it out: Home - Find Car Wallpapers, Car Desktops and Car Pictures at FastWallpapers.com

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’m happy to announce that Kristin’s new site is now finally live. It’s all converted to a full WordPress site now.

Check it out: Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini - Award-winning author and illustrator

Popularity: 3% [?]

Interesting…

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Check it out: Google Gears (BETA)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Looks like it’s time to upgrade again, lots of neat new features and good bug fixes in WordPress 2.2.

WordPress Blog - WordPress 2.2

Download WordPress 2.2 now.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Evil hackers attack!

Some customers of mine recently reported some suspicious behavior on one of their sites. I discovered, with dismay, that a number of months ago there was a nasty cPanel exploit that some evil hackers had used to insert a malicious line of code into the bottom of every HTML page on this server. After verifying that the cPanel installation had been fixed, I used grep to search through all the files on the server to see if any other files had been touched by the hackers. I found over 4,700 individual files that had malicious code added and knew that something needed to be done immediately to address this problem.

Not the best way to start my day…

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

(via reddit)

Popularity: 1% [?]