Our kitchen now has a website (using WordPress of course). Lots more content to come soon, including the secret story of how the river came to be, the inspiration behind the pipes and the amazing triumph of getting everything finally finished.

Visit the site: Serafini Studios Kitchen – Welcome to the kitchen.

Portrait of Kristin and the Kitchen, originally uploaded by gserafini.

Kristin and Kuma posed for this lengthy timed exposure to capture the blue glowing light from the countertop. Illumination was provided by the dining room light (the overhead kitchen lights were off). This lets the river show up properly.

See all the kitchen pictures here: http://flickr.com/photos/gserafini/sets/72157594153594016/ (they start at the beginning).

Miro (the open source video player formerly known as Democracy) is running a contest right now to design a revised one-click subscribe button.

A Fun Little Design Contest
Design up to three buttons and submit them as links in the comments. On August 20th, we’ll create a blog post with all of the submissions.
There aren’t a lot of constraints on what you can submit. Our goal is to have a selection of buttons that would look nice on a blog sidebar or myspace page. We hope to see a variety of sizes and colors.

Here are my three submissions, shown on different backgrounds. My goal for this is to create simple, clean, and usable buttons.

	#FFFFFF	#666666	#000000
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3

I’ll update this post once voting is started so you can vote for my submissions if you like them

Update: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions. (I won the grand prize. )

Found this useful plugin from this site while working on a site that was in the middle of getting dugg/reddited:

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Get the plugin here: Ricardo Galli, de software libre – WP-Cache 2.0

Bruce spent a good amount of time researching the 6 best “green” sports cars. Some awesome pics there, including the Tesla Roadster.

These are our favorite “green” sports cars. Some get awesome gas mileage while smoking the competition, and others use advanced bio-fuels to eek out ever higher performance over their gas-guzzling brethren. Big Oil doesn’t like any of them, because they all mean one thing: if you buy them, Big Oil makes less money.

Read the article and check out the desktops: Fast Wallpapers Blog – Blog Archive – 6 Sexy Sports Cars Big Oil Doesn’t Want You to Buy

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

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

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

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

I’m currently travelling on my way to visit my friend Damon who is living in Guangdong, China with his lovely wife Wenhui and their awesome baby Jackson. I’ll be returning home on April 18th.

Things we’ll probably be doing:

• Hanging out in Guangzhou
• Doing art
• Nerding
• Working on our super-duper top secret game idea
• Visiting Macau
• Taking a train ride to the famous mountains (the ones you see in the background of many Chinese paintings)
• Getting rained on (probably)
• Trying to get by in a place where everyone speaks Cantonese, not Americanese
• Taking lots of pictures
• Making new friends
• Filling Moleskines
• Playing with the baby
• Cooking
• Goofing around

Should be a fun time. I plan on being available via email as often as possible (gserafini [at] gmail.com) and via the usual IM channels also whenever possible. If you have an emergency, please send me an email and I will see if I can help. I will probably not be available via phone, although if I am probably the best bet would be to call my friend Damon’s cell # 159 8643 6868 (country code 86 I think..?) Calling China would probably be ridiculously expensive, so I wouldn’t recommend it. Email would be best.

I will be hopefully doing regular updates of my Flickr stream and posting into my China Trip 2007 set, so check back there every couple of days to see what I’ve been up to. If I can’t post easily from China then I may have to wait until I’m back stateside to post all the pics.

I also may be updating my Twitter page (kind of like small little micro blog updates) with what I’m doing at any given time so you can keep up with the adventures that way too maybe.

See you when I get back!

P.S. – Posted this using my Palm Treo 700p using USB modem from the airport in Chicago. Yay for mobile Internet!