Meanwhile, whilst this particular unlock is the simplest, it also carries with it element of risk that you’re going to want to protect yourself against.

What? No that’s not the correct conclusion. A conclusion that would make more sense is that everybody is at risk until this PDF hole is patched by Apple. Jailbroken and non-jailbroken phones alike.

However, if you have jailbroken your phone, you have access to a fix now as described in the article reference above:

1. Open Cydia
2. Install “PDF Loading Warner”
3. Reboot your phone

In the meantime, here is what I did. Note that the first two steps are already abundantly documented all over the internet; a good read can be found at http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/07/07/how-to-speed-up-your-iphone-3g-running-ios4/.

1. Force your iPhone to rebuild its internal databases

Courtesy: iClarified

To perform a hard reboot, hold down both the sleep button and the home button until the phone turns off, then back on — that’s when the Apple logo shows up.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, you may need to perform multiple hard reboots: usually two or three. I have no idea whether this is just a superstitious belief or there is an actual technical explanation for that. It just seems to help.

2. Disable all Spotlight searches

Noticed how Spotlight can make your Mac slower? Well, the problem is compounded on your underpowered iPhone. I have observed a tremendous speed bump after disabling all indexing.

Disable Spotlight by opening the “Settings” application, then going to General > Home Button > Spotlight search and deselecting all search types.

.
3. Hacky hack hack

This one is not for the faint of heart. It should typically not cause your phone to spontaneously combust, but it requires some toying with the phone’s internals. Therefore, you need a jailbroken phone.
Note, however, that it does not install any new software on your phone. That’s good news if you are — justifiably so — worried about uploading anything from an unknown party to your handset.

Have a look at this forum thread. You can download a file that contains two interesting hacks: first, a hack to overclock your phone. Then, a hack to enable virtual memory paging to the phone’s flash.

Let’s get something out of the way immediately: I do not believe that the first hack does anything for you. It almost certainly provides no overclocking. It simply attempts to tell your phone to be less prone to slow down under some conditions. Both hacks use .plist files, therefore, as I said before, no trojan is installed on your phone. However, this also means that they can be easily inspected and I found nothing in the “overclock”-related one, that would speed up anything. It may, at worst, instruct your phone not to slowdowns when you are not doing anything with it, thus somewhat worsening its battery life. Amusingly, it contains many directives that have nothing to do with your iPhone, such as what to do when the lid is open(?) or which video card to use(!) but, to be fair, the same directives are found in the original .plist on your phone.

The new paging policy as defined in the second .plist file is much more interesting indeed. In a nutshell: it introduces your handset to the joys of swapping in and our of memory. When a program is pushed to the bottom of the phone’s “to-do” list, the memory pages that belong to that program can be “swapped out” the the flash, therefore out of the regular execution memory.
With this policy in place, even if your iPhone insits on loading Mail when opening the Maps application, for instance, the Mail app, running in the background, will be quickly removed from dynamic memory and your front application will be able to use much more memory. Suddenly, applications that used to be killed by a fairly touchy “out of memory” watchdog become much more stable.
And this is all done by running a memory pager that is already available on your phone!

There are, of course, some drawbacks but I estimate that they are minor: sometimes your phone will freeze while trying to figure out where a chunk of virtual memory should be. Using a tool such as “Backgrounder” is not recommended as it will only make the pager work harder. You will, in theory, shorten the life of your phone, but this should take years since we are talking about flash memory failing after millions of read/write operations, each operation only performed when necessary. It is very likely that you will grow bored of your old iPhone 3G before its flash memory gets impacted at all.

In summary: install com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist, forget com.apple.SystemPowerProfileDefaults.plist!

I setup this hack on my phone weeks ago and I have to say that my overall user experience has greatly improved. Of course, I hope iOS4.1 is the holy grail that was described to me by some enthusiastic Apple fans.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Free Software Foundation and I work in a corporate environment so I’d like to think that my views on open source are fairly balanced.

The debate of whether Thesis should be licensed under the GPL (GNU Open-source license) has been ongoing for a while but lately it has gotten more traction following a fairly sad debate between Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress software and web sites, and Chris Pearson, who co-authored and distributes the Thesis WordPress theme.

Watch the video (50 minutes!)

This is another of these “debates” fueled by the notion that there are always two sides to every issue. In many unfortunate cases, it turns out that the two sides are “the facts” versus “stuff I just made up.”

Let’s get out the way the phrase that seems to be causing all the confusion: it is claimed that Thesis works “on top of” WordPress. Well, that is just plain misleading.
Themes do not work “on top of” WordPress. They are not just dumb HTML tags; they are PHP source code that is linked against WordPress’s framework.

Some bloggers have talked about the fact Chris lifted some code from WordPress’ original GPL’d code. Well, you know what? It is a good point, yet it does not even matter: even if that code was removed from Thesis, its author would still have a problem.

WordPress is licensed under the GPL. The GPL stipulates that if you link against a piece of GPL’d code, and run in the same process space, then you have to GPL your code as well. This is very clearly stated in the FAQ:

If license for a module Q has a requirement that’s incompatible with the GPL, but the requirement applies only when Q is distributed by itself, not when Q is included in a larger program, does that make the license GPL-compatible? Can I combine or link Q with a GPL-covered program?
If a program P is released under the GPL that means *any and every part of it* can be used under the GPL. If you integrate module Q, and release the combined program P+Q under the GPL, that means any part of P+Q can be used under the GPL. One part of P+Q is Q. So releasing P+Q under the GPL says that Q any part of it can be used under the GPL. Putting it in other words, a user who obtains P+Q under the GPL can delete P, so that just Q remains, still under the GPL.
If the license of module Q permits you to give permission for that, then it is GPL-compatible. Otherwise, it is not GPL-compatible.
If the license for Q says in no uncertain terms that you must do certain things (not compatible with the GPL) when you redistribute Q on its own, then it does not permit you to distribute Q under the GPL. It follows that you can’t release P+Q under the GPL either. So you cannot link or combine P with Q.

Chris is, maybe on purpose, showing a lack of understanding of the GPL license. He argues that if you develop another application and wish to link it to WordPress, then WordPress’s license is, somewhat abusively, demanding that you GPL your whole application.

That is not exactly true and the distinction matters.

To be clear: GPL is not WordPress; it is disingenuous to paint WordPress as a dictator who decides how you should license your code. All WordPress’ authors did was GPL WordPress’ code, in effect saying “That’s the license we are adopting; please follow this license as well if you link to our product.”

So, back to GPL: GPL does not necessarily require you to also GPL your code. You have the alternative of NOT linking against GPL’d code. This is why the FSF maintains a list of licenses known to be incompatible with GPL.

GPL-Incompatible Licenses (gnu.org)

In a nutshell, it is the oldest rule in a free market: if you do not like our product, do not use it.
If you do not like WordPress’ license, then link your code against another CMS.

It is also very childish to claim that GPL cannot be enforced. Actually, claiming that violating your partner’ss license (WordPress’ GPL) is like “getting away with a blowjob” is definitely not an argument that would hold water in a court of justice.

Michigan Finds GPL To Be Enforceable
Cisco settles with FSF on GPL violations
Big GPL copyright enforcement win in Paris Court of Appeals

Also, Google is your friend. It is very difficult to claim ignorance when all the relevant information is so readily available.

Its features are:

• Define themes on a per-page basis
• Define themes on a per-post basis (new)
• Support for SEO-friendly permalinks
• Support for basic permalinks (new)
• Full integration with posts and pages screens in the admin control panel (new)

There should also be a lesser potential for Javascript interference as I removed the one external script I was invoking.

How do I use it?

In the admin control panel, under “Appearance” there is a new link: “Page Theme”
 
 

Select the checkboxes for which screen you wish to integrate the plugin with.
 
 

Click on the preview picture/theme name to change it.
 
 

Select a new theme for this page or post and click on ‘Set Theme’
 
 

If you already have a previous version installed, you can go through WordPress’ update mechanism. If not, just head to the plugin page.

It’s still a very unambitious thing but at least it does what every blog owner wants: it allows you to work on your posts in a convenient and intuitive way.

The new guy is unimaginatively called ‘Free Blog’ and believe me it’s way better than the other potential names I came up with.

And yes, I intend to add many features to it if you guys like it.

More info on Free Blog: Free Blog’s Page.

So, what’s a bad position to be in today? Well, it would certainly not be a good idea to offer a product that handles longer Tweets and external pictures or captures video. Uh-oh.

Now, do not get me wrong: there was a market for that and Twitterified’ and other players’ success clearly demonstrate that. But now, Twitter has looked at these extras, decided that they are good, and is taking over.

Of course, they cannot be blamed for doing so: they have long been in search of a good business model therefore it would be foolish to begrudge them a (not-so) sudden change of direction. As Twitter’s popularity exploded, they have let third-party developers play with the platform while focusing on keeping up with their infrastructure growth.
As a company, Twitter is responsible to its shareholders and “filling the holes” through acquisitions seems to be just the most reasonable move they could have made this year.

Other “long tail” companies, at least the ones who do not focus on “filling holes” but rather on using Twitter as part of an “open social” strategy, should not fear Twitter’s recent moves.

Our other focus was to sell turnkey solutions to the enterprise; after all, Twitterified can be used with your private servers. The good people at Status.Net (formerly Laconi.ca) seem to have made this approach work for themselves. Unfortunately, it seems easy to overestimate the size of that market. Players like Yammer have been fairly successful thanks to an incredibly appealing approach to the enterprise market: let the employees easily build the network and management will follow. I am convinced that this was the right approach and these guys mastered it.

So, what’s going to happen to Twitterified?

• The server infrastructure will remain in place in the foreseeable future. We may eventually open-source it.
• The client itself was open-sourced several months ago and anyone is free to fork, modify and repackage it as long as the license is respected. Note that if you do work on the client, you will first need to modify it to work with oAuth.

I hope you, our users, do not feel sad about this. Twitterified was a very enjoyable ride and I am glad that you liked the product. You can contact me on Twitter if you wish, I always enjoy hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Chris F. Ravenscroft

Hence, page-theme: a simple plugin with a friendly user interface that lets you specify a given theme for any of your pages. Here is what it looks like:

Two limitations you need to be aware of:

1. This plugin is called very early on during the process of rendering a web page; so early, in fact, that I had to come up with my own way to detect which page you are looking at. This works well as long as you are using “pretty links” (e.g. “yourdomain.com/2010/05/mypagename”) but will not work with the other type of links (e.g. “yourdomain.com/?p=5″)
2. Only pages are currently handled. Posts could also get their own theme, but I would need to modify the plugin to support this. Just let me know if you would like to see this feature implemented.

So, if you’re interested, go get it now:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-theme/

Two notes on moving to multisites:

1. WordPress 3.0 final has not been released yet; I have no idea whether a safe upgrade can be guaranteed after enabling multisites

2. Multisites based on subdomains are possible; if you blog is not recent, you will not be offered directory-based sites

First, edit wp-config.php, add towards the top:

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

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In the ACP, go to Tools > Network

This page shows how to modify your default wp-config.php and your .htaccess (for SEO links)
Do not worry if some of the text looks similar to what you already have in your existing wp-config.php; it is, in fact, different and necessary.

When this is done, your current blog should work as before; you may see some things that needs fixing if using some new features such as “make thumbnail.” See below.

Your last step in the ACP, whether you are migrating from WordPress or WordPress MU, is to go to Super Admin > Update and let WordPress update all your blogs.

Update: Do not forget to also create, under wp-content/, a directory called blogs.dir and make it writable by your web server.
Next, you may, for historical reasons, have some loose files lying around, e.g. images, which will not be displayed correctly anymore; for instance, Thumbnails.
If this happens, using the command-line again, go to where these files are located (typically /files/ or /wp-content/uploads/) and type:

cp -R * ../wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/

.
Now, let’s say your site can be found at http://example.com
Your subdomains/blogs should be created at http://blog1.example.com http://anotherblog.example.com etc.
You can either place a wildcard record in your DNS configuration, e.g.:

*       14400        IN A  1.1.1.1

where 1.1.1.1 is your IP address;
Or you can create a new DNS entry for each subdomain.

You will also need to tell your web server that subdomains are enabled. The way to do this varies based on your web server and control panel. Or configuration files if you are more of the command-line creed.

If you wish to use different domains altogether, this is still untested but I will give it a try eventually; there are plug-ins, in the extend database, that map domains to sub-domains.

What about SEO?

I know. You’ve noticed that even your main blog now has slightly different URLs: where it used to be something like ‘www.example.com/2009/11/26/…’ it now is ‘www.example.com/blog/2009/11/26/…’
Fear not! WordPress is nice enough to keep these old links ready for any visitor following a link from elsewhere. The old address simply returns a ’301 – Moved permanently’ header which will tell search engines that your content has not disappeared but simply relocated, and where.

Now, WordPress 3.0 is about to be released, nightly builds are available, and migrating to 3.0 is going to prove a challenge on its own since it re-introduces multi-blogs support and, as a major release, existing WordPress installed databases will be quite — but hopefully gently — re-shaped by the upgrade process.

So, here is what I consider the safest upgrade/clean-up path. I hope it works for you as well as it does for me. Everything is now back to stable and working and I am not seeing major incompatibilities with any of my existing plug-ins.

Cleaning-up the Database

This is something I recommend doing if you have been using WordPress MU or any other plug-in that renames your tables.
First, dump your old database’s content into a temporary file:

mysqldump old_database_name > tmp.sql

If you need to rename tables, edit tmp.sql; in my case, I use vi (sorry!) and this command:

:%s/wp_xxxxxx_/wp_/g

where wp_xxxxxx_ represents the prefix used by your plug-in. For instance, when using WordPress MU with the Nexus, it was something like wp_nexus_zteo_com_
If you have a statistics plug-in, you may also reclaim a fantastic amount of space by removing its data from your export file.

BTW, I have not tested it myself but there is a plug-in you might be interested in using before you dump your old database: WordPress Cleanup, by Nisipeanu Mihai, discards comments tagged as spam as well as pages and posts revisions: plugin page.

New Install

Create a new database, let’s call it “new_database_name.”
You need to create a new install with the same version of WordPress you are currently running. It is very likely that you do not have the archive handy anymore. It’s not a problem: just go to http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/ and download your version.

Note: You can check your current version in the Dashboard in the ACP (“Right Now”)
Expand the WordPress archive to a new directory. By default, it will be wordpress/. You can rename it to something else if you need to but I will keep referring to it as wordpress/ in this post.
Now, go to the link where your new “old” install can be found and install. Provide your new database’s info.
When your pristine new blog is fully installed, import your cured file into the new database, clobbering whatever was installed just now:

mysql new_database_name < tmp.sql

Upgrade

This is where the magic happens. We are going to left WordPress upgrade your install.
Until WordPress 3.0 reaches final status, we will use Peter Westwood’s plugin to perform the upgrade. Get it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/
Activate the plug-in, then go to Tools > Beta Testing and select Nightly builds.
Finally, choose Tools > Upgrade.

Because you installed WordPress in a new place, but you wish to preserve your Google juice, you will want to make sure that your blog is still available at the “old” place. Doing so requires playing musical chairs with your directories. For instance:

mv old_directory bogus_name
mv wordpress old_directory

But that’s not all! You need to inform WordPress of its relocation. In MySQL:

update wp_options set option_value=replace(option_value,'temporary_new_link','old_link');

For instance if your blog was originally found at http://example.com/blog and you expanded your new WordPress install at the same level, this new blog should be found at http://example.com/wordpress.
You would therefore type, from the command-line (you may also use a web interface, simply adapt as needed):

mv blog old_blog
mv wordpress blog

And in MySQL:

update wp_options set option_value=replace(option_value,'www.example.com/wordpress','www.example.com/blog');

You could, alternately, just completely remove your old directory. But it’s good practice to keep it around until you know that everything is spick and span.

Help! It’s all messed up!

Well, let me know, I may be able to assist with that.
Note that thanks to the paranoid steps we just took, it is extremely easy to revert to your original install. Following the example we just used:

mv old_blog blog

Done!

Adding Analytics code to your blog is quite straightforward. You can either copy/paste the Javascript code to your template’s footer.php, or use one of the many plugins that will do just that. But toda, I would rather focus on the plugins that integrate Analytics reporting with your admin control panel.

Adding Analytics Code to your page

I will mention these two plugins so that you know where to got to collect your visitors’ info. As I mentioned earlier, they are two among many plugins:

Google Analytics 3 codes for WordPress
http://www.prima-posizione.it/download/wp/google-analytics/

Ultimate Google Analytics
http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/

There isn’t much to say about these guys. They add the code necessary to track your visitors. They have nice admin control panel screens to configure who you wish to track, and how. That is, they offer to not count certain roles, differentiate outbound links, etc.
I have tested these plugins against WordPress 3.0 beta 2 which is about to be released and in the process found several of them to not work anymore.

Reporting Plugins

Google Analyticator
http://ronaldheft.com/code/analyticator/
This is the first plugin I will mention because when using this one, you can do without a “code” plugin as it will automatically do both jobs: insert the relevant code in your pages, and provide reporting.
It has the ability to not count visitors based on roles (administrator, editor, etc.)
Its reporting capabilities are found in a dashboard widget which lists current trends, five top pages, referrers and seaches.

Its support forums offer a very comprehensive FAQ and its community seems to be very active.

Google Analyticator
Features
Tracking, Roles, Support
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

WordPress Analytics
http://imthi.com/wp-analytics
This plugin requires its own dashboard page; as such, it does not work with the “one-stop” dashboard paradigm, but it makes up for this shortcoming by offering more information than a typical dashboard widget. It offers a fairly clear breakdown of visits versus geographic data. It also displays search keywords, traffic sources and browsers types.
A couple nice features to be aware of:
1. If it possible to navigate between dates using left and right arrow-shapes buttons; this lets you visualize much more data than the default ten entries displayed for each category;
2. The visitors history map is interactive and you can quickly visualise any given day’s information
My only gripe with this plugin is that it does not integrate directly with Google Analytics by asking Analytics to authorize it. Instead, you have to enter your username and password in the plugin itself. It is not so bad, though, as you have the plugin’s source code that you can check if you are worried about it “calling home” with your information.

WordPress Analytics
Features
Clear, Date ranges, Interactive
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

Google Analytics Dashboard
http://www.ioncannon.net/projects/google-analytics-dashboard-wordpress-widget/
It’s a misleading name for this plugin. But wait! It’s misleading in a good way: it actually is more than just a dashboard widget.
This plugin will also display analytics graphs next to each post. I would like to talk about the dashboard widget itself but it’s pretty much a run-of-the-mill widget with a few nice touches: you can select which roles have access to it (administrators, editors, etc.) and it can display Analytics goals.
However, where it really shines is by providing an Analytics graph next to each post: it quickly tells you how many page views a post received, how many visitors left your site after reading this post and the tiny graph tells you about the post’s recent popularity history.

Yup...not all posts are created equal

Google Analytics Dashboard
Roles, Goals, Posts Details
Features offered by this plugin
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

The ones that make me sad

Tantan Reports
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/
On paper, this plugin has it all: it comes with a widget that you can use to proudly show your stats to your visitors, it also reports on Feedburner…
Unfortunately, beyond the fact that it, too, requires your username and password, it happens to use a Google Analytics library written by the same author, and that library uses a hack to log in to Analytics that seems to be broken by a recent update to the Analytics website.

Tantan Reports
Features
Publish, Feedburner, Standard
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

iRedLog Google Analytics Stats
http://iredlof.com/2009/04/iredlof-google-analytics-stats-wordpress-plugin/
This plugin displays several widgets using Flash. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that it tries to display them as I could not get it to work in any browser.
Sill, I tried to view its online demo at http://blog.iredlof.com/wp-admin/ but unfortunately that page does not offer to demo this plugin anymore.
I have to assume that the plugin is not supported.

iRedLog Google Analytics Stats
Features
Beautiful, on paper at least
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

Local Analytics
http://www.joycebabu.com/downloads/local-analytics
This would be an interesting concept, caching as much information as possible to make your pages not dependent on Google Analytics’ web site connectivity; unfortunately this plugin has not been updated in two years. I hope someone picks up its development.

Local Analytics
Features
Tracking, Subdomains, Caching
Compatibility
With WordPress 3 and Google Analytics

I will keep an eye on these plugins and update this blog if they get updated.