caffeinatedb

Ooh my Moo cards have arrived.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:00:41 +0100

Ooh my Moo cards have arrived.

I've lapsed

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:01:00 +0100

I’ve lapsed and I feel terrible. I started the year with such high hopes, well to be honest I ended last year with high hopes for this year. I signed up for Project 52 last december in order to “incentivise” myself to write more frequently.

So excited was I, that I created three other sites that I intended to fill with my wisdom. Needless to say, I haven’t posted weekly on any of them. “But no more, I shall begin again” (picture me punching the air whilst shouting that).

Now, where did I put the login details?

I wonder how close to “Aberdin” these, erm, friesian...

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:29:00 +0100

I wonder how close to “Aberdin” these, erm, friesian cows originated?

“HELLO, Yeah, I’m on my iPad” - Dom Joly out...

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:12:00 +0100

“HELLO, Yeah, I’m on my iPad” - Dom Joly out and about with his iPad.

Offsite assets WordPress plugin

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:48:00 +0100

There comes a point in the life of every website when the amount of traffic surpasses the power of the poor little web-server.

Thankfully there are ways of delaying the move to a larger, more powerful but ultimately more expensive server. A few of which are invaluable for websites that have infrequent surges of traffic.

Step one - cache, cache and cache again.

WordPress is, quite frankly, resource hungry. Whilst a lot of work has gone into streamlining the source code and making the database queries more efficient, let’s be honest - a standard install on a small (or shared) server isn’t going to survive thousands of visits a day.

Thankfully there is a plugin specifically developed to help you out. WP Super Cache was written by Donncha O Caoimh and simply generates a text file containing the HTML of your site and serves that to your visitors rather than creating the page content for every visit.

Obviously it is a lot more complicated than that behind the scenes, but once you have it installed and running, you shouldn’t even notice it - other than an increase in the speed of your page loads.

Step two - split the workload.

Your web server does a lot of work. As well as initially building the HTML for your web page and sending it to the visitor, it also has to send all the small bits and pieces that make up the design and functionality of your web site to their browser.

It, therefore, makes sense that if you take away some of the simpler (but more bandwidth heavy) work of your web server, then your sites performance will be improved.

This is where the upcoming Offsite assets plugin comes in. By moving your themes stylesheet, images and javascript to other servers, you can leave your main web server to the job of building and outputting the sites basic HTML. When combined with the WP Super Cache plugin above, your main web server will only be sending a text HTML file to your visitors, whilst another server sends all of the graphics.

An extra server?

Though you could go to the expense of getting another server solely to handle your theme files, there are thankfully a few services that will allow you to store and serve files to your visitors whilst only paying for the amount of space and bandwidth you use.

Amazon S3 (and it’s CDN service called Cloudfront) are used by some of the largest websites out there, and are more than capable of handling whatever traffic your site can throw at them, for surprisingly little cost.

Is it complicated?

Absolutely not, but then I would say that wouldn’t I? Once you have an extra server, or have set up your Amazon S3 (or alternative) account, simply upload your theme (or themes) into a “themes” folder on that server. After making sure that the files are publicly readable, upload the Offsite Assets plugin to your WordPress plugin directory and activate it.

Finally, tell the plugin where your theme files are now located - have a look at the video below for an example.

The Offsite Assets plugin will be available very soon, if you would like to help beta test it, then leave a comment below and send me a tweet.

Sometimes it’s better not to ask. By the way, the...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:01:47 +0100

Sometimes it’s better not to ask.

By the way, the collection of items at the top of the picture are the remains of my cafetiere after it spectacularly dismantled itself mid pour.

"Pretend that you’re feeling a little bit crazy (possibly due to mental illness), and that during..."

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:35:43 +0100

“Pretend that you’re feeling a little bit crazy (possibly due to mental illness), and that during Mass at the Vatican you push the Pope down. The Pope then has a meeting with you, tells you that all is forgiven, and then proceeds to bring you to court. Does that sound like forgiveness to you?”

- Does the Pope understand forgiveness? | The Good Atheist (via travors)

Well, I can only imagine that there must be a shortage of quality mug-based websites in the world...

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:17:53 +0100

Well, I can only imagine that there must be a shortage of quality mug-based websites in the world today, if an iPhone picture of my beloved Guinness coffee mug can make the first page of google for the phrase “guinness thermal mug”.

I’m not quite sure when this particular piece of...

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:57:00 +0100

I’m not quite sure when this particular piece of functionality was added to YouTube, but I do remember writing a tweet about how desirable it would be to have a url that started playback at a particular point in a video.

I’m still not sure how to get it to work with an embedded video (such as the wonderful Tim Minchin video above), but it certainly seems to work with a direct link (which will take you directly to the beginning of the song - note the #t=0m37s at the end of the URL).

Chinese people are paying their respects to Google. If they...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:10:12 +0100

Chinese people are paying their respects to Google. If they can’t fight the censorship in China, who can? (via livejamie)

My question after watching this (quite a few times if truth be...

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:34:00 +0100

My question after watching this (quite a few times if truth be told) is just how long were the camera crew waiting to get that shot?

Ahh, it’s big Guinness thermal coffee mug time. A present...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:32:00 +0100

Ahh, it’s big Guinness thermal coffee mug time. A present to myself from Dublin.

The adventure is over, and an adventure it was. The past two...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:19:00 +0100

The adventure is over, and an adventure it was. The past two weeks of travelling have taught me a few things, the most notable of which is that an iPhone is an invaluable device.

It kept me up-to date with the weather in the Irish sea, which ferries were sailing (and more importantly which were not), allowed me to get online and re-arrange car hire, find and book a cheap hotel in Dublin, inform the owner of the cottage we were heading for that we would be arriving a day late and redirect us around flooded roads and closed bridges. All with one handy device (instead of the usual mass of A4 print outs).

After making it back and transferring all of the pictures and videos, now comes the task of editing and uploading.

So to start I give you this little beauty taken at some point during our One Night Only reunion. Oh how I wish I had such moves.

Watch it in HD if you can.

Getting excited by spanners?

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:43:30 +0100

Every once in a while I get this feeling that I don’t belong, that I am working in an industry that I have no interest in.

One of my early childhood memories was visiting the local computer shop to pick my first computer. It all started after my mother had been told by a gypsy tarot card reader that I was destined to make my fortune with a keyboard. Not wanting to inflict the life of a musician on her first-born (or I suspect the family in general) she decided that the gypsy, obviously a seer of the future, had mean’t one of those new-fangled computer thingies, and so on my 8th birthday my father and I were despatched to the store.

Of course, back in 1983 the computer shop was actually a store selling primarily fridges and washing machines. But right at the back, they had a shelf holding their entire stock of 6 machines. Below that they had set up 2 display models each with huge 12 inch televisions. It is here, I feel, that the direction of my interest in computers took it’s first step.

The decision had to be made: A ZX Spectrum or an Oric-1? The sales person (in truth the shop owners 15 year old son) gave us a quick demonstration of both machines and took a great delight in highlighting the much better sound of the Oric-1. “The games for this one will be a lot better because of the dedicated sound chip” he remarked, a large grin on his face and the look in his eyes of someone who knew just what an 8 year old boy wanted to hear.

I chose the Spectrum, and never really looked back or regretted the decision.

Shortly afterwards I signed up for my first magazine subscription. It was for a weekly booklet called “Input” which, over the course of 52 issues, aimed to teach it’s readers how to program little applications and, in later issues, games - though in reality those later “program listings” consisted of typing in hundreds of rows of hexadecimal characters to produce a game that you couldn’t complete because you mistakenly typed “AE 3D” instead of “A3 ED” on line 21308. It was the programming of the computer that interested me, getting it to solve a problem or accomplish a task.

So, how does this choice have a baring on my current feeling? Well, even at that young age “playing” on a computer didn’t really interest me.

Let me try to explain… I spend a large part of my day, practically 7 days a week, sitting in front of my computer. I need to because my work requires it.

When I have completed a piece of work, or have decided to call it a day, the last thing I would imagine doing is spend more time in front of a computer for fun.

Whether it is the same machine I have just finished using for work, or a different one specifically used for playing games, the idea of spending more time interacting with them seems rather strange to me.

I see a computer as a tool to accomplish a task, much as a mechanic would view a very expensive spanner. It exists to allow me to get my job complete in the fastest and most efficient way possible, and then stop.

At this point I am sure that a few people, especially none gamers, have similar thoughts about wasting their lives trying to collect little bits of coloured light in the shape of a shield, but I fear I go a stage further.

The majority of my work revolves around a piece of software called WordPress. I generally have the source code for it open most of the day so that I can quickly look up a function or method.

A lot of people develop software and design themes for WordPress. An even greater number of people build websites about WordPress. A much greater number of people subscribe to these websites and read them daily. I am not one of those people.

I see WordPress in pretty much the same way as I see a computer. It is a tool that enables me to accomplish a task, switch off my computer and get on with my life. I have no interest in shaping it’s future, I don’t want to read about it in my free time and I am certainly not interested in what the developers are up to (in much the same way I am not interested in what graphic card is in my computer). If it didn’t exist then I would use something else. If it stopped being developed then I am pretty sure that something equivalent would come along to replace it. If not, then I’ll go back to building from scratch.

So I sit here bemused and confused. What is exciting about a new trash setting for posts, or image thumbnails?

I was sent a delightful email this morning from WordPress (well from Automattic really) informing me of the exciting news the WordPress 2.9 beta 2 was now available with the above two new features. I’m not interested. When it’s ready I’ll download it and take a look, then I’ll wait a few weeks for the regular bug-fixes and security releases before moving my code across and continue on as before.

No doubt the world of WordPress will then start getting excited about what is new in version 3.0.

It’s true, someone is impersonating Matt Mullenweg...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:47:00 +0100

It’s true, someone is impersonating Matt Mullenweg online!

Based on an original modification by Travors, using a creative commons photograph by wohlford.

Oh look he's back

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:49:00 +0100

It is often remarked that you can’t keep a good man down. Not that I’m claiming goodness in any way, shape or form.

One month ago exactly,I closed up the old clearskys.net site and blog on the hunt for new, correctly spelt, pastures. After four weeks of domain dropping, moving, re-visioning and registering, I find myself sitting here in my newly designed home, with the freedom to be as creative and rambling as I want, struggling to put together a few welcoming paragraphs.

This new blog will not focus on WordPress or even development. I’m sure it will be mentioned, maybe even written about every now and then, but I shall send the more technical posts over to wpmu.org. No, this blog will be the home for creative and “quirky” posts, or anything that just happens to enter my peripheral vision.

If you followed me from my previous home, then feel free to subscribe to the feed of this site. I’m pretty sure you will find something interesting and fun over here, and if you don’t, well that unsubscribe button is only a mouse click away.

Thanks for reading, now let’s get on with it.