Chris Meller

Crazy Opera and IE Display Quirks

2009-10-24T03:07:00Z

Someone checking out my last entry about CDN performance helpfully let me know that my site was displaying horribly in Opera. I’d checked in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome and hadn’t noticed a problem and just assumed I was pretty safe in other browsers since I wasn’t doing anything especially amazing.

A few minutes with Browser Shots later and I found out that it was broken in at least Opera 10 (8 and 9 seemed to work fine, oddly) and IE – all versions, including 8. I confirmed the IE8 problems in a virtual machine (compatibility view didn’t help) and dug in with the Opera developer tool Dragonfly.

Curiously, Dragonfly’s DOM view only showed the first div in the HTML that contained the header. It took a few minutes of head scratching before I started toggling options and idly hit the button to expand the HTML tree… Suddenly everything was there. I ran the W3C Validator again, just to be sure it wasn’t my imagination, and it checked out fine.

It didn’t take long backtracking up the tree to find out where I’d gone “wrong”:

<button />

Apparently Opera 10 and IE wanted the full closing tag:

<button></button>

I’m not surprised IE choked on the short tag, but I’m really disappointed in Opera… I’ve never been happy using it, but I always respected their rendering engine.

Amazon CloudFront vs. Rackspace Cloud Files CDN Performance

2009-10-24T01:50:06Z

I’ve been playing with both the Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace Cloud Files CDNs over the past week with the eventual aim of offloading all the static files that make up this site (all like 4 of them) to a CDN, mainly for the fun of it.

Having used Amazon’s S3 storage service for quite a while now they were my first choice, but I didn’t want to totally discount the Rackspace offering – they’ve done some seriously cool things in a very short period of time and I swear by their Cloud Servers.

From casually playing around there have only been minor differences. First of all Cloud Files doesn’t seem to support “folders”, so you end up with a much flatter storage pool. For my 4 files that’s really only an issue for my OCD, but Amazon does support hierarchical directory structures, so that’s something to keep in mind.

Otherwise I found Amazon’s system only slightly more annoying in the way you ‘deploy’ an S3 bucket to the CloudFront CDN. It seemed to take slightly longer and emphasize the idea that there were two distinct systems and products being used, whereas Cloud Files seems much more unified – click a check box and you’ve got a CDN URL.

So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.

Amazon CloudFront CDN Response Time Graph

Rackspace Cloud Files CDN Response Time Graph

After 24 hours of monitoring the Cloud Files average response time was one tenth that of Amazon CloudFront’s and its slowest response time was still 40% faster than CloudFront’s average.

Just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I setup another set of Pingdom checks to measure performance of a binary image file:

Amazon CloudFront CDN Response Time Graph - Binary

Rackspace Cloud Files CDN Response Time Graph - Binary

In short, after the initial delay as the file was propagated throughout the CDN network, Rackspace kicked Amazon’s ass.

I know who’ll be getting my CDN business…

Update to WordPress Migration Script

2009-10-11T21:16:32Z

I’ve updated the Habari to WordPress migration script from my last post. As special thanks to someone who pointed out that comments weren’t being associated with the right posts, they were totally off because I forgot to translate the old Habari post ID to the new Wordpress ID… Whoops.

The script can be found via my original post, it’s just been silently updated in place.

Again, best of luck to anyone using it…

Update 10/11/09: One more update related to post comment counts – we only want to ‘count’ ones that have been approved. Again, the original link has been updated.

Migrating Habari to WordPress

2009-08-22T04:59:48Z

While of course we never like to see anyone give up on Habari, it’s obviously not going to be the perfect platform for everyone. Hopefully most people will test it out before they make a final switch, but for those who get stuck and wish to switch back to WordPress (and we know you’re out there), I’ve finally throw together a quick script that should help.

Things this migrates:

Posts – published or draft
Pages – published or draft
Comments – approved only
Tags

A few caveats: this is MySQL-only, if you’re using Habari on Postgres or SQLite I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be especially difficult to change, I just have no interest in doing so – it suites my purposes. It’s also quite hacky. There’s very little error checking (make that practically none) and it prints output in plain text. It’s also not a plugin, I wrote it as a one-off script that you use and immediately trash because that’s exactly what you should do with it.

Also note that it writes directly to the WordPress database tables, it uses none of their API functions. That means the slightest schema change could (and probably will) break the whole thing and that things like filtering and other plugin actions aren’t performed. I was using the trunk build of 2.9-rare, so roll back to about r11867 if you have problems.

Finally, it will set the owner of a post to an existing WordPress user with the same username if one exists – if not it will create a new user account that you can then manage any way you like.

So how do you actually use it? Well, you dump it in your Habari root directory, edit the array at the top so it can connect to the MySQL database your WordPress instance is installed in, and you load it up in your browser. You should see a bunch of junk about things it finds – and hopefully no MySQL errors along the way. If you see any errors, you’re on your own.

On my VPS I was able to import my blog back into WordPress in a matter of about 2 seconds. For those who want or need to switch back, best of luck to you, hope this helps.

Snag the script over here: wp_migrate_script.php

Developing a New Theme: The Sidebar

2009-06-23T20:31:32Z

I’ve been idly working on a new theme for this site for quite a long time now. It’s now been pretty much completed, I just can’t decide what to do with the sidebar area. There’s so much somewhat random information that I think should go in the sidebar area that it invariably ends up looking cluttered and becomes a useless mass of text.

I’ve been considering a change in logic. Perhaps instead of placing random things like Flickr photos and Twitter feeds in the sidebar I should take a “gateway” approach (or something similar), in which the first page you see is a list of all the sites I use where you can find their individual feeds. Not only can you get to Flickr or Twitter and find me directly, but you can also click through to continue to my blog.

The only real downside here is that the best URL for such a gateway would seem to be chrismeller.com, which would mean my blog would need to move (either to an entirely new domain, a subdomain, or a ho-hum subdirectory). None of these are really desirable, I like my URL exactly the way it is now.

So the consideration goes on… Eventually I’ll probably just make an impulse decision and throw something up, just to get it out there and get over the decision-making hump.

Now Mosso’d

2009-05-21T20:32:19Z

I’ve decided to finally migrate from a Slicehost VPS to a new Mosso Cloud Server. With such low bandwidth usage, I can end up saving nearly half my monthly payment without packaged bandwidth. Spiffyness.

Habari Hack-A-Thon ‘09

2009-01-16T20:40:18Z

There’s going to be a Habari Hack-A-Thon this weekend to try and get several features wrapped up and as many bugs as possible squashed before a 0.6 release.

The two main features we’ll hopefully be finishing off are ACL and our new, more generic, Taxonomy system.

The current stable major release, 0.5, was packaged up and shipped on July 27th, so we’ve come a long way from that. As many people who still run 0.5 know, most of the plugins and themes currently in use by the community have long since broken as they’ve been updated to work with the latest pre-0.6 SVN code. Here’s hoping the HAT produces some great progress towards a speedy fresh version of Habari.

If you’d like to help us hunt bugs, test changes, or just come by for some witty commentary, we’re always available on IRC in #habari on Freenode. You can use your favorite IRC client, the Habari LiveHelp plugin, or use Mibbit for a web-based client.

From WordPress to Habari

2009-10-12T10:40:08Z

Back in February I started becoming interested in this new blogging project called Habari. I, like most people, had been using WordPress for years on what passed for my pathetic excuse for a blog.

Over those years I went through phases of love and hate for WordPress as they branched out and tried new things. Often it seemed that the good came hand-in-hand with the bad. While striving to improve their product and push adoption to the masses, many changes seemed to forsake those hard core users who had been loyal all along.

With the creation of the wordpress.com hosted platform and the funding of Automattic to continue to improve and pursue these ventures, things really began to take a turn for the worse. The line between open source and commercial venture began to blur, and continued development seemed to focus on the hosted aspect, rather than the self-hosted community. Some features did trickle back down, but the gap continued to grow as time went on.

Along the way, something totally unrelated to WordPress and the blogging world happened. My coding skills improved. While I had previously been content to harness the awesome power of the WordPress plugin system, I now felt the need to branch out and spread my coding wings. Realizing that the WordPress code base was a mess of PHP4 code, global functions and variables, and lacked any documentation at all, I became frustrated trying to make changes. Since that time, WordPress has attempted to make strides in the documentation and global functions areas, but for the most part the codebase remains as messy as ever.

Looking for alternatives, I happened to stumble upon Habari. Several people I’d known from the WordPress IRC channel had begun to frequent their IRC channel as well, and I migrated over mainly to have more people to chat with regularly. As I became more familiar with the people involved and started participating in some of the arguments happening around functionality and usability, I began to become more and more interested in the product as a whole.

Habari is totally PHP5-based. It doesn’t sacrifice functionality to appease a few misguided souls who believe PHP4 was the perfect development platform for an open source application. It’s also focused on providing the most reliable and flexible blogging experience possible (for example, it supports MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres out of the box). This kind of dedication to providing a system that will (eventually) run on any combination of technologies is really what sets Habari apart from most of the other platforms available. It’s not just about the database systems it supports, because that same approach is taken with everything: make it modular so people can substitute in their own pieces to create a system that works for them.

At the same time, close attention is paid to the quality and reliability of the code written to support these features. Not only is it heavily object-oriented, but it’s also very flexible (the two do generally go hand-in-hand) and of a high quality, which improves extensibility and performance greatly.

Don’t believe me? How about an example? Here’s a Pingdom response time graph of my blog moving from WordPress to Habari on the same Slicehost VPS:

Response times go from 900 – 1,250 ms on WordPress to 550 – 600 ms on Habari with the same content (and actually both were running their respective K2 themes) on the same server. Not only did Habari cut response times in half, but it is also much more consistent. Those 300 ms spikes are no longer a problem, it’s smooth sailing the blogging seas onboard the S.S. Habari.

If you haven’t given Habari a look, or have only tried an older version, I encourage you to test drive the latest development code straight out of SVN. It’s leaps and bounds beyond the 0.5 release and growing closer and closer to a 0.6 release every day. You should also take a few minutes to stop by the #habari IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and say hi – our community is half the value.

Welcome to Habari

2008-10-29T21:43:09Z

That’s right, I’ve switched…

There are broken links galore. I’m slowly moving towards fixing them.

New Slice Goodness

2008-09-13T17:52:59Z

I recently started to get annoyed at Debian because they seemed to go a bit overboard at being “cautious” when it comes to approving new versions of packages (Postgres 8.1, seriously?).

Originally I’d gone with Debian over Ubuntu just because it seemed to make sense: Ubuntu is based on Debian, why not go straight to the source?

Well, no more. You’re now seeing the new Ubuntu-powered Babble, on a fresh new slice of goodness. Yay, hurray, drinks all around…