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Holy cow... 1 million downloads

The plugin didn't work for him, and it only worked for partly for me, which turned out to be because of some new stuff in the WordPress 2.9 branch. I had an email back and forth with Alex, who then fixed and updated his plugin, isn't open source great?

Anyway, what this plugin does is run any image you upload through a service called Smush.it. It uses, and I'll quote the site directly, "image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality".

Basically, it's "save for web" on Steroids. And when you have this plugin enabled, you don't even have to think about it anymore, as it's taken care of when you upload the image.

The plugin also adds another column to your Media Library, where you can Smush images you've uploaded before you've installed the plugin as well. It looks like this:

This will now become a default install plugin for me, as it offers a very easy optimization for your images. Because of how fluently it's been integrated with WordPress, this plugin will work great with the WordPress CDN plugin I'm working on.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

SmushIt for WordPress

What is a CDN?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. Basically, it's a bunch of highly optimized servers all across the world, with a bit of unique logic worked into them: you'll always hit the server that's closest to you. This leads to huge performance improvements for sites that have visitors from all across the world, like this one.

My images were coming from the US, which was better for like 50% of my readers but pretty slow for a lot of my European readers (about 35% of my readers are European). Now, for them, these images can come from the CDNs servers in London, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, whichever is closest to them.

The other servers of this CDN are, in North America: Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose and Seattle. In Europe, as said; Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London, as well as Sydney Australia and Hong Kong and Tokyo in Asia. (There's actually a map on VI's cloud hosting page, another sister company of the same group of hosting providers). So my server now distributes its images, js and css files to those 15 servers, which in turn serve them out to you!

The CDN works with so called Pull URL's. This means you specify a directory on your server that it pulls all files from, which it then starts serving from the CDN. This allows for a few quite neat tricks, for starters, to serve all your uploaded files from the CDN quite easily, once you've done some WordPress stuff that I'll of course take care of for you.

I've moved several things onto the CDN:

1. my themes image files
2. my themes js files
3. my themes css files
4. the js files that come with WordPress that are not hosted by Google (eg. thickbox)
5. all my uploaded files

Most of this was pretty easy, though there's some tricks involved in all of this. I'm working on moving those tricks into a plugin, which I'll try to release at the same time as when the CDN becomes available at VPS.net.

Who should be using a CDN?

Because it distributes your data across the globe, a CDN is beneficial for pretty much everyone. Larger blogs and sites with a lot of traffic, sites serving videos or other downloadable files benefit most, as it speeds up these downloads. Other sites that benefit are sites that are often on Digg or other huge sites - as it spreads the load across a network of servers, rather than just one.

The CDN has pretty cool live stats in the backend, that look like this:

I'm planning on integrating some of these statistics into the WordPress plugin I'm building for all this.

This CDN stuff must be expensive!

You were thinking that, right? Well, that's what I thought too. Turns out I'm wrong, they told me pricing for the CDN will be $0.05 a GB, pay-as-you-go, with a minimum purchase of $50. So you could buy 1TB for $50 and it could last anywhere up to even a year... And as one account can be used on multiple sites, if you put it on a whitelabel type domain, it'll be very useful to a pretty big group of people. It's also good to know that most good CDNs (including this one) don't charge for storage, just for bandwidth.

I'd love to know what you guys and girls think of the new speed, and whether this is something you can use too, let me know in the comments!

BTW. If you want an account like, now, and don't want to wait, let me know in the comments and I'll hook you up with the guys at VPS.net!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

Using a CDN for your WordPress blog

Though they told me that would be changed pretty soon (meaning the image will support a higher WP version), I made a quick video on how to do all this:

I have to say it was a pretty nice experience, if you're looking for a VPS, this is pretty much top notch stuff (being a nice combo between a VPS and cloud based hosting) and it isn't expensive.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

Playing around with VPS.net

PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

Ok, so that's the final truth, because the Software Freedom Law Center (who are of course absolutely NOT partial in this, even though they're called the "Software Freedom Law Center") said so. Nice. Really nice actually as all I've done and released for WordPress, ever, has always been GPL, and I chose to work with Brian because his themes were GPL and the others were not (at the time).

You'd think I'd be happy, and I am, sort of. But I've got an itch that needs scratching. With this final statement, there's also a new page on WordPress.org for Commercially supported GPL WordPress theme makers, and StudioPress is among those of course.

So, all the theme makers who decide to go fully GPL (their artwork and CSS included), can get listed on that page. Well, good for them. You'd think, that by now, Matt and Automattic would have been smart enough to know who their friends and who their foes are. I'm not saying these theme makers aren't their friends. But there are these people out there, who have been building things that have been GPL all the time, who do NOT get that recognition.

Of course, we plugin authors get to host our own plugins on wordpress.org, and we can get links back to our site etc. But where's the page for commercially supported GPL WordPress PLUGINS Matt? Don't you think it's time you started treating the plugin authors the same way as the theme authors? Or do we have to start a theme war for that first?

And yes I do have an interest in this, and yes I am planning on going the "commercially supported GPL" route with some of my plugins, just because keeping them all free doesn't make any sense any more. Free does other things, just as Chris Anderson says, it has helped tremendously in getting my name out, but "free" doesn't make me rich, far from it even. I can be quite honest in that so far, in working with Brian on StudioPress... Well let's just say the effort to gain ratio is a LOT better.

The fact that people are able to build business models around a project, is the reason that projects grow. The premium theme market, started by Brian but also greatly pushed by my buddies at WooThemes and others, has increased development on themes tremendously: it has done the entire WordPress community a lot of good. (BTW, read Daniel Jalkut's post on the GPL vs liberal licenses, it's a very good read and offers some nice food for thought).

So my plea, to you, Matt, is to help people build up viable business models around WordPress Themes AND Plugins. For several reasons, including the fact that I'm loving to be able to make a living with it, but also because I think it will do the community a lot of good. And ow yeah, I'd love a haiku on WordPress.org about me too!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free.

All your suggestions for names, topics and guests are welcome in the comments!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

Yet Another WordPress Podcast

[rss feed="http://yoast.com/feed/" num="10" excerpt="false"/]

And then that would show the feed you'd specified. Well, now there is: the RSS Shortcode plugin. It looks like this, when functioning (with excerpts set to false):

• Holy cow... 1 million downloads
• SmushIt for WordPress
• Using a CDN for your WordPress blog
• Playing around with VPS.net
• On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

New Plugin: RSS Shortcode

I've also always been in favor of the use of CSS Image Replacement for headings, while not wanting to fake the search engines, I've kept a simple rule: if you OCR the page, it should be exactly the same as when you read the HTML.

I've said so on Dave's blog back in January '08, and then, Matt Cutts agreed with me. Well, Dave pinged me today, and blogged it too, because in a video today on Youtube, Matt said something else:

Now Matt, how would you go about doing something like my menu, here on Yoast.com, without doing CSS Image Replacement? You know that thing, Speed that your colleagues are going for? Well so am I. My navigation looks like this (when shrunk heavily:)

And the HTML for it looks like this:

<ul id="nav">
  <li id="a1"><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/">WordPress</a></li>
  <li id="a2"><a href="http://yoast.com/articles/">Articles</a></li>
  <li id="a3"><a href="http://yoast.com/tools/">Tools</a></li>
  <li id="a4"><a href="http://yoast.com/hire-me/">Hire Me</a></li>
  <li id="u1"><a href="http://yoast.com/advertise-here/">Advertise</a></li>
  <li id="u2"><a href="http://yoast.com/sitemap/">Sitemap</a></li>
  <li id="u3"><a href="http://yoast.com/contact/">Contact</a></li>
  <li id="u4"><a href="http://yoast.com/speaking/">Speaking</a></li>
</ul>

I think that's a pretty cool use of CSS, HTML and the possibilities it offers to mark up websites in clean, semantic code, with a great look, while going for speed. I mean, how would you do that with alt tags?

I hope you agree Matt, because otherwise you're contradicting yourself... Because, well, the Google result pages look like this:

And that even violates my own guidelines... It says "Google" in the text (notice the quotes?) and Google on the image (notice the lack of quotes?).^* And by the way, the Google Webmaster blog said something else as well.

Maybe you were trying to be friendly to people and not make it too hard on them, or you didn't feel like telling the complete story because that confuses people. But please, please, please, be aware that there are some SEO's out there who actually trust what you tell them, like I do, and who don't like to be disappointed twice in a month.

You took away PageRank sculpting as a valid technique, which was a technique you said had its merits, although it was only used by a few, now you're going to take away CSS image replacement? A technique used by just about ANY decent web designer out there? I think a bit of clarification is needed here.

Otherwise I just might have to go with what Mikkel said on this one as well... He said this, on a post of yours back in '06 about using text:

Matt, you know I allways use tons of text. Real text. All over my cloaked pages – and it works really well, thanks

^* Update: as noted by Thijs in the comments, the quotes are added by Safari's web inspector, they're not in the source.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

CSS Image Replacement, what's up Matt?

There's a couple of ways to go about this, but what I decided to do was the following:

function mail_feed_query($query) {
	if ($query->is_home || $query->is_front_page) {
		$query->set('cat','-120');
	}
	return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','mail_feed_query');

(120 is the category ID here)

This filters out the query from the home page and/or front page of your blog. Now you'll need to do a bit of extra work to prevent it from showing up in category listings, everywhere you do a get_categories or wp_list_categories you just add &exclude=120 (where, again, 120 is the category ID).

So as of next week, my WordPress newsletter will be having its own unique articles again, as well as all the articles in the WordPress category. So, subscribe, like, now, so you don't miss any of the goodness!

One of the things I intend to send out only to my newsletter subscribers is the new plugins I come across that I like or find useful, so if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, you're really missing out.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

Excluding a blog category from your feed

• Added 'esc' tab-expansion: with the help of Mark Jaquith's great article Escaping API updates for WordPress 2.8, typing esc and then pressing tab now brings up a menu with options to choose the proper escaping function.
• Localization shortcuts, Alt-L now wraps the selected text in a _e(''); function, that translates and outputs the selected text, while Shift-Alt-L wraps it in a __(''); function, which returns the selection.
• A new widget-tab expansion, which works like this:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• A <body> tab completion function with the new body_class(); function, for its use, read this great article by Nathan Rice: WordPress 2.8 and the body_class() Function.
• A author-tab expansion, with the new the_author_meta function, with some help from my own PHP Cross Reference and this article: Displaying Author Meta Information in Wordpress 2.8
• All functions that are prefixable with get_, like bloginfo and most functions above, now start with that. author->tab expands to get_the_author_meta with the chosen variable, but pressing space or delete immediately removes the get_ part. Neat huh?
• A readme.txt template, including the new changelogs, just type readme->tab in a new file, this snippet uses some shell variables, be sure to enter these in TextMate for quick use.
• A plugin template, open a new file, type plugin and press tab, and you'll get the option of either adding just the "normal" plugin header, or one with the GPL embedded.
• blog->tab now first ask you whether you want general info or RSS info, and the expands into a menu with all the options for each.
• You should also try the $post, $comment, $cat, wpdb and row tab expansions, they've been slightly updated and totally kick ass.

Shell variables

Don't forget to set the following shell variables in the TextMate config, which you can find under Advanced -> Shell Variables:

I'm very interested in hearing what you would like to see in this WordPress Texmate Bundle, so please leave your requests in the comments!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

Updates to the WordPress TextMate bundle