We setup a multi-site network, with different P2 blogs for different topics/projects. One challenge we’re now thinking about, is how to view a summary of content across all the blogs.

Has anyone found a simple / elegant way to view an aggregation of posts across separate P2 blogs?

thanks!

“Do whatever you want. Hosting companies always do. Meanwhile us coders will do what we always do and spend more waking hours making sure that our code works in as many places as it possibly can while navigating an invisible minefield of limitations that hosting companies never talk about unless asked directly in private conversations covered by NDAs. Don’t worry, we probably have you covered whether we want to or not. You can sleep soundly knowing that hundreds of developers will be going without sleep tonight to solve problems created by the artificial limitations of hosting companies and are likely to do the same when you start breaking their code with this new rule.”

This is a problem that all hosting companies face. The people that develop code do not fully understand how things run on a processor, what implications their choices with their code has to the performance of their application, how to efficiently utilise a RDBMS (if they even need to use one!). The number of times I’ve come across a poorly performing WP site on a customer’s server only to discover that they have a very poorly planned plugin causing page generation time to be over 1s (sometimes into the minutes). At the hosting company I work at if we spot a BackupBuddy installed on a site we immediately recommend that the customer stops using it an relies on more traditional backups, BackupBuddy just doesn’t scale.

Remember the hosting company is the one that deals with the customer complaining because their site is slow. They are first to start to point the finger towards Disk IO or Slow Network, when in 99% of the time it’s actually a poorly written application that is causing their issues. Then we have to go out of our way to prove that it is indeed the application causing the issues.

Do developers ever think of using XDebug to generate trace data to determine how their code is running? I would guess less than 1% of them do. And I’m not targeting my comments towards that 1%.

Spend a month working at a hosting company dealing with the shite code that is thrown on to customers machines and then you will realise the scale of the problem of poorly written code.

Getting back around to base64_[en|de]code there is no need to have hard coded strings inside a base64 function call. It’s purely obfuscation of something, be that nefarious or legitimate. If you really want to “secure” your code/links/etc then dare I say it use ionCube, though in effect that is still only obfuscation.

NEVER USE BACKUPBUDDY!