Let’s Get Naked!

Brothers and sisters, April 9th is a day to get naked.

And tempted as I was to take a photo of myself like these fine looking specimens, I figured I’d just drop the stylesheet and post up a few lines. Aren’t you glad?

CSS Naked Day is intended to show your appreciation of the wonders of CSS. Without it, well, you can see how the site looks

WordPress 2.5 has arrived!

And it’s pretty awesome, in my humble opinion.

Earlier tonight, it was announced that WordPress 2.5 has finally been released, after what seems like an awfully long time. Automattic skipped the 2.4 release, and packed as much tasty php-powered goodness into this release as they could possible manage. Have a look at the post on the dev blog to see what I mean.

Is There Food, and all the blogs I host, have been updated to 2.5. As usual, if you come across anything weird, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it.

To weigh in on what I think of 2.5: I love it. I posted on the wp-testers mailing list the other day to say that, after a short period of adjustment, it’s really hard to go back to 2.3 (I’ve been using 2.5 in beta and RC form for weeks on other sites).

Is it niggle free? No. But then no release with changes this massive was ever going to be. Will things improve? Absolutely. There’ll be plugins or hacks to resolve the majority of complaints people have, and maybe 2.6 (or 2.5.1) will make some more alterations.

But for me, 2.5 is a massive leap in the right direction. I recommend you upgrade, or get someone who knows what they’re doing to do it for you

WebFaction Versus Media Temple

AKA Hosting Move Update #1 - Speed

It’s been almost a week since I moved this and all my other hosted sites from Media Temple to WebFaction. Given that there isn’t a massive amount of information out there on WebFaction (although there was enough to convince me to try them, thanks to Technorati!) I thought I’d do a short post on how things are looking on this side of the fence.

Host moves can often be a “grass is greener” type of affair. You like the look of a particular feature that your host doesn’t have, or their pricing seems better, or they offer a revolutionary scaling grid system that’ll make your site Digg proof, and you jump ship. I left A Small Orange to move to Media Temple (I seemed to have landed a slightly temperamental server at ASO, but friends have had no such problems with them) in order to host a big future project of mine.

I’m happy to say that, in this case, the grass is altogether greener and far more luscious than it was over t’other side. The main reason for my move was Media Temple’s apparent slowness with the sites I was hosting. These are all low traffic WordPress blogs, so nothing particularly adventurous or taxing, but when the mind boggling tedium induced by simply clicking on the “write” link in the WordPress dashboard became too much to bear I had to try something else.

I set up a WebFaction account for roughly $9.50. I’m in the UK, so I ended up paying VAT on top of whatever they charged, so a straight conversion won’t quite give you the total paid. I figured I could write that off if they ended up being slower than Media Temple and close the account after month 1. Or take advantage of their 60 day money back promise.

I copied one of my sites across, and loaded up the WordPress dashboard. Then, in another browser, on another monitor (yes, I have two monitors - how posh am I?), I loaded up the same site on Media Temple’s servers.

Now, admittedly this isn’t strictly speaking a fair test - there are a number of reasons beyond the host that could account for the difference in speed, but the WebFaction hosted site seemed so much quicker it was untrue. I was seeing ten second load times for the write post page, compared to three seconds on WebFaction. Maybe Media Temple was having a particularly bad night, but tests on subsequent nights confirmed a definite speed difference.

Normal Service…

Should now resume. Until I upgrade everything to Wordpress 2.5, that is

Bad Plugin

If you’ve seen lots of test posts show up in your feed, I apologise. Something went pear shaped during the server move, and one of my plugins started acting up. Every time I hit publish, I got an error.

I managed to track it back to the Wordbook plugin I had installed. My Facebook profile is now nicely spammed with test posts though. Grr.

I’ll contact the plugin author and see if he can help. For now, it’s bye bye Wordbook plugin.

Featured Reviews…

…has gone offline for a bit. Having seen how other themes are doing their featured posts these days, my way is a bit crap, frankly. So I’m ditched it for now, and it’ll resurface when I a) start regularly writing reviews again, and b) change the theme. Which is still coming soon…ish…ly.