Foundation's Edge

Keeping up with the latest bugs and improvements with WordPress – or heck, any large-scale project – can be a challenge. To that end, I subscribe WordPress Trac and WordPress-MU Trac, the official bug trackers for the WordPress project. They feature a steady stream of bug reports, user problems and feature requests, and they’re a good way to gauge how well a particular upgrade is going … and what pitfalls to look out for.

But it’s not all bugs. I’m also interested in how people are modifying and building out WordPress, and the WP-Hackers Listserv has proved invaluable for keeping track of both. It’s a fairly low volume listserv — maybe 40-60 messages a day — but there’s a lot of good quality conversations. Recent ones include:

• the possibility of requiring PHP 5 for WordPress 3.0
• removing the “janky text” disclaimer from the “Order” field in the “Edit Page” interface.

Admittedly, the conversations are technical — if you don’t know PHP, this list isn’t for you — but it is handy for coders.

CollegeWebEditor.com has a nice profile on Swarthmore College’s use of WordPress to power it’s online magazine, the Swarthmore College Bulletin.

The magazine’s based on the Branford Magazine premium theme for WordPress, which just serves to remind me that we need to dig deeper into the premium theme options out there.

Jason Alley’s got a cool little Sites blog called The Alley Way, but alas, he hasn’t updated it recently. So this is just a quick tag post to encourage him to write something nifty, like this post from way back in September: Dude, where’s my iMovie ‘09 project?

The ITS Coffee Break’s resurgence continues with Episode #61, just released today. In this episode, we discuss Chris Phillips essay “I Hear America Reading: Using Digital Audio to Teach American Poetry”, which appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Teaching American Literature and announce Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V, which will be held at Lafayette College.

We also chat about Windows 7 testing, the new Droid smartphone, and DARPA’s new $40,000 balloon hunting challenge. All in all, a nice little show — so go listen to it now.

This is a rather ho-hum article about technology on college campuses, and students arriving on campus with iPods, Kindles, etc. What I did find interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “utterly crazy”) is this photo of a student on a treadmill working on an iMac. Now I get multitasking — heck, I watch vidcasts and movies on my iPod all the time at the gym — but this just seems like a fantastic way to hurt yourself.

Treadmills can be a challenge in the best of times (as evidenced by the occasional iPod or iPhone that gets dropped, hits the treadmill, and goes flying across the gym); I can only imagine how badly I could hurt myself trying to use this setup.

After a six month hiatus, the ITS Coffee Break is back!

In Episode #60 Courtney Bentley and I discuss Lafayette’s WordPress MU project, take a look at Bates College’s new WordPress-powered home page, discuss the Google Wave web application, debate the merits of Amazon’s Kindle vs. Barnes & Nobles’ new Nook ebook reader, and talk about an upcoming copyright webinar.

Get the podcast.

Courageous is the third book in Jack Campbell’s military SF/space opera series called The Lost Fleet. As with the previous books, it tells the story of John “Black Jack” Geary, a legendary starship captain thought killed in combat a hundred years earlier, only to be found in suspended animation in an escape capsule.

Once revived, he finds that the galaxy has been caught up in a war between two factions — the Alliance (a liberal democracy on the verge of collapse) and the Syndics (a corporate meritocracy gone horribly wrong).  He’s thrust into command of the Alliance fleet just after its disastrous assault the Syndic home world.

Courageous sees Geary continuing his efforts to get the fleet back home to the Alliance while simultaneously trying to teach the Alliance Navy the meaning of honor and compassion, two concepts that have been horribly warped (in the case of honor) or abandoned (in the case of compassion) over the last of 100 years.

As with previous books, Courageous is at its best when focusing on naval and Marine combat between the two factions. It occasionally gets bogged down with Geary’s angsty struggle to live up to the legend that his name has become … as well as the temptation to resist using that legend’s power.  This book also sees him having to deal with a Syndic navy that’s wising up to his tactics, which ratchets up the tension for both him and the reader. Geary’s won battle after battle against the Syndics, but it seems likely that he’s going to lose — and possibly lose big — sometime soon.

Bates College is using WordPress to power their new home page.

College Web Editor has a nice write-up on the relaunch, including an interview with the project leader.

They talk about what plugins Bates is using (NextGen Gallery, Super-Cache, WP Table Reloaded) as well as how the site integrates with the college’s social media sites (Netvibes, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube).

I’ve been on a huge space opera kick for the last year or so and have been reading every example of the New Space Opera I can get my hands on. Space opera, for those who don’t know, is the sort of larger-than-life science fiction typified by Star Wars and Star Trek. Unlike Hard Science Fiction, which attempts to limit itself to what’s possible, or at least close to what’s possible, Space Opera is happy to slush around in all kinds of impossibilities.

Faster-than-light travel, wormholes, time travel, myriad alien civilizations — space opera does it all. The New Space Opera is a movement that’s grown in popularity over the last few years, and fuses some aspects of Hard SF onto a space operatic frame. Alastair Reynolds is one of the leading writers of the New Space Opera and his Revelation Space trilogy typifies the movement.

Absolution Gap is the third book in this series. In earlier novels, humanity has expanded to the stars via “lighthuggers”, starships that travel just below the speed of light. They’ve found the ruins of a dozen alien civilization, but time and again the aliens are long dead by the time we arrive.  Over the course of the first two books, we discover exactly why all these alien civilizations died … and why we might be next.  Absolution Gap promises to answer the question of whether we can avoid our own extinction, though it’s certainly taking its time doing it.

Reynolds is quick enough to bring characters from Book 2, but he also introduces a new subplot on a world entirely divorced in time and space from the main storyline. This tends to slow down the pace of the book as you pop back and forth from the characters you care about to new ones that aren’t nearly as compelling.  I expect there will be a pay off for this divergence — Reynolds is always good about delivering on that — but I wish he’d sped things up.

I’ve recently been running some tests on WordPress to determine where potential download bottle necks may lie. I’ve found two add-ons for Firebug, the excellent troubleshooting/development plugin for Firefox:

• YSlow: A tool for Yahoo that analyzes a page’s download time, breaking it down by file type (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Images) and points out potential problems.
• Page Speed: A tool that lets you dissect the very act of downloading a page, from the initial request to the server for the page through the download of each component. Perfect for visually identifying where your slow downs may be occurring … in real time.

They’re handy tools to have, and were very helpful in my WordPress analysis.