David Coveney

I noticed on my ping­dom stats recently that this site has been slow­ing down recently. But why? Is it Word­Press? Some plu­gins? Time for research!

Over the week­end just gone I made two planned present­a­tions at Word­Camp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Cari­bou Theme that runs this site and is avail­able for down­load from Spectacula.

MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a com­pet­ent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.

Ever needed to migrate a data­base to a new server or web­site (espe­cially with Word­Press and other PHP applic­a­tions) and been stuck because when you do a search and replace some of the data seems to get corrupted?

An inter­est­ing prob­lem today — Word­Press post­ing on this site was sloooooow.  Some other back-end tasks were also incred­ibly slow.
Adding a post or page would take about 30 to 60 seconds.  Unac­cept­able.  I did the usual job of deac­tiv­at­ing plu­gins, and even resor­ted to a dif­fer­ent theme for a few minutes but no, it was all still […]

CSS not refresh­ing in the browser can be a pain — Mark Jaquith has come up with an eleg­ant solu­tion to this for Word­Press coders.

CPU spikes were mak­ing my laptop less fun to use — a nice online guide and a quick bit of sleuth­ing with MS’s sys­in­tern­als tools and I soon had the answer. The laptop is now faster, quieter and has bet­ter bat­tery life.

Seri­al­iz­a­tion of data loaded into an SQL table is a dread­ful thing and makes Word­Press migra­tions harder than they should be, but it hap­pens and so we must deal with it. I’ve knocked up a rough and ready bit of code which does its best to resolve the problem.

If you’re fol­low­ing the vari­ous Word­Camp lists, you’ll already know about this event.  But many won’t.
If you use Word­Press pro­fes­sion­ally, or with a great deal of enthu­si­asm, Word­Camps are a great way to meet with other users, developers and design­ers who really under­stand the sys­tem.  There are use­ful present­a­tions, social events and activ­it­ies based around the event.
I […]