Monthly Archives: July 2007

How to write about Linux for Digg?

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I can't say I really know the answer to this question as none of my articles reached the front page, and I don't think they will ever be there mainly because digg audience doesn't care much about the type of content I write, but check out this site www.venturecake.com.

The site has only 11 articles and 6 of them reached the front page on digg.com. Venturecake.com is a blog about technology, mainly open source, Linux, Unix, Apple, and some others. The last post ( Who copied who? ) was published yesterday and it got over 600 diggs in one day.

The posts that made it to digg's front page are about common buzz words like Apple, Web 2.0, ( Web 2.0 is built on Open Source ), Open Source ( yes this is still a buzz word ), Ubuntu and Virtualization ( 15 minutes to using your existing Windows install & apps in Ubuntu , 10 minutes to run every Windows app on your Ubuntu desktop ) but also some unique tips like
10 Linux shell tricks you don’t already know. Really, we swear.

Speedlinking Unix 20-07-2007

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It seems Solaris features (mostly ZFS ) make a lot of buzz these days. I wonder when ( if ever ) will Linux include ZFS in the kernel. I know there is a ZFS implementaion for Linux in FUSE, but that's never going to be used in production unless it's ported in the kernel.

I think the developers should leave the licensing mambo jumbo aside and really look at what ZFS has to offer and decide upon that if it's worth implementing . Isn't there anyone in the Linux world that wants ZFS ?

More optimization for comment relish plugin

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In my previous post about optimizing the comment relish plugin I managed to lower the load generated by the comment relish plugin on the database server by adding an index on a column in the cr_emailed table and by optimizing a query ( basically removing a "useless?" join ). This improved the load time a lot but some users still reported slow load times on blogs with a lot of comments.

Looking more over the source code I realized that the function that tried to find new commentators was executed on each page. This function was executing a mysql query that joined two tables wp_comments and wp_cr_emailed. I think you can imagine the result of this on blogs with a large number of comments.

The solution was to execute this function only when a new comment was posted. And this comes with two benefits:

  1. because this is called only when a new comment is posted ( or approved ) the rest of the blog will remain as fast as before the plugin was installed.
  2. because of the way we call the function ( as an action/hook associated with the code that processes the comments ) we have more information about the comment so we don't have to do the query where we join two tables. We still do one query to get the whole comment data and one to see if this is a new commentator ( not emailed yet ) but these use indexes and are really fast.

Get the new optimized plugin here and let me know how it works for you.

Update:

the plugin link above contains a plugin that tries to send email even when the blog receives a pingback or trackback as reported by Rhys. I have uploaded another version that corrects this problem here: [download id="9" format="1"]