Read some of our tips how to optimize WordPress for large sites below:

Post revisions

This is a weakness of WordPress. On this site there are over 30,000 revisions for the 14,000 posts. That makes the table bigger and it's slower to search in it. WordPress users realized this three years ago.

Tip #1

We backed up the the wp_posts table and then used a simple MySQL command to remove old post revisions. This decreased the table size from 400MB to 120MB:

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_type = 'revision' AND post_date NOT LIKE '2012-%'

Long-term solution

There are WordPress plugins which can limit the number of revisions per post. We think that the WordPress code should be improved and the revisions should be stored in a different table to maximize speed. You can support this on WordPress bug tracking.

Large number of comments

We need to be extra careful specially with the wp_comments table which has close to 400,000 comments and 320MB. We often find speed issues with MySQL queries which take only a couple of milliseconds on smaller sites.

WordPress 3.2 added a count of comments into the WordPress Admin Bar which shows up for logged in Administrators and Editors when browsing the site.

Comment count in WordPress Admin Bar

Counting the comments actually takes a lot of time on our big database. Here's the query and it's duration in log:

SQL query for counting of the comments

SELECT comment_approved, COUNT(*) AS num_comments FROM wp_comments GROUP BY comment_approved;

In the above case, it takes 0.3 seconds, while all the other queries are done in 0.05 - 0.001 seconds.

Tip #2

To do this kind of audits use WPDB Profiling plugin for WordPress. It shows you all sorts of information in the site footer and you can turn it on and off as you like.

Beware: this plugin turns off post revisions and autosaves when activated, you need to turn it off once you are finished or change it's settings.

It's clearly the slowest query when the site is loading. And this site has up to 20 editors who like to come to the site and read the comments to their articles, so it affects the performance. Keep in mind that this information is shown on multiple places in WordPress Admin Interface.

We created our own queries to do this count. It's 5 queries instead of 1, but they are faster. Just try to test them:

SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'trash'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '0'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'post-trash'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments

The last query counts all the commands, so we subsctract the previous counts. Here are our results - 0.042144 seconds:

SQL query for counting of the comments improved

That's a big improvement over 0.3 seconds duration with the standard query.

Tip #3

You can also download a code and test it on your site, just put it into functions.php file of template here.

If you want to test above queries, replace SELECT with SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE to make sure no MySQL caching will be used.

We also opened a bug tracking ticket for this on WordPress Trac - Speeding up Dashboard and Comment moderation SQL load.

Finding slow database queries with MySQL tools

Another way of finding the slow queries is using this MySQL command. It's best used when you have SSH access to the site.

1. Watch the server load using top.
2. When you see that mysql process is taking too much of the CPU, just try to list running queries with following command in MySQL console:

mysql> SHOW PROCESSLIST;

+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id    | User | db      | Time | State        | Info                                                                                                 |
+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 59462 | site | site_db |    0 | NULL         | SHOW PROCESSLIST                                                                                     |
| 61208 | site | site_db |   62 | Sending data | SELECT ID FROM wp_posts AS a LEFT JOIN (SELECT post_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key='...') AS b   |
| 61228 | site | site_db |   25 | Locked       | UPDATE `wp_postmeta` SET `meta_value` = '1327484262:39' WHERE `post_id` = 66955 AND `meta_key` = '_e |
| 61238 | site | site_db |   16 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (17992)                       |
| 61241 | site | site_db |   16 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (12931)                       |
| 61249 | site | site_db |   11 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (34465)                       |
| 61251 | site | site_db |   11 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (5209)                        |
| 61257 | site | site_db |    6 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (34465)                       |
| 61258 | site | site_db |    5 | Locked       | SELECT meta_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = '....' AND post_id = 24661                          |
| 61262 | site | site_db |    1 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (5367)                        |
+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

In the above list, there is some nasty query which is taking 62 (!) seconds to get executed and the other queries are just waiting until it's finished. Yes, the site was in real trouble when the above list was saved.

There is also an MySQL option called "log slow queries", but we newer had a success with it.

Here's the query in it's full beauty. Since it's using subqueries, it's slow and hard to optimize:

SELECT ID FROM wp_posts AS a LEFT JOIN (SELECT post_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key='fb') AS b ON a.ID=b.post_id WHERE b.post_id IS NULL;

We re-coded the plugin and this bad query is no longer used. This was some weird query in some old plugin which was running as WordPress Cron job, so it's not visible in WPDB Profiling which was described above.

Tip #4

If the query seems to complicated, try to move some of the processing into PHP.

Use indexes!

If you see a slow query, try to use MySQL EXPLAIN command on it. Here's the query:

SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[[::]]' = 1

Here's the output of the EXPLAIN command. Notice the big number in the "rows" column. It means that MySQL has to examine 377,606 rows in the wp_comments table - that's all the comments on the site.

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[:asdf:]' = 1;
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
| select_type | table | type   | possible_keys                                              | key              | key_len | ref                    | rows   | Extra       |
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
| SIMPLE      | c     | ref    | comment_approved,comment_post_ID,comment_approved_date_gmt | comment_approved | 62      | const                  | 377606 | Using where |
| SIMPLE      | p     | eq_ref | PRIMARY                                                    | PRIMARY          | 8       | site.c.comment_post_ID |    1   | Using where |
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The SQL query is using user_id in the WHERE clause. And there is no index which would contain this (see possible_keys in above output, you can also execute "SHOW INDEXES IN wp_comments;").

So we create a new index which will combine two fields from the WHERE clause:

CREATE INDEX userid_approved_index ON `wp_comments` (`user_id`,`comment_approved`)

The table index size will increase a bit, but SQL will search only 1,423 rows when executing our query, because it's able to use our new index:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[:asdf:]' = 1;
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+
| select_type | table | type   | possible_keys                                                                    | key                   | key_len | ref                              | rows | Extra       |
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+
| SIMPLE      | c     | ref    | comment_approved,comment_post_ID,comment_approved_date_gmt,userid_approved_index | userid_approved_index | 70      | const,const                      | 1896 | Using where |
| SIMPLE      | p     | eq_ref | PRIMARY                                                                          | PRIMARY               | 8       | mondoweiss_net.c.comment_post_ID |    1 | Using where |
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+

Tip #5

When you create a plugin which uses custom SQL queries, have look at the tables and make sure the fields which you used in WHERE or ORDER BY statements are indexed.

Add more indexes to the table if necessary (but then be careful if you ever reinstall WordPress).

Another example would be sorting comments by comment_date. comment_date field is not indexed, but comment_date_gmt is. So use that one and your queries will be faster.

• Check out the indexes on wp_comments table in Database Description on WordPress.org Codex.
• Read more about indexes in MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual

Results

Check out the load of our server. It dropped significantly once we added these tweaks.

Reduced load

WordPress Performance Tips for Big Sites

Post from: Foliovision

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Here's all the reasons you might want a VPN.

The problem was Bill Bullock was obsessive about our security/anonymity. So the customer portal didn't really work or hardly existed. Support was over email and a bit hope for the best. Your email address had a single subscription.

Worse yet, when you would go to renew your subscription, you had to create a new account and login.

From the beginning there were two services: Personal, which always included PPTP and now includes ipsec and L2TP and Pro which was twice the price and included OpenVPN. Both are secure but Personal is more easily blocked by governments or corporations as they can usually detect the protocol.

Witopia SSL Service: Tunnelblick then Viscosity

Witopia's upgraded SSL service was always a bit of a crapshoot. For years you had to fight Tunnelblick (one of the nastiest pieces of open source software out there, which requires advanced networking knowledge modifying a text file to get anything done: it defaults to not working and makes you move text files all over your computer, authorizing them each time you do). Then came Viscosity which worked a whole lot better. With your Witopia VPN you got a free preconfigured Viscosity client.

Then something went wrong with Viscosity. When you update Viscosity to keep up with Mac OS X, it's another crapshoot if your settings will carry over to the next version.

So as someone who tried to buy three licenses last year (Personal x 2, Pro x 1) for my company and ran in circles for weeks with absolutely silly suggestions from Witopia on how to fix my configuration, I can tell you the dream was over, the shine off of the hood. With the obliging help of Witopia's owner Bill Bullock finally we managed to get a single one of the personal accounts up and limping. Our ideas of using VPN regularly in the various departments at Foliovision went down the tubes.

We cancelled the other two and got on with our lives. OpenVPN on a small VPS turned out to be an even bigger catastrophe. After a whole day of programmer time settting it up, we were able to eke out 2 KB/sec performance. When Witopia is working, you are looking at anything between 1 MB/sec and 8 MB/sec bandwidth up and down. It's not the 100 MB/sec down and the 10 MB/sec up we have on our connection but it's not 2 KB/sec.

So with clients to serve and lives to live, we more or less didn't use VPN except in emergency.

For reasons of my own, I was using VPN via Witopia a fair amount in the last week. All was well until my VPN account wouldn't connect today.

Witopia happily enough has live chat support now. I lost hours with them today so you don't have to.

Why did my Witopia VPN die?

Witopia created a customer portal and consolidated everyone's account history and orders.

When they consolidated the orders some accounts clearly died. Including one of mine as it was a courtesy account offered for last year's nightmare. Tip: don't kill your courtesy accounts early.

Witopia's ability to consolidate our orders years later begs the question how private were our accounts in the first place if Witopia could consolidate them after the fact.

Locked out of the Witopia customer portal

The new portal sounded great. One problem: it was impossible for me to log in with my old username and password. No problem.

I'll reset my password. No luck: No such username.

Joe suggested I reregister. No problem. Wait yes there is, Username already exists.

Joe suggested I create another account using another email and then consolidate them. That sounds like a lot of work and lots of chances for misunderstandings and broken accounts. No, I want access to my existing account.

Joe needs his supervisor.

Tara comes online (last year Tara was the queen of alternative protocols who led me around an enormous emerald coloured garden of irregularly working VPN). Tara remembers me. A bit awkward. Like an affair gone wrong. Happily she doesn't hold a grudge and we get to work.

Fortunately, Tara is able to get a link which allows you to login to your account and reset your password. Remember Witopia is not access to your data. Witopia is only access to your VPN accounts, so security is important but not paramount. If someone sneaks into your Witopia account, the most they can do is cancel your VPN without asking or change your passwords on you or use your VPN surreptitiously for their own purposes (actually that could get you in trouble if they did illegal things while using your account: but the same applies to your home broadband connection).

Inside the new Witopia Customer Portal

So now I'm in the portal. There are all of my orders for the last three years. Hurray.

On the two active orders, there's 412 days left on one and 46 days on the other. The other is also listed as cancelled, with no options for checking data usage, resetting password or assigning the VPN to someone else.

Looks like portal consolidation this week killed off the courtesy account. Sloppy programming. Thanks sloppy Witopia programmers, you've just stolen two hours plus of my life getting all this working again.

Tara asks me to install Witopia software and use that to access my VPN. No dice. With this track record on working software, there's no way I'm letting Witopia's direct installer get at my network settings. I have work to do this week.

Remember Tara loves the alternative protocols. So I set up all of the different OS X VPN protocols following her instructions.

Alas no protocol, PPTP, ipSEC, l2tp will work.

Testing the main Witopia account

I give Tara the password for my main account (not the courtesy one) to test herself. Tara disappears for about seven minutes. When she comes back she announces that the account works just fine and it surely must be a local problem on my end.

I try to reconnect with a couple of the protocols I'd previously set up and tested unsuccessfully. Bingo, I'm on.

"See," admonishes Tara, "it was a local problem after all."

Yes, Tara, but I haven't changed anything in my settings. All that happened was you went and worked on my account with a tech.

Whatever Tara and the tech did while she was away did manage to reset my Witopia account and get it working.

Witopia Speeds

The second test was on an account with send all connections over VPN so I lost my connection to Tara.

Taking the occasion to test while logging on an on, I ran a battery of tests using SpeedTest.net which is nice enough to give both ping and transfer speeds.

Here's what I found:

ipsec New York
ping 111 ms
download 1.2 Mbps
upload 1.1 Mbps

l2tp New York with built-in Mac client
ping 109 ms
download 2.66 Mbps
upload 7.23 Mbps

PPTP New York
ping 110ms
download 9.7 Mbps
upload 7.36 Mbps

Witopia VPN Software

I was feeling optimistic after seeing all of these protocols work so I decided to give Witopia's custom built software a chance. The download is quick and the installer opens up automatically.

Witopia's software gives a nice blue icon like airport in the menu bar. It takes up less space than Apple's built-in VPN. I tried the built-in L2TP and got some surprising results.

L2TP New York with Witopia client
ping 114 ms
download 8.43 Mbps
upload 6.86 Mbps

I'm still using this connection.

Here's what the interface of the Witopia VPN client looks like:

WiTopia application interface extras

Witopia application interface

Using either built-in or Witopia client software is fine. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just stick with OS X's built in protocols. I'd use PPTP as it tests out very fast. If you want to use a lot of locations, then Witopia's VPN software might be for you as you won't have to build all the locations by hand.

Round two: trying to get OpenVPN up and running with alternative Witopia account

When I got back to my chat, Tara had gone home. A gentleman named Shirin had taken her place. We spent a lot of time trying to resurrect the dead account.

More or less hopeless.

The main OpenVPN connection is very fussy. It wouldn't work with either the Witopia VPN client nor with Viscosity.

Once installed, to reinstall it you need to remove several .kext via terminal. Viscosity which did work at one point, won't anymore. The updater won't update Viscosity and you have to manually find and reinstall all the certificates.

What finally worked was uninstalling launch2netpremium and then doing a hand search for all of its files (a nasty respawn filled networking logs to the point that it was impossible to tell what was happening with Witopia). Next step was to install and reinstall the Witopia client with reboots.

The whole affair required three reboots to work and deleting kexts. You don't want to do this. Viscosity still won't work but for now with the Witopia client I can get on OpenVPN SSL internet.

I spent over three work hours painfully troubleshooting this by hand. Effectively Witopia stole $500 from my company while I did this unpaid work. All I got out of it was this article. Don't you be so foolish.

To be honest, I would not recommend a Witopia Pro account. The amount of time you will spend fighting with software and with cryptic errors just will not justify the small increase in speed and security which OpenVPN brings.

Not only that but a WiTopia Personal VPN account is just $40 (renewal) or $50 new account, while a Pro VPN account is $70/year and will cause you to lose hours with unnecessary tech support.

If you are in China or Iran or some place where you really need OpenVPN, go ahead and spring for it. But be prepared to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.

Resources

Here's a nice historic comparison of Witopia and HotSpotVPN with interviews with both company owners, Bill Bullock and Glynn Taylor.

Here's why you might want a VPN.

Answer number one: you are travelling and need to be sure your web access is not being logged (at least only by your VPN provider).

Answer number two: you need access to another server from a fixed and known IP. It's possible with a VPN.

Answer number three: you want to watch Hulu or listen to Mog or Spotify while outside the United States. If you don't use Facebook, your one choice is Mog.

Answer number four: you need to sign up for some papers or service from outside your home country. I wasn't able to complete a birth certificate request from Europe until I came in via VPN and made the order via VPN.

VPN for OS X: Witopia 2012 review (from a three year user)

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ISB haven't decided whether to put Microsoft or Apple onto their new laptops (actually with Apple you have to buy Apple laptops).

For a smaller program without dedicated IT help, I'd say Apple would be the better choice. But at 1700 students you have the scale to make other choices.

In terms of OS, I wouldn’t choose either Apple or Microsoft. I’d look to the future and give the children Linux laptops. Linux Mint Debian Edition is a very nice distribution which can be based on the very reliable and spritely Debian core (rather than the top heavy and sometimes slow to update Ubuntu).

Of course there are driver issues in Linux, but as you have control of the hardware, you can choose recommended hardware with 100% compatibility and effectively achieve the OS/hardware integration which Apple does at a tiny fraction of the price.

I’m a 15 year Apple user with four Apple computers now (have to get rid of a couple actually). We use all three OS at work but will be moving to Linux over the next years.

Why drop Apple?

Apple is going back to walled garden:

• software: only apps from their store
• data: iCloud for all your data
• hardware: all your devices and all your peripherals have to come from Apple (new proprietary data transfer and monitor connections)

This is an Orwellian world which I wouldn’t want to push children into.

The arguments against Microsoft (backdoors, security issues, shovelware on delivery, performance deterioration over time) have been covered many times.

Let the kids learn how to use real computers where there is a chance to look under the hoods and tinker. It will help them to develop clearer and deeper thinking about IT and technology.

And it will save a boat load of money over 1700 laptops. I'd also try to pick laptops for which I could replacement parts at reasonable prices. I'm not sure what vendor offers that. I know Apple parts are very expensive.

One could still make an argument for hardware quality in favor of Apple in buying the least expensive Apple laptops (say MacBook Air 11" with max memory) and putting Linux on them. Where that gets difficult is you do need a distribution which handles power management on those specific laptops well.

Those MacBook Airs are very light (I have one) and easy to carry around. The maximum memory at 4GB is a limitation but one that young students could probably live with, just as students are forced to live in shared dormitories and only get apartments later in life.

The equivalent of a MacBook Air 11" was only made by Sony a few years ago and cost upwards of $2300. Current US educational pricing on a Macbook Air 11.6" with 1.6 GHz processor, 4 GB memory and a 128 GB flash drive with Apple care is $1332 (bare bones 2 GB/64 GB is at $949 but it's seriously underpowered and nothing is replaceable). Not sure about Thai pricing on Apple computers. The advantage here is that the maintenance for three years would be all Apple's problem.

No, but even the Air doesn't scale out for educational use. The cost for 1700 machines would be $2,260,000.

Steve Jobs holding a MacBook Air: Laptops for Students should be small and light
durable and attractive. They also should not cost $1300+ with reasonable
memory and a multiyear warranty. Photo by MacMessiah.

Does anyone have any suggestions for similarly durable and attractive and lightweight mid-range hardware which would suit Debian Linux (with 1700 laptops, you could even afford to commission some power management rewrites from core Debian team)?

Laptops for Schools: Microsoft Windows, Apple or Linux

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And his name is Ivan Pope. He runs a site called Magazero that we moved from Typepad to WordPress. The move went very well, but Ivan Pope went AWOL after the move.

Ivan Pope is the reason we don't split payments anymore on technical moves.

ivan pope teapot head

His site Magazero.net is now offline completely. Probably another unpaid bill. It's very strange as at one point Pope controlled NetNames registrar and should have sufficient capital to pay his bills.

His other sites for which he may try to commission work include IvanPope.com where he runs a site called Learning to Write (he could better teach eat and run courses). For some reason, Pope's become obsessed with writing about Scrivener an OS X writing tool. I can't imagine Alexander Pope losing his mind about a writing tool.

Here's what he writes about himself:

After a short and varied career as an artist, entrepreneur and anarchist I am settling down to write books.

I am now writing Scrivener for Dummies about the best long form writing software in the world.

His other website AbsentWithoutLeave at awol.ivanpope.com is very appropriately named. Pop hasn't been here since July 1 this year.

Here Pope begs us:

You can buy prints of several of my pieces from the Saatchi online gallery. I’m adding new stuff every day for a while so have a look and make sure to buy something.

Thanks, Ivan

Why should anyone buy anything from Ivan Pope when Pope doesn't pay his own bills.

If you meet Ivan Pope, I recommend you avoid providing him any services as he is unlikely to pay. Anarchists are good that way.

Ivan Pope the Scrivener: Hit and Run Rip Off Artist

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I was recently at a Canadian round table in Slovakia. The Canadian Ambassador to Prague (Canada for inexplicable reasons does not have an Ambassador in Slovakia though most African republics do) asked us very politely what motivated us to come to Slovakia. One well-known business figure quickly answered, "Money is the name of the game. That's what brought me here and that's what gets us up very morning. Isn't it?" His pudgy face beamed at all of us for certain affirmation.

I nearly choked on my drink. I couldn't believe that anyone could live with such shallow values.

Money is certainly not what gets me up every day. Building a better world is. Sometimes it starts by making sure our team is well fed, well paid and well lodged. But the true journey goes much farther.

Cancer survivor Julie Kinnear leading a huge team in a ride against cancer

I have been somewhat concerned that some of our clients or potential clients would shun our services if they knew what progressive organisations we support. But at the end of the day, a progressive stance is part of who we are. We haven't had too many gun-loving, invasion-happy oppressor clients.

And that's just fine with me.

It's been great working with our clients who are usually small to medium sized organisations (not always: we've had Microsoft Seattle and The Hollywood Reporter among other large clients) trying to improve their own communities.

On the occasion of American Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October), I finally had  peace from our clients to put up a first draft of an about page with some of the organisations we support. The normal pace of my email around 250 emails/day which I actually have to read and answer about a third: on American thanksgiving it's dropped to under 50: if only Thanksgiving came more often.

I'm especially proud to support Captain Paul Watson of The Sea Shepherd every month and for the work we've done to help Mario Radačovský found an international level modern dance company here, Balet Bratislava.

Both men are doing heroic work at great personal sacrifice. This is really change we can believe in. People who are willing to put themselves on the line to do something for the greater good.

Keep on doing it Captain Watson, ballet founder Radačovský, Professor Juan Cole. Your personal contribution to making a better world is what makes hope possible.

sea shepard paul watson takes a bullet saving a whale

Thank you to all the volunteers at EFF.org, Wikileaks, Series 8:08, Znet for your great work against tall odds.

Thank you to the open source projects and coders with whom we've been able to give something back to the giants like Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman who made this explosion of shared knowledge possible.

Thank you to our clients who trust us with their projects and their dreams (quite rightly it turns out) and give us the opportunity to contribute to their lives and the ability to contribute to the organisations we support.

Thank you to the Anima which supports us and allows us still to toil for a better life for humankind and all beings on this earth. However dark the clouds overhead, there is still light on the horizon.

Thanksgiving: Making a Better World

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“people who buy iPhones are image-conscious fad-following idiots”.

The words of Apple pundit John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, not mine. But a pretty good summary of the situation.

Gruber was complaining about the brilliant Samsung Galaxy S II ad making the rounds. Here is the long version (1m25s) which you might otherwise miss. There's lots of additional clever repartee not in the airplay version: "I guess this is what adultery feels like," says one of the Apple fans in the queue with the Samsung Galaxy in his hands.

long form version of the brilliant Samsung ad

I'm one of the people who moved from iPhone to Android and is really happy about it. Here's why. I owned an iPhone 3GS. After the initial thrill of ownership wore off, I became very tired of:

• being forced to update to the latest version of iTunes every week
• having my mobile phone tied to my credit card and personal account at Apple, sending all the info in my mobile phone to Apple anytime Apple chooses
• fighting with a virtual keyboard which fills most of the screen when you are using it
• really slow network switching (I live on the border between Slovakia and Austria and need to switch networks often), usually requiring turning the iPhone on and off
• having to hack the iPhone to be able to share the internet connection from the iPhone even to a Mac: and then to be worried that any given update could kill my tethering set up
• looking at really lousy photographs, worse than my two year old Nokias

Samsung Galaxy S II

iPhone 4G

HTC Desire Z

 

After the iPhone, I bought an HTC Desire Z on a contract renewal and gave the iPhone to my girlfriend (strangely enough she likes it, as I'd already set her up with a MacBook a couple of years ago: she doesn't do much with a phone and liked its simplicity but could never really figure out the tethering).

The HTC Desire Z is so much better an experience than the iPhone:

• I haven't had to even log in to Google in order to have a first rate experience.
• The SIM card and account are only hooked up to my mobile provider and my private email (our own server) offering me far more privacy.
• The slide out chiclet keyboard allows typing at about half normal speeds and is very accurate. I also enjoy the full resolution of my screen for viewing and writing while typing.
• Network switching is relatively fast and doesn't require turning the Desire Z off (for bonus points to get internet working again - I have data turned off on when roaming - hit the Airplane mode setting and then turn wireless on again).
• A Wifi hotspot app is built-in. Share your mobile internet connection and data plan with up to 8 devices. This really works well. It's my main internet connection when travelling now. You can even swap another carrier's card in when travelling abroad (I did this in Czech republic, switching from T-Mobile Austria to o2 in five minutes right in the store with no manual configuration necessary).
• In fairness, I'm not sure photos are any better than the iPhone 3G and the movie mode is probably better in the iPhone.
• Paying a normal contract fee, not an inflated iPhone contract. The difference is about €15/month or $25/month, i.e. $840 over the course of a two year contract. Paying taxes to the government is okay: they provide roads and schools. Paying taxes to Apple is just stupid: they don't provide different data than another telephone.

Samsung smartly shows iPhones are for pretentious wannabes who are behind the times. That Apple is trying to create a walled garden in the smartphone industry with their lawyers indicates just how accurate Samsung's television commercial is. The iPhone cannot complete on merit in the marketplace.

All in all, anyone who buys an iPhone at this point is an image conscious, fad following idiot. Android and the Android manufacturers are offering faster, more flexible and more reliable devices with a minimum of hype.

People who buy iPhones are image-conscious fad-following idiots

Post from: Foliovision

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imsanity plugin

When they do, a couple of things happen: the site slows down. Occasionally somebody manages to put the original in the post and their bandwidth goes through the roof.

While it's possible to put a hard upload limit in which defeats the heavy uploads, the errors create a lot of unnecessary administrative overhead.

Imagine that someone created a plugin which would resize huge images to the maximum size used on your site.

Well someone just did.

Try verysimple's Imsanity.

Weird but very cool branding.

WordPress images uploaded by client too large? try Imsanity

Post from: Foliovision

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Where is Textile now? Most importantly Textile is the markup language for 37 Signals Basecamp messages and Writeboards and Backpackit.

There's nothing nicer than Textile for making a quick list with asterisks:

* item one
* item two
* item three

becomes

• item one
• item two
• item three

in no time.

Blockquotes are easy to do too: bq. gets you there.

h1. h2. h3. h4. will get you headers of various sizes.

# will get you numbered lists instead of bulleted lists.

I often have to introduce our team to Textile formatting and our clients. That's the essential above. Rather than create too much documentation when there's lots of other great Textile documentation out there. I'll link to the rest.

Essentials of Textile and Basecamp formatting attractively presented by Alex Kendrick.

Great Textile test bed with reference in left hand margin from ThresholdState.com

Not very attractive but covers the essentials clearly: Warpedvisions's Textile Cheatsheet.

Total overkill is ThresholdState's Textile Reference Manual. Recommended only to hardcore geeks.

Textile: How to write in the world’s greatest markup language

Post from: Foliovision

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missing create new deal highrise

37 Signals minimalist philosophy in terms of software is something I really get and really appreciate.

37signals got it so right with allowing us to create a new case from the Highrise dashboard when filing an item.

On the other hand, I don't understand how 37signals can cripple the dashboard File option for Deals by not allowing us to create a new Deal and file the item directly.

Such an easy fix and we've been waiting years.

Unfortunately, this fix will be more difficult to add to our GTD product for Basecamp AscentList than search ordered by date and some of the other nice tweaks coming. AscentList will be free until at least May for those who sign up now, so if you are missing some advanced task and project management capabilities in Basecamp, give AscentList a try. Early adopters will get a permanent discount.

HighriseHQ issues: Why can’t we create a new Deal from dashboard?

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Basecamp uses Textile as the main editor (well 37signals have added some kind of WYSIWYG editor lately but for those of us writing messages, comments and writeboards for the last seven years, Textile is in our blood).

So what I want to be able to do is write all my posts and drafts in Textile and then convert them to html for publication (saving the original in Textile for further editing).

For a while I used iTextile a wrapper around a Python script. It worked pretty well but was kind of ugly and not customizable. I gave up on iTextile due to ergonomics. When I went to fire it up again yesterday, it turns out iTextile is PPC only and requires Rosetta. On my most recent machines, I've managed to get rid of Rosetta completely so I was warned about installing Rosetta. I'd prefer not to have the emulator overhead hanging around waiting to steal memory and cycles, so I said no.

There is an interesting application called MarkMyWords from xelaton.com in Germany. MarkMyWords allows you to write in the mark up language of your choice (important ones include Markdown, Textile, BBcode and Wiki syntax) and get html out on the other end.

Preview is live which is very cool.

MarkMyWords does what it promises very well and even includes full screen and distraction free modes. If you are looking for a new text editor, MarkMyWords has a lot to recommend it.

MarkMyWords edit window

MarkMyWords Downsides:

• MarkMyWords is another application to install and maintain and learn across all your computers
• MarkMyWords requires a change in workflow (I write mainly in BBEdit and other people have their own text editor prefernces)
• The icon is fussy and ugly.

MarkMyWords icon

Textile Editing on BBEdit

At this point, I was thinking what I really need is to get Textile into BBEdit. I don't know why the BareBones guys have been so lazy about adding a Textile module themselves. Apparently there's been Markdown syntax for a long time.

I found a reasonably good article about how to add Textile to BBEdit but the explanations aren't very clear and one of the download links is broken and the other doesn't give the right filename when unpacked. [Update: dpkendal's original version was broken - our own Martin Vicenik has fixed it for you and uploaded it.]

So for non-programmers, here's how to get Textile editing working on BBEdit:

1. download our Textil.sh filter from Github.
2. unpack the very long file gist1348479-0d1929ba5ff2b3e2b4293dd63254604b72d62b58.tar
3. you will get a folder with a file with this name in it: "Textile.sh"
   

   Note:If the github ever disappears, here's a local copy. We found that this script has some bugs in it's current version (the constants are not properly added). Before this gets submited to Github.com download the fixed version here: Textile.sh.zip
   Our version also won't convert single and double quotes to HTML entities. This should be an option in the original version, hopefully our changes get into Github.com soon.
   

4. move this file to /Users/~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/
5. go ahead and write some Textile
6. open up the Unix Filters palette: Windows -> Palettes -> Unix Filters
7. you should see Textile.sh at the bottom
8. when you are ready to convert your Textile to html, just doubleclick the Textile.sh item. You can create a hot key as well (very useful)
9. as it's BBEdit you can see your html and get a preview of it and then just use undo (command-Z) to get back to the Textile version for further editing
10. when you save your file, make sure you save the textile version
11. for bonus points before posting into WordPress or even Basecamp run the html optimize filter on the result to get rid of all line breaks: Markup -> Utilities -> Optimize

BBEdit unix filters palette

Bingo, you now have full Textile writing inside of BBEdit at zero cost. Apparently this filter will work for other text editors which accept php filters (TextMate among others) but I can't provide step by step instructions as BBEdit 8.7.2 is my weapon of choice.

I may still buy MarkMyWords as I have something of a fetish for text and html editors (own at least ten of them) and earn my living writing and coding. $25 for another work tool is no big deal. But I wouldn't encourage it's adoption across our company as that would be $200 for what most people wouldn't use nearly enough. Our programmers will be much happier with a working php script. On the other hand, Textile.sh doesn't require me to change my workflow at all.

This article full of ordered and unordered lists was written in BBEdit and Textile.sh with no issues.

Marked does not get a review here as Marked is AppStore only. I will not sign into or buy anything from the AppStore or even let it run on my computers (the AppStore is effectively a back door).

Textile Editing on OS X: BBEdit, iTextile, MarkMyWords

Post from: Foliovision

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