I worked all day Tuesday without a break and by evening, I was in some pretty bad pain. I fantasized about taking ibuprofen all day, but it makes me tired and I had too much work to do. Fortunately, I am married to a genius! Karen started rubbing my shoulders and I could feel huge relief spread though my whole body. She suggested that I get a real massage. Suddenly, I was filled with hope. I could get relief! We called a place that has relatively cheap massages and booked the 2 appointments they had for 9pm.

Turns out that you get what you pay for, but even still it was great and fixed my pain. Only problem was that neither of our massagers listened to what we asked for. K’s kept doing things too hard even after repeated requests to stop. My person asked if I had any specific requests. I told her the parts that hurt and asked her to concentrate on those parts and ignore the rest. My main request other than my painful shoulder was my hands. My hands almost always hurt. She did not even touch my hands. Suddenly it was over and my whole body was relaxed except for my hands. They were still in pain and in a total state of tease, still tingling from the anticipation that they would get some relief. Oh well. The rest of my body still feels good.

Wordcamp is this Saturday! I am very excited. Wordcamp is tied with Macworld as my favorite geek event of the year. Perhaps not so coincidentally, those are the only two geek events that I can afford to go to. Always nice to be around other geeks and share in the WordPress love.

Me and K saw Dolly Parton at the Greek last week. She was totally awesome and played about 12 different instruments over the course of the show. She also told lots of stories and laughed a lot and generally made it impossible not to have a great time.

I finally updated Autiblogger yesterday from WordPress MU 1.3 to WPMU 2.6. Had a few problems with the .htaccess file which were pretty easy to fix and blank admin pages all around due to a plugin incompatibility, but the upgrade was pretty smooth otherwise. Hopefully it will help with the splogs.

The last exciting bit of news is that I got a few more .me domains. I think I am done for now, especially considering I am not completely sure what to do with the five I now have:

• lorib.me
• beeis.me
• killerbee.me
• primarykey.me
• whatiswrongwith.me

I am considering changing the name of this site to either lorib.me, beeis.me, or primarykey.me. The name LBnuke is kind of outdated considering it was named after software that is no longer used on this site (PostNuke). primarykey.me cracks me up, but will be lost on non-database geeks, and possibly even on them too. K hates it. lorib.me is appropriate but kind of boring. beeis.me is nice because saying it makes me happy.

killerbee.me and whatiswrongwith.me were just too good to pass up. Hopefully I will find a good use for them someday.

If anyone has any thoughts on a new name for this site and/or what to do with the other names, please leave a comment.

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This weekend, I went to Wordcamp 2007 in San Francisco. It was even better than last year. Surrounded by wordpress geeks. In some ways, I like it better than macworld. There are not too many things that I like better than macworld. Wordcamp is smaller and more focused. Lucky for me, it is focused on some of my favorite things.

Saturday morning started out with a session about podcasting given by Dan Kuykendall, author of the podpress plugin for wordpress. I had no idea how much that plugin can do! It is very easy to insert a podcast into a post. Podpress will auto-detect media type, size, and length, as well as provide options for how to play and display the podcast in your post. Podpress also enables you to set different settings per category. Nice.

Next was a very cool discussion about blogs vs. journalism led by John Dvorak and Om Malik. It was very interesting and covered a lot of ground. The discussion started off looking at the perceptions that people have about blogs and whether blogs are a replacement for journalism, an addition to journalism, or are journalism in themselves. Also discussed were the role of comments and how the appearance of a blog can affect its credibility. Dvorak said that people might discount a site just because it looks like a blog without even bothering to read it, while if that same content was placed into a different layout and design, it would be perceived as more credible. There were a few good suggestions about holding off on publishing content immediately. Om Malik suggested stepping away form what you wrote for 15 minutes before posting it and John Dvorak suggested reading out loud (for real, not pretending to read it out loud in your head) because your ears will catch things that your eyes missed. Om suggested having your computer read it to you. It was recommended that people learn about journalism & libel law, and what words are okay to use and which aren’t.

After lunch came one of my favorite sessions of all, Kicking Ass Content Connections with Lorelle VanFossen. I have read some of Lorelle’s writings about wordpress over the years, but never got to see her speak before. She was nothing at all like I imagined. She was a little older, a lot funnier, and had a completely different attitude in general than I would have thought. Hearing her speak made me want to go back and read more of her writings. She spoke about her book, Blogging Tips, writing good content, general tips for blogging, and spam management. It was all very interesting. Some blogging tips she shared were to not publish a post immediately, to show people a story in a new way, to make a personal connection to your readers, and to leave something left to talk about by blogging only part of an idea. My favorite tip of all was to not write for your 8th grade teacher.

Next was a session about blog monetization which was not quite as informative as I was hoping it would be and then a session led by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith called Getting Involved with WordPress. I liked that one a lot. I really like to give back to the wordpress developers and community whenever possible. Some suggestions they had for getting involved were submitting good bug reports, including a patch in the bug report, writing documentation for the codex or making helpful screencasts, and answering support forum questions.

Robert Hoekman, Jr. led the next session, Designing the Obvious, which was based on his book of the same name. He spoke about surfacing the important elements of a site by eliminating things that are non-essential and using graphics to encourage interaction in place of “useless” graphics so that people can find what they are looking for very quickly.

The last session of the day was Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers led by Matt Cutts from Google. Matt had some good SEO tips that included thinking about keywords that people are typing into the search box and using those words, variations of the words, synonyms, and plurals in a natural way, using dashes instead of underscores or spaces (underscores work like dashes in google, but not in other search engines), and using alt tags on images, but of course we are all doing that anyway for accessibility reasons

My favorite google factoids of the day were about how google treats certain characters in urls. Question marks are treated like regular urls, but will not get crawled if there are more than 2 or 3 parameters. Google truncates urls at a hash mark.

People went out for drinks at Lucky 13 afterwards, but I was all out of energy for being with people and also I missed K, so I went home.

Sunday morning started off with a session called HyperDB and High Performance WordPress led by Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg. It was extremely interesting, but hard to conceive of the actual reality of running blogs or blog networks with the kinds of traffic they were talking about.

Some statistics comparing different caching methods:

• Un-tuned LAMP Stack
• Linux, Apache 2, PHP 4 or 5, MySQL 4.1 or 5.0
• 8 requests/second
• 691,200 pageviews/day
• APC – Alternative PHP Cache
• 12 requests/second
• 1,036,800 pageviews/day
• 50% performance increase
• WP-Cache
• 300 requests/second
• 25,920,000 pageviews/day
• 25X performance increase

Matt talked about HyperDB which was above and beyond my level of database understanding, but sounded pretty cool anyway. He made my favorite quote from wordcamp, which was “Only make new mistakes”. I like that. If only I could actually do it!

A few helpful hints about what to do if you get slashdotted or dugg:

• Disable plugins until the site stops crashing
• Use WP-Cache
• Sometimes, switching to lighttpd or something similar can fix it.
• In your .htaccess file, deny everyone except your own ip access so you can work on the site

Jeremy Zilar from the New York Times talked about the blogs at the Times which run on wordpress. There are currently 30 – 40 active blogs that all run on a single wordpress install and primarily use a single template. After that, Rashmi Sinha spoke about designing massively multiplayer social systems. People seemed quite interested in this, but it was lost on me.

Next was a BBQ lunch from Memphis Minnie’s which looked quite delicious if you weren’t a vegetarian. For the veg’s, there was mac and cheese, potato salad, greens, and cornbread. Unfortunately I am not so good at eating dairy and didn’t like the greens, but the cornbread was excellent.

After lunch was a musical interlude by Andy Skelton followed by a session called Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing led by Dave Winer, author of the Scripting News. My brain was still out to lunch so I do not remember much of what went on, but there was an interesting discussion about creating future safe archives. It is something I think about. Hard to know what the best way is. Paper? Tape? Stone? Someone said that the library of congress was archiving things onto 78rpm records because you can play them just by putting something sharp in the groove and spinning them.

Next was an excellent session led by Liz Danzico, an information architect with Happy Cog called How Not To Get Noticed, an analysis of the usability for WordPress. She spoke a lot about the wordpress administration interface and changes that are coming to it in version 2.4 based on usability studies.

Liz said that people don’t notice good design and that bad design forces people to do things to change that design. Also that users don’t care what designers intended and will get frustrated if something doesn’t work in the way that they expect. As an example of those concepts, she talked about ‘desire lines’ such as the dirt paths made by people who want to get from point A to point B the quickest way rather than using the paths designed by architects for that same journey.

Many of the idea for changes came directly from the ideas and kvetch sections of wordpress.org. People want the dashboard to be different by focusing more on incoming and outgoing information such as referrers, comments, and stats.

One very interesting thing that happened during the usability tests was when they tried to emulate the more graphic object oriented interface style that is so popular now with many socially oriented websites, and also in use on the iPhone. They organized the wordpress admin by nouns instead of by verbs and added a media library. Turned out that wordpress users really hated it, including Matt. I think I would hate it too. Based on that discovery, they cleaned up the primary tasks and the navigation section in the admin area rather than rewriting it. Why fix something that works fine?

Matt gave the State of the Word after that. He is a great speaker and embodies the enthusiasm of the wordpress community. He spoke about bbPress, accomplishments in the past year, and the future of wordpress. He spoke about wordpress becoming a platform and asked the audience what they thought the most important feature of a platform was: stability, speed, security, or flexibility? Most people, including me, voted for security, but Matt said that flexible platforms have the best track record of staying around and moving forward.

Things to come in version 2.3 are plugin update notification which will tell you if a plugin is compatible with an upgrade and if a new version is available, tags, and an improved draft and pending system where there will be more options for categorizing unpublished posts such as ‘submit for review’ and ‘awaiting review’. Not so coincidentally, these things are at the top of the most popular ideas wordpress.org page.

The last session of the day was the Developer Duke-out with Michael Adams, Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, and Andy Skelton. It was an interesting format where either Matt or someone from the audience would ask a question, and each person would answer it. One question asked was whether wordpress and wordpress mu should be combined. I don’t think it is a very good idea because it adds extra complication and is more than most people will ever need. Andy said that he thought they should be combined because they are almost the same, Mark said that they shouldn’t because wpmu requires server access that most people don’t have, Donncha said no because it is harder to install and needs mod_rewrite and wildcard subdomains which hosts might not support, and also that it has a layer that is unnecessary if you are running just one or 2 blogs.

What is everyones favorite theme? Sandbox, of course. What would they use if they didn’t use wordpress? Andy votes for a moleskin notebook, Mike votes for either nothing or nothing, Donncha would use an ftp text file or write his own cms, and Mark would either use textpattern or write his own.

There was a split down the middle for choice of php version. Mark and Mike vote for PHP4 and Donncha and Andy for PHP5. I was kind of surprised by the votes for PHP4, but someone mentioned that most worpdpress features do not really need PHP5, so there is no need to involve wordpress users in that particular war.

I was sad when it all ended and very tired. There is nothing like being surrounded by so many geeks, especially geeks with such similar geekularities as me. I met some nice people including Jessi Hance, who I only knew through this site before, Estelle Weyl who has a cool blog about random things of interest to webgeeks, and Daniel Brusilovsky, a high school sophomore who does a podcast called Apple Universe. I learned lots of new things and had an excellent time. I wish wordcamp happened twice a year.

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Wordcamp 2007 – I can’t wait! 2 days long this year. D will be there too. I am happy about that.

No more sponsored themes on WP themes site. Makes me happy.

PHP4 will be no more. Finally!

Warcrack
I can finally play again! I am taking a break from Tsayad my main hunter because I wanted to start at a lower level so I could remember how to play and was not in a guild so that I didn’t feel like I should be grouping with people.

I started a night elf druid named Shikibee who is now level 16, alchemy/herbalism. I might end up making her my new main. Tsayad is only 41 and I am liking this character better. I thought hunter was my favorite because it is possibly the easiest class to solo with. I liked having a pet and it was pretty cool to send my pet (Fuzz) in and shoot things with arrows from a distance.

My favorite way to play is to run up to things and fight them, but that is hard to do as a hunter. I tried to be a warrior for a while, but that sucked worst of all. Not a good solo class because of no healing abilities. Have to stop and eat or bandage and make sure to have lots of healing potion, which is not so easy if you are a blacksmith/miner. Tsayad is skinning/leatherworking, so could supply shikibee with some nice armor.

I am leveling shikibee as a feral druid with this build but I might move some of the points around before I am done. If anyone has any idea what I am talking about and has any suggestions on a good solo pve feral druid build, I would be happy to hear them.

/* end random geekery */

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I am sitting in the back with a bunch of other folks who felt the need to plug in to a power strip. It is comforting to have so many power strips about, and I am kind of amused at the amount of people who brought their own. Talk about good planning! I was happy that I even remembered to bring my power brick.

We are having a musical interlude now by Eric Haller. He is singing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ and playing guitar. It is very nice : )

There are lots of people here. Way more than there were at 9am. The first session was all about widgets and was very interesting. I haven’t tried wordpress widgets yet, but they look pretty fun! Matt M is going to give the ‘State of the Word’ now.

Matt is a really good speaker. I like how he speaks to everyone in the room and has such a concern about making wordpress easy for everyone to use, especially new bloggers and non-technical people.

People in the audience are making suggestions about how to make wp easier to use, for example adding images, changing themes, making it very easy and intuitive to perform common tasks.

Yobie Benjamin and Pat McCarthy are talking about monetizing your blog now. Sometimes I think about doing that either to this site or making other sites on specific subjects using targeted advertising. I gotta make money somehow!

I just noticed that the guy who is speaking now looks just like my brother, Bri. I find that a lot of people look like him. I took a picture with my phone, but I think I’m too far away for a good shot.

Now Mark Jaquith is speaking about using wordpress as a CMS. I do that a lot, so I am pretty excited about this one.

Not much new info about the CMS stuff, but still interesting to hear about. It was especially interesting to see the example sites and how far they diverge from the standard wordpress look and feel.

Now I am in room 2 where Donncha O Caoimh is leading a Q&A about wordpress mu (multi-user). I am most interested in this because I would like to set up something for Aspieland where users can easily set up their own blogs free and easy.

The windows are open and it is very hard to hear what is going on. No mic in this room : ( It’s not so bad when the traffic dies down.

At the Apple store now. I just HAD to come here, since I was in the big city and all. I left wordcamp a little early because my attention span ran out. It would have been nice to see the plugin showcase, but maybe someone will blog about it. Soon I will hop on BART and head home. There’s a party with free beer giong on at Pier 38 tonight which is pretty tempting, but taking BART home after that doesn’t sound so good. Okay, off to BART now. I will wait until I get home to post this. Gotta check for typos and all. I am writing this in Yojimbo so it will be on my big mac when I get home. Gotta love that!

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