We run a few different HTTP servers in a few different roles on WordPress.com . One of those HTTP servers that we were running was lighttpd on the servers which were delivering static assets like CSS, JavaScript and (some) image files. Recently the WordPress.com load balancers were upgraded to nginx and since then nginx has been proving to be a very high performance piece of software, with some very useful features. So we took the next step and moved to nginx on the web servers running lighty, since they had a tendency toward high CPU usage at times. The CPU utilization difference between the 2 was quite amazing really.

Here is a CPU % chart of one of the web servers from this last week. Can you guess when we switched to nginx? (Hint: its on Monday evening when the CPU usage drops to near 0)

CPU usage plummets as nginx is added

Kudos to Igor and the rest of the team, nginx is really impressive.

Sep 24, 2008 (3 Comments »)
Tagged with: nginx, wordpress, WordPress.com

I am sitting at Cape Town airport, thought I would use the last few MBs of bandwidth I have bought to post a quick review of WordCamp South Africa. Matt Mullenweg and I came out to Cape Town to meet the local WordPress and tech/media enthusiasts who use and support WordPress, and blogging/social media in South Africa.

South Africans are doing interesting things with WordPress, and it has found use in many of SA’s most prominent media outlets. Justin Hartman and Vincent Maher gave some good insights into the back stories of WordPress implementations at established media institutions. They both deployed pretty large scale WordPress-powered sites in SA and had some good tips on things they learned in the process. Vincent is an insightful person and a calm and engaging speaker. I owe much of my early career to help from Vincent as he essentially mentored me during my final year at Rhodes by sending me manuals on cutting edge (at the time) technologies including something called Cascading Style Sheets, and then helping me get a job at VWV.

Matt spoke about WordPress and Automattic and focused on lessons learned building an online business, with some predictions and commentary on the business of software in general. It was a good talk, went down well. The thing about Matt is that he is the same approachable guy when he is talking to you at dinner about camera lenses, or talking to 120 people in Cape Town or talking to 500 people in San Francisco. People appreciate this about him.

I snuck onto the schedule and did a quick talk about WordPress.com and people seemed to enjoy some of the stats of a site of that scale. I was a little nervous and jetlagged, operating on 20 minutes sleep the night before. I am taking a lack of mass rebellion and hostile heckling as a good sign.

Some common themes which emerged in the talks and the conversations: Challenges and merits of WordPress vs WordPress MU, “does it scale?” (yes, it does), getting buy-in to Open Source in a culture of “Enterprise Software” and people responding “yes, we hope to” to my asking if they plan to Open Source the plugins and themes they have developed.

Some other highlights of the trip so far: Tyler Reed, Denham Coote and Jason Bagley are a great group of guys who not only put on an impressive event, but took Matt under their wing and looked after him and I so well in Cape Town. The future of social media and Internet technology in SA is in good hands with these guys. Also, the future of the food industry in South Africa (especially chicken related fast food chains) is secure as these guys will singlehandedly keep the sector viable. Personal thanks to them for being such entertaining hosts.

Chris Rawlinson from Stormhoek Wines is a fantastic guy, a gracious host (even at 5am) and now also a wonderful archive of fascinating Jennifer Aniston anecdotes. I wish Chris and Stormhoek Wines continued success in the future. Dave Duarte is an impressive and natural speaker and a warm and personable guy and I am glad to have hung out with him a bit. Good to run into old friends like Elan Lohmann again, he is a smart guy and looks to be doing good things in SA. Also met Jaques Marneweck and he is an interesting and smart guy with some strong opinions. I met many other cool people like Ashley Shaw, Malan Joubert and of course WordPress Rockstar, Adii Pienaar. Henk Kleynhans and the Skyrove team pulled out some real South African ingenuity and hauled in a truck-mounted mobile satellite wifi hotspot when the heavy Twittering at WordCamp took down the first one.

It was a worthwhile trip, but was very short and rushed. I still have family and friends in Cape Town and so I chose to selectively miss a few events to fit in time to see everyone I wanted to see. This is the kind of stuff that stresses me out, so I had to do some mental yoga and just be sure I was doing the right thing even when it felt wrong. I managed to see everyone, but not spend enough time with some.

More pics on Flickr soon when I have some bandwidth again.

Aug 25, 2008 (6 Comments »)
Tagged with: capetown, south africa, wordcamp, wordcampsa, wordpress

Congrats to the iPhone team at Automattic for the official launch of the WordPress app in the AppStore. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Download it now.

Jul 22, 2008 (1 Comment »)
Tagged with: iphone, launch, wordpress

I am posting this from the awesome WordPress iPhone application that’s coming out very soon.

Matt, Joseph and Ranaan and the rest of the team have created something pretty great with this tool.

I was quite amazed at the controls Apple places on iPhone application development. To just get an Xcode build of the app onto my iPhone took some serious permission granting and cert signing from Matt.

It will be in the AppStore soon so enjoy!

Jul 16, 2008 (2 Comments »)
Tagged with: iphone, wordpress

I have had two great years with Vidavee and now inside Vignette there should be new levels of success. Looking forward to seeing what the new organization can do with these products. There are some great people at Vidavee.

Recently, I met up with Matt, Barry and Toni and got to know them a little bit. I have been lucky enough to be offered a chance to join the Automattic global team. A seriously talented group of people, I am honored to be part of it.

Very much looking forward to being involved in such a prominent Open Source project which I have been using for a while (and which Vidavee created a plugin for) and generally supporting the related services. Who knows what future magic these folks have up their collective sleeves.

I start in a couple of hours. I’ll try to blog more now.

May 5, 2008 (7 Comments »)
Tagged with: automattic, vidavee, wordpress, work

Spent a few hours hacking together a WP theme from scratch to get to understand how some of the new WP functionality works. This theme has a pretty minimalist feel, not much going on with it.

Download it if you would like: demure-05.

Unbelievably right now my house only has Macs in it. There isn’t a Linux box powered up (construction going on) and there is no Windows here. Not even a VM anywere at this point. Wow. So this hasn’t been tested properly. I bet it looks terrible in IE. Sorry. I’ll do some testing soon.

May 4, 2008 (4 Comments »)
Tagged with: demure, theme, wordpress, wp-themes

I took the basic assembly parts of this theme from man~ja by Praveen Kumar Ramanathan and then changed most of it. Took about 2 hours all in all and didn’t turn out the way I planned. Anyway, it’s a moving target.

Here is my WP theme: dodgy and it’s not going to win any competitions.

Artwork credits: Some of the vectors which went into the title image come from Vecteezy.com and are Creative Commons licensed. Includes this one from vectorstock, this one by cubik, this one by neno/hybrid and probably some others.

Apr 27, 2008 (No Comments »)
Tagged with: artwork, wordpress, wp-themes