Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Your Photos, Your Way

I’m funding PressGram on Kickstarter and you should too.

I like Open Source. Surprise!

I don’t mind paying for products (as witnessed by the fact that I have paid for this theme, and even the old DevPress and ThemeHybrid ones I don’t use anymore. I have a slew of plugins I paid for, and all in all, I think every dime was money well spent. Paying for open source makes sense.

So there’s this guy I know from the Internet, John Saddington, who likes taking photos, and he likes social media, but he wonders, like I often do, what happens when those outlets go away? Where are all my photos if TwitPic or YFrog vanishes? Or if Facebook deletes my account?

They’re gone.

John loves WordPress. So do I. John loves photos. Well. I fiddle around with them, but the point is he wants to built something that is way more than ‘just’ a plugin. He wants to make a free iPhone app… look, this is what he wants:

The premise is simple: I wanted to post filtered photos from my iPhone 5 but without worrying about any privacy or licensing issues (and we’re not interested in asking you to upload photo IDs). In other words, I wanted complete and total creative control of my images and content (as well as the pageviews).

And this will post to WordPress, which is so simple, we have a one-click installer at DreamHost for you to use to make it. Imagine that. You could have a photoblog with a couple clicks.

When I read that John was making PressGram, I had to poke at it, even though it’s not Open Source. It’s an Apple iOS app. I’m not shocked that it’s not open source, and after consideration, I don’t mind. It doesn’t have to be. As long as the plugin is open source (and frankly, given WordPress’s API, I can easily envision how it would be without stepping on closed source apps), it’s good to go.

John knows his shit. He shares the same concerns and doubts about social media as I do, he rails on Facebook for the same things I do. He’s a guy whose ethics I can get behind. And he’s a guy whose code I can get behind. Remember I review plugins. I’ve seen his code. It’s good.

So yeah, I’m supporting him so you can have a free app. Go figure. And as with most of the things I kickstart, I get no swag back (I think I get a kudos and a link somewhere), because I like to give for the spirit of giving most of the time. I’ll be getting the Veronica Mars DVD, but I’d be buying that anyway.

Give in. You know you want this. Pay $5 instead of risking your content belonging to someone else.

6 April, 2013
Chrome Dumps Webkit

Chromium, the machine behind Chrome, has dumped Webkit.

This speaks for us all:

Chrome is no longer using webkit. Every developer in the world:http://t.co/3wIT6XCaxO

— soully (@soully) April 3, 2013

I’m not sure what’s going viral first, that gif or a ‘Don’t blink’ joke that someone has yet to make up. Oh, the new system is called Blink, and it’s open source.

We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

Yes, this means we all get to use even more browsers to make sure our sites look okay on all of them. Again. Thanks. And while they say it’s ‘based on’ webkit, that’s about as ‘related to’ as when Law & Order would say ‘The following episode is based on a true story, only names have been changed…’

This prompted my coworker Shredder to opine “Are Google and Mozilla late-april-fooling us?”

Did you miss the Mozilla/Samsung partnership? ~~Or maybe you didn’t notice that Opera moved too Webkit in February.~~ No wait! OPERA SWITCHES TO BLINK

Okay, Rarst is right: They’re out to screw over Apple.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see the new ways in which my sites break!

3 April, 2013
Trading APC for Zend
The last thing I did before Passover was a totally unannounced, not telling anyone, surprise flip from my old standby, APC, to the new hotness, Zend.

As of PHP 5.5, Zend Optimizer+ will be included. Back in 2009, I decided to use APC for a couple reasons: It was made by the PHP blokes and it worked well with mod_php and MediaWiki. Since PHP decided to change, I joined in. Why the change? Zend went open source.

Installing Zend

I grabbed the latest tagged version from the official GitHub repository, since I don’t cotton to using bleeding edge all the time.
```
$ wget https://github.com/zend-dev/ZendOptimizerPlus/archive/v7.0.1.zip
$ unzip v7.0.1
$ cd ZendOptimizerPlus-7.0.1/
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
```
That gave me the final output of: Installing shared extensions: /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/ You want to hang on to that path, because we’re going to edit php.ini and put this in below the line for IonCube, if you have that installed:
```
 zend_extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525/opcache.so
```
Replace the path with your own.

I also followed their advice on the recommended config and put this in my php.ini as well:
```
[Zend]
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
```
Since I had APC there before, I removed all those lines while I was at it. Restarted PHP (well, httpd in my case, I like a clean slate) and I was done.

Cleanup

As I mentioned before, I removed the APC lines while I was in the php.ini and, since I installed it via a downloaded pecl, I just removed the apc.so file from the same folder where opcache.so was installed.

On WordPress, I also removed the APC Object Cache Backend plugin from the two sites that had it, since I’m not using APC. There doesn’t appear to be an equivilent for Zend, but I may or may not need that.

For MediaWiki, I had to edit LocalSettings.php and remove $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL; as that’s no longer being used. Then I went into my maintenance folder and ran php rebuildLocalisationCache.php --force to flush everything and my errors went away. MediaWiki has a pretty different cache method than other apps, and for yonks flat out didn’t work with Zend. It does now, and there seemed to be no speed loss without an OpCode cache.

None of my other apps seemed to care, so I moved on to see how this all played out.

Results

Much like the ManageWP guys, I saw an immediate drop in memory and CPU. And I’m still on PHP 5.4! There was an initial spike while I was mucking around, which I expected, and then everything dropped. Some things did not so much drop as level out and change my ‘spike’ range. Normally my load average for 1 minute would spike at 0.8 or so every hour. Now it’s spiking at 0.5, give or take, which is a success in my book.

Can you guess when Zend went on?

Before someone points out that, hey, this is hardly a real check, I want to note that I was having one of those 200% traffic days. Actually I was having a few of them in a row, and I know it’s going to go up from there. Here’s a quick look at my traffic:

The real test will be tonight and tomorrow, though, as I push some large data (videos) on a popular topic, but frankly, this is looking good.

The benchmarks used in the ticket to include Zend in PHP (why are they using WP 2? I have no idea) were startling compared to normal PHP. Compared to APC it’s a minimal kick in the pants, but the assurance of bundling to come speaks for itself. This is where PHP is going.

Credit: Dimitry

I’m not yet on PHP 5.5, but I’ve already found that 5.4 is a notable kick to my speed. Zend took me from a B to an A in PageSpeed and YSlow (when you tell YSlow that I’m a small blog and not Amazon). Also it ‘feels’ faster, which is totally subjective, but still a valid remark. The site feels fast, it doesn’t hang (yet) and it didn’t crash over Passover!

Former bbPress regular, _ck_, went and wrote a neat little Control Panel for Zend Optimizer+ which I snagged and tossed into my secret bin for poking at later.

Since I’m the Zend Rookie, anyone have any tips and tricks for configuring it to make it sing? Remember, I don’t just use WordPress on this box!
2 April, 2013
Genericon’d Menus

Quick and dirty, I wanted a menu to have Genericons. Menus are crazy extendible and I use them in sidebars all the time to make a list of links formatted in a nice way. So why not a Genericon? After all, I know menus are really glorified Custom Post Types.

Don’t they look pretty? It’s stupid easy.

URL: http://facebook.com/you
Navigation Label:
Title Attribute: Facebook
CSS Classes (optional): social-buttons

Then all I had to do is fiddle with CSS. li.social-buttons .genericons is applicable here, and that’s why I gave it the CSS class. If I wanted to have it be a genericon plus text, then the Navigation Label would have been Facebook instead. If you don’t want the genericon to be part of the link, make the label just the link name, and add genericon genericon-facebook to the CSS classes.

31 March, 2013
Collecting Conflicting Stats

While, like many people, I use Google Analytics, I don’t really trust it’s parsing. I do use mod_pagespeed which lets me auto-embed my GA code in every page without plugins or extra work on my part, which is great, but the results are questionable and often wildly disparate and conflicting.

Let me demonstrate:

Google AWStats Webalizer

Page views 2,607 10,354 8,502

Hits 49,830 59,542

Visits 888 1,274 2,255

First of all, I can’t find ‘hits’ anywhere on Google. Their layout is different and changes regularly. Secondly, and I’m sure this jumps out at you, according to AWStats and Webalizer, I’m getting 4 to 5 times the pageviews compared to Google. I previously configured AWStats and Webalizer to exclude wp-admin and other ‘back end’ pages by editing the configuration files. I did the same in my .htaccess for PageSpeed, so I know no one is tracking admin pages.

I already know that AWStats errs on the site of users, so if it can’t tell something is a bot, it assumes it’s a user. I also know it tends to overcount, since it bases its counts on traffic in a way that is a little generous (a 60 minute count for a visit). Not a huge deal, but enough to say that yes, the 10k pageview is probably closer to the 9 or 8 of Webalizer. Speaking of Webalizer, it uses a 30 minute count, so there it skews higher. Fine, let’s be harsh and halve them.

That gives me 4000-ish pageviews. Google gave it 2600-ish.

Interestingly, Google gives a 30 minute visit count too, but it also uses cookies and javascript, which while fairly safe, doesn’t run on everyone’s browser. As an amusing side-bar, when I switched from using a plugin or manually injecting Google Analytics into my sites and started using mod_pagespeed’s insertion, my results went up. Noticeably. In part this is attributed to the fact that my site is having higher traffic than normal, but when I compared it to WordPress Stats, it was a bigger than expected jump.(I’m not using WordPress’s Stats ala Jetpack in this experiment because it only counts WordPress pages, and the site I’m using is not just WP. However on a pure WP site, WP’s stats tend to skew higher than GA.)

Which one is right? Most people will say Google is ‘closer to the truth’ but I don’t know how much I can rely on that. Certainly it’s more true for how many actual people are visiting my site, and when I’m judging metrics for marketing, I’m a little more inclined to use Google. That said, if I’m trying to understand why my page speed is slow, or where I’m getting hammered with traffic, AWStats and Webalizer are far more accurate, since they’re counting everything.

From “Manga Guide to Statistics,” Shin Takahashi, 2008
Right now, I’m keeping Google Analytics on my sites. I don’t really need the measurements for marketing (that would involve doing marketing), but there are better social engagement stats provided that make it helpful. Like of all the social media sites, Facebook and Twitter are tied for traffic, and Google Plus is only high scored on my tech blog. I think that if Google let us auto publish to Google+, those stats would change, but for now, it’s all manual.

This is not to say that I think auto-posting is great for social engagement, but I find I actual pay attention more to the social aspect of the media if I don’t have to remember to post all over the place. This is a massive shift since October 2011, when I’d stopped auto-posting for SEO reasons. Why did I change my stance? Well it because easier to autopost and keep that personal touch with Jetpack’s Publicize feature. Now I can easily insert a custom message, and I know it’s going to (mostly) use my excerpt.(For some reason Tumblr is a moron about this) That saves me effort and allows me to spend more time actually interacting!

Auto-generating my stats with little effort, and being able to easily read them without needing a degree in SEO (no they don’t exist) is also hugely important. Google Analytics is easy to read, but curiously I find it overly complicated to understand. The different pages and layouts make it surprisingly hard to find ‘What were my stats for yesterday?’ Sometimes I have a boom in traffic on one day (like the day I had a 600% increase) and I want to see what went on and why. Where was this traffic coming from? WordPress’s stats do this amazingly well, just as an example.

No one tool provides all the data I need to measure all aspects of my site, nor does anyone one tool collect all the data. Google tells me more about browser size, screen resolution, and everything it can grab about the user, where AWStats and Webalizer give me more information about traffic by showing me everything, bots and humans. Basically server tools are great for collecting server stats, and webpage tools are great for user stats. But you need both.

So in the end, I have at least four different statistic programs I check on, regularly, to try and understand my traffic and measure success.

25 March, 2013
I Don’t Understand CloudFlare

If you know the answer to all this, I’d love to hear it, because I can’t figure this out. What’s the real point of CloudFlare?

Fairly recently I was reading Tony Perez’s post about CloudFlare vs Incapsula vs ModSecurity. As regular readers may know, I am frenemies with Mod_Security. I often want to kill it with fire, but I never disable it entirely because it protects my site from hackers. By using Mod_Security I limit my chances of having Bobby Tables kill my site.

Using Mod_Security gives you some protection from simple SQL injections, but also XSS attacks. You can integrate it with things like Project Honeypot. As they put it:

ModSecurity™ is an open source, free web application firewall (WAF) Apache module. With over 70% of all attacks now carried out over the web application level, organizations need all the help they can get in making their systems secure. WAFs are deployed to establish an external security layer that increases security, detects and prevents attacks before they reach web applications. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring and real-time analysis with little or no changes to existing infrastructure.

And you know what? It really does all that.

So what’s CloudFlare? It’s an intermediary between your site and the world which caches your site, compresses data, and gives people the fastest version of your site. In the event your site is down, they’ll serve cached versions. They even give you a pretty picture.

The first time I heard about this, I arched my eyebrows in surprise and confusion. I’m going to make my site faster by putting more layers between the reader and my content? That means instead of just relying on my server and host to be fast, serve compressed pages, keep the lights on, keep a speedy connection to the Intertubes, and do all the things that needs to happen for the magic pipe between my website and you guys, I’m doing all that and trusting someone new to help me do it better. Interesting, Captain. How are they doing this?

CloudFlare has a few tricks to do this: CDN (content loads faster if it’s stored local to the people visiting the site), content optimization (minimizes and compresses page content), security (protecting you from DDOS and SQL injection), and analytics.

Except when I look at that list I think that I already use mod_pagespeed to minimize and compress my content, mod_security to protect me (also Config Server Firewall for the DDoS stuff), and analytics is done by my server or Google. For me, that means the only thing they’re offering that I don’t have is a CDN. I read up on CloudFlare’s CDN, and they tout not having the weight of 15 years legacy crap. That’s a tricky edge to dance on, since they also don’t have the experience of those 15 years, or the network. In fact, looking at their network map, they have nothing in South America. Guess what the number two location is for people visting my sites? Brazil.

And this, my children, is why you study your stats to understand who is visiting your site, where from, why, and with what browsers. Right away I can see that CloudFlare, while interesting, doesn’t seem to have any benefit for me. If I decide that I want a CDN, it’ll probably cost me around $30 more a month, minimum, for my sites and what they have on them today. Oh but wait, you say, CloudFlare is free?

Yeaaaah. I don’t trust free services very much. A free app, once I download it and put it on my server, I keep. A free service is hosted on someone else’s server, at their whimsy, and is supported as they see fit. Yes, this means I don’t trust Facebook or Twitter. A free service is interesting only in that it lets me try it before I buy it, and for that, I approve of how CloudFlare does it. But the problem is today I went to a website and saw this:

What did I do? I didn’t visit this website. They can brag about the whole 30ms response time all they want, but if I went to a website and hit a barrier like that, I stop because it’s getting in the way of my surfing. That was my initial quandary about CloudFlare after all. How can it provide all these awesome things without getting in the way? And it can’t for everyone. At first I thought it was because I was going through bit.ly and it worried I was a spammer (okay, fair enough), so I tried manually, and it was the same problem. I just went to the page normally now, and it’s been well more than “5 seconds” and the site still hasn’t loaded.

I fundamentally dislike anything that causes my users to do ‘more’ to get to my content. I think that it’s more harmful than a slow site, and it’s more harmful than letting these bad eggs visit my site. The right place to block a naughty person is when they’re doing something naughty. If my IP is a range of DDoS attackers, that’s one thing. You shouldn’t be detecting as the page loads, delaying me almost 30 seconds, and then loading the page. This delay is supposedly for my protection (me the site runner, not the visitor). Okay then, what are they protecting me from?

Part of CloudFlare’s service is something called a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is fancy-speak for saying their computer looks at what people are coming to your site to do, what data they’re sending, and tries to figure out if they’re nice visitors (which it should let through) or naughty hackers (which it should block).(From WP Shine Cloudflare: Early Reports Question Effectiveness as Website Security Tool)

WAF came up before, with Mod_security. And at this moment, I go to a picture. Here’s what Tony parsed from the data:

He asked on Google+ what we took from that article, and my reply was “That the months I spent mastering mod_security was totally worth it.” If you don’t trust Tony’s numbers, you can read the full report on slideshare for yourself. Tony has the same feelings about Captcha as I do, by the way, though less strongly. I despise it more than I hate hotlinkers, and I hate hotlinking. Captchas are the worst barrier between content and consumer that was ever invented. They don’t work, they’re not accessibility friendly, and they are rarely implemented well. Hotlinking may be theft, but Captchas are shouting “No soup for you!”

Which brings me to my point.

What is CloudFlare doing? In plain english, can someone explain to me how it would benefit me? Ignoring the CDN aspect, the only WAF part I can see benefiting me is that CloudFlare (and Incapsula for that matter) essentially crowdsource the list of people who are ‘bad’ and shouldn’t access my site. Which is cool, and that I certainly like. It’s sort of like a Project Honeypot for baddies (and by the way, that would be a nice feature). Having the world bring in the list of bad people, as well as their patterns, and sharing that back out is a great way to keep everyone up to date quickly and seamlessly.

I really just can’t see why I’d ever want to use CloudFlare. It would certainly be a cheap and easy way to put some possible gain on my site, but in the long run I feel that managing these things myself (or hiring someone to do it) would be a better business solution. It saves me from the dread blackbox spam killer, which means I always know what’s going on. Now I know not everyone is capable of handling all this themselves, but from what I’ve seen, most webhosts already have mod_security running. So lets drop the WAF argument from the table, and we come down to the best thing CloudFlare’s doing is acting as a CDN and compressing content. That’s not good enough for me. At that point, you may as well use Google’s PageSpeed Service

I’m sure there are great reasons for using CloudFlare, but I just can’t see it.

Quick ETA… Talking to a coworker, it occurred to us that I may just not be their audience. I’m too big already and I took care of most of what they do. I can look at this and think “If I just have a small site and I want to speed it up on a shared server where I have no root nothings” then it looks way more reasonable. But I’m not.

20 March, 2013