Tag: review

Review: FacetWP

I’ve been using FacetWP since April 2017 and I can unequivocally say that it was one of the best purchases I’ve made.

Search Is Hard

There’s no two ways around this. Search is difficult. You have to guess what peoples’ intents are, and you have to order the results in a way that is meaningful. While it would be great if people searched for keywords, they prefer to look for things in whole phrases like “jackets made of feathers.” Those are terms and presentations that make sense to the human mind.

On top of that, there are different kinds of search.

Most people are familiar with document search, which is more or less what WordPress and Google do. Since webpages are just text documentation at the end, Google searches all the text, figures out how many people link to the page, use some secret dipping sauce, five spices, and determine relevancy. WordPress’ own search is much simpler and consequently less effective. Not that Google gets it right all the time either, though…

Another common type of search, also used by Google, is graph search. This is popular on Facebook and Twitter, but it uses connections between your friends to prioritize and determine depth of search.

Finally there’s the concept of faceted search. This is useful when a site knows you’re looking for a product, like a shoe, and you just need help narrowing down the size, the color, the fit, etc. And that’s where FacetWP comes in.

Facets vs Filters

You might have heard about search ‘filters.’ If you’ve ever used Google’s image search, or news search, and you tried to narrow down results based on dates or colors or formats, you’ve used filters. They help you filter the results by changing the parameters. A faceted search is similar, in that it uses the same concepts as filters to toggle multiple aspects of the search item, giving you even more flexibility in your results.

The term ‘filter’ and ‘facet’ are oft used interchangeably, and since they’re so similar and related, this does not help a single person at all. They both help reduce large data sets into something manageable, but filters are relatively easier than facets. In fact, your WordPress site already does basic filters. Ever gone to a category or tag page? That’s a very basic example of a filter.

Faceted Search Is Hard

If regular relational searches are hard, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that faceted search is too. A faceted search has the job of analyzing a large data set and excluding anything that doesn’t fit your specific criteria. This means it uses multiple filters, once for each aspect of the data set.

Okay, let’s make this a little easier to understand with a practical example!

Let’s say you have a database of 750 TV shows. You’ve identified what you feel to be the key components of the shows, such air dates, countries, ratings, specific genres, and if the reviewer liked it. Now, if someone comes to your site and wants a list of crime dramas that aired between 2000 and 2017, in the US, that the reviewer hated, you don’t need filters, you need a faceted search.

By building in options to sort each of those things, you reduce the dimensions of content and offer a structure to help your users understand the contextual construct of the data. You are giving them ideas about what data is available, and how they can search through it without having to guess at keywords.

FacetWP Does All That

Simply put, FacetWP does that.

It does all of that. It even lets me add in a sort-by so once a user has narrowed down the shows, they can reorder them based on name, date added, number of characters, and show ratings. If I wanted to extend that to order based on airdate, I could do that too. People can toggle criteria on and off and the content updates dynamically

If you have a large amount of data (like 750 TV shows or 2250 TV characters), and you want to organize them sanely, swiftly, and not crash your server, use FacetWP. It even works with WooCommerce and EDD, so if you want to be the next Amazon, you need this.

7 December, 2017
Dogfooding DreamPress

While I work for DreamHost, and I’ve used DreamPress since day one, I haven’t have the opportunity to put a serious, stress site up on it. The reason for that is simple. The two sites I have that I might do that for are ineligible for pretty much all managed WordPress hosts … because they’re not 100% WordPress.

But. There is one domain that is, and I’ve moved it over. And this gives me an opportunity to determine what needs to be done to this site to make it fly on a different host.

All Hosts Require Site Tuning

This is possibly an unpopular opinion, but no matter which host you pick, there will never be a ‘drop it in and forget it’ option for any web host. The reason is that no two sites are the same. No two sites use the same code, have the same data, and have the same traffic patterns. And all those things come together to determine how well your site will run.

No matter who your web host is, you will have to adjust. It may be something as simple as editing an .htaccess file or removing a plugin you no longer need. Maybe it’s as complex as PHP settings or having someone write you custom code.

I don’t mean to say that no two hosts are equal, or that one is better than another. What I mean is that no two situations are identical. Of course a site will work, out of the box, better on one site than another. But when we have the capacity to understand what it is that makes our site work, what it does and how it does it, we can make any site work on nearly any host.

For DreamPress, I Made Four Changes

After I moved the site over to a test setup, I quickly debugged the ‘big’ issues. I had a white screen of death. Thankfully I knew right away what it was, because I was clearly aware of what went into my site and how it worked.

First, a lot of sanity checks I’d put in to my .htaccess didn’t work. Primarily it was a case of how I’d handled redirects, since I was using an Apache4 format that didn’t work universally.

Second, I wanted to use a phar file, so I had to add custom lines to my PHP settings to let it know how to run properly.

Third, I replaced the old caching system with the new one. DreamPress has Memcached and Varnish, so I removed some of the object caching I didn’t need anymore.

Fourth, I wrote some customized code to teach my site how to talk to Varnish, since I do weird things.

That’s it. Four things. And I was able to debug this in about an hour because I took stock of the moving parts of my website. Not everyone can do this, I understand that, but when you build out a website, even if you can’t code, it’s incumbent on you to document what you did.

When you add a plugin or a theme, you need to make a note somewhere of what it is and why you did it. I recommend someplace not on WordPress, since if your site is down, it won’t do you any good at all.

The Immediate Impact

With those four changes, the result was immediately obvious.

In the chart above, there are two major drops in speed (in this case, a drop is good). At the end of July, I reoptimized how images were processed by using Photon via Jetpack, I applied caching for FacetWP, and I removed all Google Ads. In doing so, I halved my time to load. This is a great thing.

But then, just by moving to DreamPress and doing no changes to code, I halved it again.

The average site load is now .8 seconds. It ‘spikes’ to 1.2 seconds if you hit a non-cached page. The time to first byte, which is shown on the graph as the yellow/orange line, went from 1.6 second to .1 second.

Was Everything Perfect?

No. But as it turned out, everything that wasn’t perfect had nothing to do with my new hosting setup. I reproduced the site locally and found I had some seriously slow database queries on a couple pages, which resulted in poor load times. Once I fixed that, a few of my archive pages began to fly.

Also as I mentioned in the four things I changed, I did have to write new code. The bonus for the new code is that I was also able to back port some of that into the Varnish plugin itself, which means fewer people will have to write that code. You’re welcome. But that really was more for convenience as the site ran fine, it was just a bit overly aggressive in caching.

Is DreamPress Right For Everyone?

No host is right for everyone. Period. End of conversation.

Is it right for you? Maybe. It certainly can be, and not just for generic ‘blog’ type sites. But you have to know what your site does, who uses it, and what they do to really know the right questions to be asking.

The question isn’t “Is this good for me?” but “What does this do to a site that does what I do?”

25 August, 2017
Review: Do The Twist

When I got ready to go to WordCamp Europe this year, I realized I needed a new adapter. I had one, and it worked, but it also was highly imperfect as it required me to charge everything through my laptop. You know that drill, right?

Like a lot of road warriors, I travel with about four USB plugs and it’s a mess. It’s always looking for good plugs in a hotel room, and hoping I can charge everything. I used to have a cheap USB hub, but it shorted out. Cheap. I knew what I needed, and it was a charging ‘station.’ But I wanted one that would work ‘universally.’

The Drama Of Plugs

I don’t actually remember how I found this. It may have actually been an ad that popped up when I was searching for chargers. I’d been thinking about getting a multi-outlet travel power strip with a couple USB ports. My constant worry with those is the 3-prong US outlet isn’t actually universal here. I’ve been in a lot of nice hotels that don’t have them. Worse, converting from 3-prong to European outlets has, in summer at least, caused a power short.

Seriously, I blew out the power on my floor in Spain once. Sorry.

OneAdaptr to Bind Them

And then I ran into OneAdaptr. At first I was skeptical of the idea. While I had a universal adapter, the sort you can plugin anything into and get anything back out of, this was slightly different.

If you’ve got a Mac laptop, you’re familiar with the odd way you can change your power adapter to use the 2-prong or grab an extension and use a 3-prong. Backpacking off that concept, the Twist+ adapter lets you plugin your laptop right into the base, while leaving you four USB outlets.

This is the TWIST+ World Charging Station. And I’m a super fan.

How I Use It

First, yes, I use it entirely as intended, plugging my laptop and all my devices in. But I actually use it more as a USB hub. Shoving it into my purse, I was able to whip it out at a dinner with friends and plug all our devices in to charge. One of them had a 3-in-1 USB charging cable, and we ended up with 6 devices all plugged in and charging.

This works well with my ‘style’ as I tend to plugin laptops to charge while I shower and clean up at the end of the day. By the time I’m done, the laptop is charged and goes away, and the hub gets plugged in at my nightstand to charge a Watch, a phone, and an iPad. It could even do another phone without breaking a sweat. And in the absolute worst case? I could plug in my laptop and get two more ports.

If you just want a USB hub, they (will soon) have a World Charging Station which looks about perfect for a lot of things.

7 July, 2017
FacetWP: Making Sorting Suck Less
Sorting data in WordPress is generally done in the most basic of ways. You want to see all posts that are in a specific category, you go to example.com/category/drinks/ and there you are. But if you want to see everything in the category ‘drinks’ with the tag ‘bourbon’ and the custom taxonomy of ‘ingredients’ and a value of ‘mint’ AND ‘simple syrup’ to get the recipe for a mint julep, then you have a pretty crazy complex query.

Enter FacetWP

FacetWP is a premium plugin that, for $79 a year, handles all that crazy sorting for you. And yes, it’s worth it.

FacetWP introduces advanced filtering to WordPress, which lets you do things like get that list of all drinks made with bourbon that include a simple syrup, in a dynamic way! It’s incredibly fast, since it’s using ajax and javascript, and as long as you have enough server memory to index all the data in the first place, it’s faster than reloading a new category page.

Downsides

In order to be that fast, you do not get pretty URLs. Let’s say you have your drinks category at `example.com/category/drinks’ and you want to list all those things. Your URL will look like this:

example.com/category/drinks/?fwp_alcohol=bourbun&fwp_ingredients=simple+syrup%2Cmint

The realistic reason they don’t try to make it ‘pretty’ is that it would create a lot more rewrite rules than would be sustainable, if you have a lot of facets. The number of checks would slow your site down, and that would kind of suck.

Compatibility Notes

If you use CMB2 you’ll need FacetWP + CMB2.

If you use Genesis themes, there are two tricks. First, you’ll want to use the following function to add FacetWP’s CSS to your theme:
```
function YOURTHEMENAME_facetwp_class( $atts ) {
    $atts['class'] .= ' facetwp-template';
    return $atts;
}
add_filter( 'genesis_attr_content', 'YOURTHEMENAME_facetwp_class' );
```
Second, if you’re like me and you use a lot of custom loops, they may not behave as expected. If you call the loop multiple times on a page (which is bad behavior in the first place and I know it), FacetWP has a bit of trouble knowing what javascript to apply to what section. That should be expected, and once I cleaned it up, it worked great.

Should you use it?

If you have a lot of complex intersectional queries to sort through, yes.

If you need dynamic result updates, yes.

It works.
12 April, 2017
Local: For When You Don’t Need The Kitchen Sink
The app formerly known as Pressmatic was bought by Flywheel and converted to be Local.

I’d been wanting to try Pressmatic for a while, but had some ethical concerns about paying when I knew the owner wasn’t paying his other employees. At this point, however, the damage has been done in a way I can live with, so I downloaded Local to play with.

Local Is an App

The best thing about Local is that it’s an app. Vagrant is awesome, but it’s 100% command line, and while I’m fine with that, not everyone else is. The learning curve for VVV is steep and, given what you can do with it, it’s not a bad thing. I love it but it can be overkill when I want to work on my plugins. Local is an app, it looks like a Mac app and behaves like a Mac app, so it makes it more obvious how I use it and what I do with it.

Syncing Data

My biggest issue with VVV (and VVV2) is I can’t sync folders from Vagrant to my desktop. This is a workflow issue and I know it. For me, I have dedicated folders for my plugin development, all saved in ~/Development/wordpress/plugins-git/ (with a folder per plugin obviously). That makes it easy for me to script updates by saying “For every git repository in this folder, do a pull.”

Since I do my development work on multiple computers, having as much of this automated as possible is important for my sanity, no matter how much Sara Lance tries to destroy it. Every time I log in to my computer, it runs the update which pulls everything down and syncs.

And all that means, for VVV, I have two options.
1. checkout a git repository into the plugin locations for my site and edit those, syncing them back up.
2. manually copy files over every time I update them
But with Local, I can use the add-on Volumes which lets me map a folder on Local’s virtual machine to my local desktop. Now it’s not perfect, but with this script by Andy Fragen, I was able to set up my site with actual honest to goodness symlinks:

[gist]https://gist.github.com/afragen/748e4780b6057d4c41cf9e466557042a[/gist]

Now I just edit my repositories and magically they’re updated on Local. Faster development for the win.

(My own fork of Andy’s code is available here on Github – I made some changes but not much.)

Conclusion

I use both.

VVV is great. I love it when I’m working on WordPress core, or god help me, WordPress.org itself.

But when it’s just me developing my own software and testing? I like Local. It’s good.
7 April, 2017
Hiya: Bye-a Spammers!

Do you get calls from scammers and telemarketers?

Trick question! We all do!

I stopped getting so many recently, thanks to Hiya. The claim?

Hiya identifies the calls you want to pick up and automatically blocks the ones you want to avoid.

And guess what? As of iOS 10.1 it sure does. I installed it after a day when I had eight scammer credit card calls in a row. In November, a day happened when I got a series of robocalls, and I didn’t answer any of them. My phone flashed, said it had a call, and then it went away, like a hangup. Curious, I popped into my call log to see who’d butt dialed me and saw Hiya flagged the number as a scammer.

They were right. They’ve been nothing but right since I installed it and configured it, and I’ve been unbothered by crazy phone calls.

Setting up the app is onerous, I’ll warn you. On an iPhone, after I installed Hiya, I had to go in to Settings -> Phone -> Call Blocking & Identification. There I had an option for Hiya to allow the app to block calls and provide caller ID. And once I toggled that on, it took minutes for my phone to sync everything up but … Once it was done, the app worked exactly as expected.

The bother went away.

Now for the dark side. Hiya needs access to your contacts. Their privacy policy isn’t fully clear on what they do with it, but they do say they take the numbers in your contacts to build a whitelist. After all, people you add to your contacts aren’t likely to be spammers. But they also claim not to use your information, sell it, or market to your contacts. They also don’t sell to 3rd parties.

As a California resident, I can write and request (once a year) for a list of everyone they gave my information to, so I may do that later, but they appear to be on the up and up. They’re FTC governed, though given that the drama with all this started because they’re doing fuck all at stopping spammers, your milage may vary.

Me? I’m kicking scammers to the curb.

18 November, 2016