Tag: website

Cacheless (or not)
ETA: As of a month later, I’ve actually switched from APC to Zend Optimizer+

Don’t get me wrong, I love caching. I love W3 Total Cache (I’m willing to spend my ‘free time’ testing it, after all), and WP Super Cache saved my life once. So why, on a day where I got a 400-600% uptick in traffic (not a joke), did I turn all my caching off? I’m daring, and a little crazy, but I wanted to see if it could be done. I would not have tried this if I was on a smaller server: if you’re getting as much traffic as I am, and you’re on shared hosting, you really need to move to a VPS or Dedicated Server if you want to turn off caching via plugins. It’s not to say that caching is better or worse than not-caching, or vice versa, or that one is a rich-man/poor-man equivalent of the other. Caching plugins are an inexpensive way to speed up your site, and if you can’t afford a bigger server they will buy you the time you need to figure out a better solution. Even with a good plugin and setup, if you get hammered with a lot of traffic, you will crash your site unless the server’s optimized too. Again, what I’ve done is not something I’d try on a low-end server with high traffic.

When I started measuring the effectiveness of all this, I used:
- WebPageTest
- GT Metrix (tests Yslow and Google Page Speed at once)
- ByteCheck
- Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool
To understand what caching is and why we use it, it’s good to understand the basic concepts, and to start by looking at what caching plugins are, how they work, and where their pitfalls are.
- There are parts of your website that don’t change often (images, javascript, CSS, etc).
- You want the user to only download what’s changed.
That sounds easy, but WordPress isn’t static HTML, it’s PHP, and that means every time you visit the page, it runs various proceses to give you the latest and greatest files. The problem with this dynamic code is where content changes rapidly (think ‘comments’ or ‘forums’ or ‘BuddyPress Groups’). Suddenly caching ‘pages’ as wholesale chunks of html doesn’t help if you have to re-cache when someone leaves a remark. Add in the possibility of 4 or 5 people commenting at once, for 12 hours, and now you’re risking a thrashing situation where you keep trying to cache, but it keeps flushing. This is why most people use plugins that handle things elegantly, or try to, where the ‘static’ part of the page (sidebar, etc) are HTMLized, but the dynamic part is left alone. This helps when you have a portion of every page is dynamic, like a shopping cart with a ‘Your order…’ box.

But the downside is that you have to write fancy code that remains dynamic portions, and while it certainly can be done, it’s not fun, and let’s be honest, a theme developer doesn’t know which cache you’re going to use, so how can it write the right way for that? The only way to make a truly dynamic and cachable site is to do it from day one, with your theme, server, and plugins all crafted to provide the best experience. And then we have reality, which is we start with something simple, wake up to something large, and experience growing pains.

Accepting the fact that we’re not starting from nothing, that we have an existing site with content and activity, the first thing most people do is install a plugin. Now, back to what I said before, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s a good first step and will buy you time. It’ll also show you where you need to go. If you don’t have server root access, this may be a your limit, too, as some of the other things I like to do to speed things up without a cache will require it (or you’ll have to ask your hosts and they may tell you to upgrade).

If you’re going to use a plugin, WP Super Cache (WPSC) and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) are the best two. W3TC is way more advanced, and has a lot of extra bells and whistles, but personally I find that once you can master it, you’re well on your way. Remember though, you’re sacrificing a lot of control here by using a plugin. They’re going to, by their nature, cache everything they can, and we’re back to where we were with the dynamic site generation issue. W3TC has a bunch of extra .htaccess/nginx rules which parse data before you hit WordPress. WPSC can do that, or use PHP (which is slower).

The dynamic nature of my site is what drove me away from caching plugins. I use other CMS tools, and for my infrequently updated Wiki and ZenPhoto Gallery, where content is very much static, caching makes perfect sense. But when I want to run a simple community site with WordPress, I have to consider all aspects of user experience. Speed is hugely important, but so is the user getting the content they want. Stale content is a killer.

The reason I decided to see if my site ran slower without caching was that I was reinstalling caching and I thought “This is a perfect time to benchmark.” When I did I was astounded. There was very little difference in a benchmark test. Really no difference between at all, since it was within the results of each other, but I neglected to save the results at the time. I did however snap a picture of my server load(The unrelated part is where I was uploading 10megs of media. Unrelated.):

Browser Caching is the first thing to tweak, as that tells browsers to cache content. The way this works is your .htaccess tacks on extra information while content like images and CSS are being downloaded, to say “This content is good for X days.” With WordPress, you don’t have to worry about changing the CSS, as most themes and plugins are extra smart, in that they append a version to the end of your CSS like this: style.css?ver=1.9.1 That 1.9.1 is the version of Genesis I’m running, so when that changes, the version changes, and browsers see it as a new file and re-download. That’s pretty cool. (I do wish that child themes pulled in their version, so you could increment that way.) We still have to tell the broswers to cache, and for how long, so near the top of my .htaccess (just below my hotlink protection) I have this:
```
## BEGIN EXPIRES ##

    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"

    ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 hour"

    ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/x-js "access 1 month"

    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
    
    ExpiresByType video/quicktime "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType audio/mpeg "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType video/mpeg "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType audio/ogg  "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType video/ogg  "access 1 month"

    ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"

## END EXPIRES ##
```
I’ve added in only the types used by my site. I used to use Pragma caching headers as well, but I noticed that Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow ignore them. Turns out that Pragma headers aren’t honored all the time, in fact, they aren’t honored often, so I just removed them. I don’t think it slowed my site down to have them, but the less to maintain, the better. This had an immediate positive impact, so it was time to look at the server.

Over the years, I’ve tuned httpd.conf so it doesn’t crash, I’ve got CSF locked down to prevent people from DoS’ing me over TimThumb, and I of course have APC turned on. Recently I broke down and installed mod_pagespeed when I upgraded to PHP 5.4. Just those things have done a lot to make my site run faster. I intentionally skipped things like Varnish or TrafficServer, as well as a CND or Google’s PageSpeed Service. I (still) don’t need them.

Since I’m new to Page Speed, I decided to look deep into the filters and enabled the following for the whole server: rewrite_javascript, rewrite_css, collapse_whitespace, elide_attributes. This had a right-away impact of what I jokingly called ‘Effective Minification.’ These filters are new to me, so I spent a lot of time reading up on all the filters, and I find them highly interesting. By having PageSpeed handle things like offloading jQuery, I take the load off of WordPress and other CMS tools, and don’t have to use a plugin.(Don’t get the wrong idea. There are uses for plugins! But I’m all about using the right tool for the right job. I don’t have plugins handle my WordPress database, because I feel it’s like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. You can….)

I added in a couple more to my standard: remove_comments and rewrite_images. Then I went back to my site’s .htaccess and started turning on the things I wanted per-site.

The ones I picked are:
Putting those in my .htaccess looks like this (note: no spaces between the filter names, or it all blows an error 500):
```
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters move_css_to_head,defer_javascript,insert_ga
    ModPagespeedAnalyticsID UA-MYCOOLID-1
```
That also means I don’t have to use a plugin to use Google Analytics for my whole site! This may not mean a lot to you, but I have multiple ‘apps’ on my site (four now) and when I edit themes, if I don’t have to do anything, it’s easier. Google will tell you not to do this, but unless they have a way for me to set pagespeed.conf in the /home/user/ folder of my server, I don’t know another per-user way about this.

Finally I went back on my word, and I installed a plugin. APC by Mark Jaquith. This isn’t a full reversal on my ‘No Plugins!’ stance before, though. All APC is, you see, is but one file that sites in wp-content and kicks things over to APC. Doing this alone moved my TTFB from an F to a B. Which is pretty impressive. Giving it a little time to bake, this worked out okay.
19 February, 2013
Let Your Content Be Copied

Recently I undertook a personal project to convert a website from Flash to WordPress. I didn’t do this for any reason other than I wanted to do something nice for someone who has, in a very strange way, been the reason I am who I am within WordPress. She’s an artist, which means her website was very media heavy, and back in the early 2000s, the way to do this was Flash.

I hated it.

Oh I loved how it looked, but really that was it. It made her content slow, and it made it impossible for me to say “Hey, check out the new content!” without also saying “To get there, click on Sputnik, then on the fourth star, then the fifth box…” It’s just really bad UI, and no matter how pretty it is, the barrier between reader and content was nigh insurmountable. Also it doesn’t work on iOS these days.

My father, similarly, had his old site as all PDFs, so when I redid his site for his birthday (which he loves, and yes, WordPress), I copied his PDFs to text, with a lot of LATex in there for the math, and he complained. “People will steal my content.” I pointed out they could do that anyway. In fact, I had, in essence, done what they would, downloading the PDF and copying out the text and images. He grumbled, but as soon as his peers remarked that they could finally read his work, he calmed down.

I understand the fear of theft. You want to show you work to draw people in and then sell yourself. My father is a consultant and speaker, and his fear is that people will take his work and plagiarize him, or worse, make it seem like he endorsed them. If you think libel is a rough road on the Internet, try the endorsement shenanigans. Some people will do anything to make themselves seem more appealing.

At the same time, I agree with Cory Doctorow that giving your books away isn’t bad. The reason my ebooks are pay what you will is that I want people to find me, and find value in me. You can argue I wouldn’t have my job if I didn’t do that. My ebook profits paid for a brake repair and help keep my webhosting fees under control, but I sure don’t make a living off two ebooks. But again, the point is not that the website, directly, makes me money, but that it allows me to make money.

It seems counterintuitive. How can I make money giving things away? A website is like advertising. You don’t make money directly on an ad. You pay around $3.5 million dollars to have an ad in the Super Bowl not because you think someone will drop what they’re doing, run out and buy Doritos, but because you are trying to make an impact. The best Super Bowl ads, the best ads in general, are the ones we watch and want to share with our friends. We talk about them, and when we’re at the store and spot Doritos, we have a positive association with them, and are inclined to buy them. Sneaky ain’t it?

The website is the same thing. You read a lot about WordPress here, so at a certain point you start to associate ‘Ipstenu’ and ‘Half-Elf’ with WordPress. You see me on the forums, posting and helping people, and you get positive reinforcement of that association. Then you see I have an ebook about Multisite and you buy it. So why are the ebooks also pay what you want? Because people come to these things the other way, too. They find the ebooks, wonder about my qualifications and merits, and later come back and pay. And yes, I’ve gotten money that way too. After a while, when you build up your cred, you don’t have to mess with that and you can just sell, but at the time of my ebooks, I wasn’t someone who could say “My job is WordPress” so I couldn’t afford to just sell. I probably could today.

By why keep giving things away? WordPress (the code) is free, and my content is technically free here. You’re not paying me to read this, after all. It goes back to positive associations. If you get a good association with something, you keep using it. Newspapers, back in the day, were the only way to get news. You paid for two things: the information and the reliability. The radio came and changed the game, letting you listen to news, but the papers stuck around because unlike TV and radio news, you didn’t have to wait for your segment to come up, you could flip the pages and read sports.

The value of straight news didn’t really change until the Internet, where we started offering you the information at no immediate cost. Most of the time, the Internet sites can’t compete with reliability, but people became increasingly annoyed with having to pay for content. Buying the paper, sure, but I’m already paying for the Internet (access to it). Shouldn’t that be funneling back like TV fees do? Alas, they don’t, which means news media goes through hoops and ladders to try to lock their content down so you can’t copy it, or you have to pay to get at it. In return people like me find ways around paying to read content.

It’s not that we don’t think we should pay for things. I do pay for books, music, movies, media, news, etc, and I encourage people to do so. It’s not the money at all, it’s the barrier between me and the content. There’s obvious value in reading the news, but the value is diminished by proliferation and frankly by their own quality. It’s true that if you build it they will come, but without letting people share what they found, then you won’t get more readers.

That’s why the walls between your reader and your content need to go. That’s why you need to allow a direct link to your content, so I can say “Hey, I read this awesome article, go here!” You want me to tweet, text, link, post, tumble, and share your content so you get more readers, and more to the point, you get happy readers. The happier your readers, the more they feel like they should share. They’re getting a psychological kick-back from sharing, and we’re back to the positive association reinforcement we want.

I’m certainly not going to say that giving away all your content is going to make you money, but I will say that giving away some of your content will do so. There’s no magic formula to say where the breakpoint is for your product, but there’s no way to do that for anything. You have to determine where you’re going to make your money. My father makes money with his work and lectures. By posting smaller excerpts of his essays and papers online for free, people can find value in his work and hire him. An artist can post lower resolution/quality versions of their art for free, and let the reason find merit in the product. A writer can put disparate thoughts that don’t really combine themselves well into one work up on their blog, and let people see the value in their books. And by letting people copy your content, by letting them quote in part on in whole, you make them happy.

Do I worry about plagiarism and content theft? Funny thing, no. By having my SEO ranking high, based on Google and all being able to read my content, if someone searches for phrases found in my articles, they’ll find my site before the sploggers and thieves. By making it easier for people to link to me, I increase my SEO. The same goes for my quality of content. I make it high, people will link to me, and we get a happy circle of reciprocity. I never fear content theft, and because of that, I let my content be copied.

It’s served me well.

11 February, 2013
Cloudy With a Chance of Upgrades

We’re all being seduced by the cloud. Amazon’s AWS has become so popular and so, seemingly, inexpensive, that people are looking at it to run a website, instead of traditional hosting. Understanding the cloud actually was the first post on this site, and while two years ago I struggled to comprehend it, today I find myself at a loss many times when asked ‘Do I need the Cloud?’

I don’t need the cloud for webhosting, and you probably don’t either.

Yes, I have a semi-cloudlike host on LiquidWeb right now, for seven of the ten domains I manage (the other three are all on their own hosts, one of which being my me Elf Dreams, where I talk about DreamHost stuff). I don’t plan on moving the other seven simply because it’s a massive effort. It’s easier to move yourself across country than it would be to move all my sites, re-build the server as I need it, get the code for the new OS (CentOS vs whatever I move to). Heck, I’m dreading upgrading to CentOS6 because of how annoying that is.

The point is that I do know and understand what the cloud is and does. It’s very cool, if you’re big enough to need it. Most indie sites are not.

How the cloud works, in general, is based on the shared resources principal. Everyone shares all the resources in the cloud at all times. If you think back to shared hosting, everyone shares all the resources on that server. The difference between the cloud and the shared is that the cloud has infinite expandability (kind of, but you get the idea), where as a shared host is limited to what it is physically. But when we were back on shared hosting, we used to have a problem with bad neighbors. You know, the other guy on your server who got tweeted by Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton, and suddenly all the sites on your server went down like a bad quiche.

That can happen on the cloud too.

It’s not exactly the same, but when you’re on a cloud, you’re on a server with a lot of virtual machines (VM). A VM is a “completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system” which is a confusing concept. The reason they’re good is that a VM isolates your hardware in a funky way, making reboots faster, while letting your VM instances share a bunch of hardware and become faster. The flip side to this is that you’re still on a real server. Instead of everyone sharing the same CPU/RAM, you get partitions so I can only use X amount and you can only use Y, and thus we don’t kill each other, until we start slaughtering input/output.

Disk I/O (input/output) can be best explained if you’re an older computer user. Remember when we used to play “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” and we’d press a button to ‘travel’ and that old floppy drive would grind like a cheap espresso brewer? That’s I/O. The disk is being read and the data is being input from the disk and output to your Apple IIe. The basic concept of this still exists, and it makes sense when you remember we have to read the data off somewhere. So if you happen to be on a box that is getting a lot of traffic, and using a lot of disk I/O, then you’re going to be slow.

There are ways to mitigate this, of course, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t always know that you need to, or how you should. And even if you do know, it’s not always very easy to do it, so the little guy, who doesn’t have the resources to do it themselves, or the money to hire someone, are left hoping that they’re okay, and often end up paying more than they need to.

And this is why you and I don’t need the cloud yet. The cloud is something I might need, but for now, there are no benefits I don’t already have with a well optimized server and a well built site. If I was a bigger site, or a company, I’d be looking at it as my next upgrade, and studying my past growth. It took me almost 10 years to grow to need a VPS, and it will likely take me at least 5 more before I need to seriously consider cloud. By then, something new will be the big thing, so the best thing I can do is study nginx and keep a finger on the pulse of web technology.

Of coures, the one major advantage to the cloud, and the reason I still see it as being around for a while, is the ability to scale up and down. A webhost provider can cannily utilize that to provide scalable shared hosting, so if you have a bad neighbor, they can be scaled up with less impact to you. But so far as I know, we’re only there with VPS demi-cloud providers right now. Give it time, and the cloud as we know it today will be tomorrow’s low-end hosting.

11 October, 2012
Encrypted Search Terms

I haven’t seen a lot of people kvetching about this, which surprises me.

If you like to look at JetPack’s stats and happen to giggle over your search terms, you may have noticed encrypted_search_terms showing up. Your search terms are what other people use in order to find you. So for example, someone found my blog by typing “forever alone” (which doesn’t make any sense to me, but okay).

About a year ago, Google made search more secure, by letting you search via https. If you’re logged in to Google anything, you will be searching via https, which means no one knows what you searched for. Jetpack sees it as ‘encrypted search terms’ and Google Analytics sees it as ‘not provided.’ This is all great for the user, and the tin-foil hat me loves it! Except that now all we users see is encrypted search terms, instead of anything of value.

As the number of people who use Google whatevers grows, the value for my search terms is going to plummet. In fact, taking a look at things, my ‘not provided’ numbers have doubled. It used to be that maybe 1% of searches showed up like this. I was around 13% for an average month in January, and now I’m looking at 30%. I am losing the ability to see what search terms are good for my site, and this makes it hard to manage my SEO.

Oh. SEO. I hate you.

I laud Google for doing this and at the same time decry them. Yes, having users protected while they search is awesome, it means my data is safe and it’s less easy for people to mess with me. As a user, I think this is good. As a website guru, I wince a lot. Without the feedback of users’ search terms, it’s very hard to know what does and doesn’t work. And the worst part is the majority of your users don’t even know they’re doing this. They know they’ve signed in to Google email, and they’ve signed in to Google+, and that’s it. They don’t know the ramifications.

I don’t pretend to be an SEO expert, but what I do claim is to have common sense, and to valiantly fight against the will to be stupid. It’s pretty obvious to me that encrypting my results rips out my ability to, for free and with no cost to my users, be able to determine what works and what doesn’t on the fly. Many times, when I tweak a site, I follow the stats and see what pages are hit more often, by whom, and when. Now there are work arounds to loosing that immediate feedback, but when you think about it, almost all involve you having to pester your users.

A/B testing is the least intrusive way about it, but for a lot of people, it’s complicated to do on a small, simple website. The basic idea is to ‘draw’ users to two different versions of the same site, and see which one gets more traffic. Max A/B is a good WordPress plugin for that. That said, your users may notice that the site one of them sees isn’t the same as another, and it means you have to up-keep two versions for a while.

Google, naturally, isn’t very consistent here. They generate their live traffic information via your cellphones. Whenever an Android user opts into location tracking, Google constantly monitors their location. If a whole mess of users are slowing down on the 405, guess what? Traffic. Now, arguably your data is ‘safe in their hands’, but that’s impossible to prove. If you haven’t yet, read Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”, especially the story “Scroogled.”

Basically what Google’s saying is ‘You can’t use their data, but we can. Trust us.’ Nothing makes me start to trust someone less.

28 September, 2012
My Custom PostTypes Live in MU
This post is dedicated to Boone Gorges (aka ‘WP Boone’ to me), who donated to help me get to WCSF. My brother is also named Boone, so even if WP Boone wasn’t so awesome, I’d like him.

Custom Post Types. I really dig them, as a great way to make ‘kind of’ pages, without making a million pages. They don’t ‘order’ as well as pages, and default to publish date, but really that could be adjusted. The point, and I have one, is that they’re often a great alternative to Multisite, and I use them a lot.

There are lots of plugins that can make these for you, but I prefer to do it myself in a function file, becuase it gives me more flexibility for what is, let’s face it, a complicated sort of thing.

In this example, I’m going to make a ‘drawing’ custom post-type, like the one I just added to my photoblog. First I made a file called photo-cpt.php and in it put a header:
```
<?php
/*
Drawing Name: Photos CPTs
Drawing URI: http://photos.ipstenu.org/
Description: All Photos custom code.
Version: 1.0
*/
?>
```
Notice I am not telling you to put this in a functions file. I never put my CPT in my theme’s function, becuase I always make my CPTs able to work with any theme. By making it a stand-alone ‘plugin’ file, I can put it in mu-plugins and run it automatically. More on this in a minute.

The code itself is split into two sections. I learned this method from Justin Tadlock, who has a nice, if very techy, primer on Custom Post Types in WordPress. I freely admit, once I figured this code out, I saved it off line and copy/paste it where I need, replacing the terms (Drawing/s) for what the new CPT is.
```
<?php
	add_action( 'init', 'create_photos_post_types' );

	function create_photos_post_types() {

         /* Labels for the Drawing post type. */
        $drawings_labels = array(
                'name' => __( 'Drawings', $domain ),
                'singular_name' => __( 'Drawing', $domain ),
                'add_new' => __( 'Add New', $domain ),
                'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Drawing', $domain ),
                'edit' => __( 'Edit', $domain ),
                'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Drawing', $domain ),
                'new_item' => __( 'New Drawing', $domain ),
                'view' => __( 'View Drawing', $domain ),
                'view_item' => __( 'View Drawing', $domain ),
                'search_items' => __( 'Search drawings', $domain ),
                'not_found' => __( 'No drawings found', $domain ),
                'not_found_in_trash' => __( 'No drawings found in Trash', $domain ),
        );

        /* Arguments for the Drawing post type. */
        $drawings_args = array(
                'labels' => $drawings_labels,
                'capability_type' => 'post',
                'public' => true,
                'has_archive' => true,
                'can_export' => true,
                'query_var' => true,
                'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'drawings', 'with_front' => true ),
                'taxonomies' => array( 'post_tag', 'category'),
                'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'excerpt', 'thumbnail', 'custom-fields', "photos-post-settings" ),
        );

        /* Register the Drawing post type. */
        register_post_type( apply_filters( 'photos_drawings_post_type', 'drawings' ), apply_filters( 'photos_drawings_post_type_args', $drawings_args ) );
	}
?>
```
Looking at this, it’s actually surprisingly straightforward what I’m adding and where. The weird code of $domain is a variable I’ve defined elsewhere, and lets me translate if I need to. I probably won’t but it’s a good practice to get into. By splitting out my labels into their own variable, I’m able to break them up and make it more readable. As Otto says, good code doesn’t need inline documentation becuase it’s readable. You can see the names, and the fields, I’m adding, and they magically become self-explanatory. Then in my drawing arguments, I again make a variable with the settings. Pull in the complex labels, then I can break out the next arguments into something readable.

You can read all the various options in the codex article for register_post_type(), which is the function I finally call at the end.

If you wonder why I have the whole thing wrapped in an action, it’s becuase in other places I actually add multiple post types to a site. This lets me put them all in one action, call it once, and walk away. As long as each CPT has a label, arguments, and registration, they’ll all run.

Below that action, I have one to add my CPT to my ‘right now’ section on the dashboard. I got this from James Laws over at WP Ninjas, and really it’s one of my favorite things.
```
<?php
// Adding to Right Now
	add_action( 'right_now_content_table_end', 'photos_right_now' );
 
	function photos_right_now() {
  
          // drawings
          $num_drawings = wp_count_posts( 'drawings' );
          $num_p = number_format_i18n( $num_drawings->publish );
          $text_p = _n( 'drawings', 'drawings', intval($num_drawings->publish) );
          if ( current_user_can( 'administrator' ) ) {
            $num_p = "<a href='edit.php?post_type=drawings'>$num_p</a>";
            $text_p = "<a href='edit.php?post_type=drawings'>$text_p</a>";
          }
          echo "\n\t".'<tr class="first">';
          echo "\n\t".'<td class="first b b-drawings">' . $num_p . '</td>';
          echo "\n\t".'<td class="t drawings">' . $text_p . '</td>';
          echo "\n\t".'</tr>';

	}
?>
```
Taking a step back, there’s this interesting line in my arguments:
```
'taxonomies' => array( 'post_tag', 'category'),
```
All this does is say ‘I want to use post tags and categories in my CPT.’ And in this case, it’s the same ones as I use for my normal posts. You can do a lot more with it if you wanted, but I believe in KISS.

To loop back around, however, why do I put this in an mu-plugin? First and formost, it’s portable. No matter what theme I use, it comes with me. As I talk about this method in No Children Necessary, it really comes into play here more than anywhere else. On a single, traditional, WP install, I just toss it in and walk away. It’s code, I don’t want my end-users playing with it, so a non-editable file is perfect. For Multisite, I really just add if ( $blog_id == 2 ) { ... } around the whole thing. I could do it just on the actions, but this is easier for me. I can see right away ‘Oh! Site 2.’

This is obviously not going to work for everyone, but sometimes just looking at the next option will give you a new idea.
7 August, 2012
Owning My Data

This post is dedicated to Aaron Jorbin, who donated to help me get to WCSF. Aaron knows that haters gone hate and never lets that stop him. Also: We’ll always have schwarma.

There is a reason people call me a Tin Foil Hat. First, I do have a small tinfoil square in my hat (as a joke) but also I have a ‘thing’ about owning my own data, which in turn has surprisingly helped my ‘SEO’ and ‘brand’ over the years.

While I often cross post links to my content on other sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Livejournal and Google, my content primarily lives on my sites. I link back and share some content, but the content is mine and it lives with me on my sites that I pay for, maintain, and support. I really like to be in charge of my data and how it behaves. That’s why I crafted my own mailing list from WordPress and RSS2email, why I use Yourls, and pretty much why the only data I ever outsource is analytics, even though I could use my own.

Analytics is funny. I have a lot of tools on my server, but frankly they suck. If someone open sourced GA and I could install it on my server, I’d probably use that. I’ve used all the locally installed Analytics tools, and just never really been fond of the interface. Right now, I have GA on my sites and it’s actually the only Google interface I use, save ‘Webmasters’ which is just there in case I get blacklisted.

You see, I don’t trust Google. I don’t like how they, like Facebook, take all your data. I don’t like their ads which screwed me over big time last year, and I switched to Project Wonderful. I make less money, but I get to approve my ads. Google Ads hit me hard when I said I didn’t want any religious ads on my site. Suddenly my profit went from $60-100 a month to $10-20(For what it’s worth, I make the same money now on Project Wonderful and feel better about the ads.). The point of this is, the larger a company gets, the more funny rules and regulations they end up following. If you read Jane Well’s ‘A Tale of Two Brothers’ and how it relates to construction and development, basically Google started as Brother #2, and are now Brother #1. There’s a time and a place for both brothers, sometimes in the same project. And with each brother, you have a comfort level. Some people love flying by the seat of their pants. Others prefer to have a plan. Some of us just want to wear a hat. This comes into play, for me, when I consider my personal data and content.

One of the schools of thought is that social media is for being social, and your website is for complex, static, content. There is a lot of line blurring these days that didn’t exist back when we just posted on our blogs and replied to comments. Now we can leave comments, or tweet, or share, or a hundred other ways to push our information out there. We have options on how to communicate with our readers. How many of us end up responding to comments on Facebook and Twitter, as well as our blogs? It’s nearly at a point of information overload, and we don’t know where to post this content. There’s clearly a need to balance out your brand promotion and your brand. Will you be diluting your brand by posting all over the place? How do you drive the readers back to your site, engage them, and keep them coming back for more?

This is where you need to own your data.

Obviously it’s a good thing to post to Twitter and Facebook and Google+. These are avenues to connect with people, but you need to follow up on them. Recently I had an odd experience with hotels, where a handful tweeted me, asked for contact info to help me with ‘deals’ and never followed up, except for one, who did email me, and got me a great rate, $40 off their normal ‘low’ rate. Guess which hotel I’ll be using? What made this odder was that they said I could get better rates at their website than at places like Kayak or Orbitz. We all know the pain of a hotel is finding one and comparing prices, right? Travelocity and Orbitz said $167, Kayak said $199. I ended up getting $167 but through the company’s website directly. They cleverly both played the system (getting two of the three sites to show accurate prices) and offering the same deal on theirs. By owning their data and content, and letting these other sites feed into their site, they’ve won. They communicated, they contacted, and they put up accurate information that led me back to their site where, indeed, they made a sale (and the likelihood for a repeat visitor).

Owning your data is controlling your presence. It’s not just remembering not to post that awesome information in just one place, it’s knowing how to ensure that your face is seen, the content is shared, and in no way does it misrepresent you. That last one is why I like to use my own short URLs, and why I dislike Facebook and Google. Think about the advertising on Facebook and Google (and now Twitter). You don’t get to say ‘Never show people ads for things I find reprehensible or scammy.’

Weather.com Ads
Personally I think the world would be better if every company said ‘No more get rich quick ads, or ‘With this one secret tip…’ or outright scams.’ Weather.com is notorious for this. Looking at the ad I screencapped, you can see things that no one in their right mind would click on. And yet these things clearly ‘sell’ or Weather.com would have scrapped them years ago. They feel the trade off between ugly, scammy ads and free content is fair, so they show the ads.

There are times when not owning your data is alright, but generally those run towards sharing your social media and any analytics. I mentioned analytics before. It’s not just that I don’t like any of the tools I could install on my server, it’s that Google does it better. There are multiple layers I can peel through, and if you’re an analytic junkie, that’s what you want to use.

Any time you come to a place where you have to decide between owning your own data and letting someone else be the master of your domain, I strongly lean towards self-ownership.

31 July, 2012

Tag: website

Cacheless (or not)

Let Your Content Be Copied

Cloudy With a Chance of Upgrades

Encrypted Search Terms

My Custom PostTypes Live in MU

Owning My Data