Caching wordpress for Weddingbee by using Varnish is a bit tricky, but totally worth it. Last time, we looked at the vcl_recv function that deals with the incoming requests. Now it's time to go over what varnish does with requests after it retrieves them from the backend, or the request to the backend has failed.

One of our sites at work (Weddingbee.com) is a simple wordpress blog with a big audience. An audience that likes to refresh the home page, a lot. Seriously, a large percentage of page views happen on page 1 and 2 of the blog. Because so much of the traffic is essentially "static", we decided to put a caching layer in front of Apache for serving this repeat content. However, like any good journey, it wasn't a straight walk in the park along the pavement, but more of a stroll through a forest on a dirt road.

I’ve updated the look of my site. I think it’s a bit more modern. I also got a bit fancy with my background image. I’m obsessed with randomness, so i wanted to make sure I could have a random background image. That part is easy.

< ?
include_once('bggenerator.php');
$bg_file = background_name($_COOKIE['width'],$_COOKIE['height']);
?>
body { background: url(”< ? print $bg_file; ?>“) fixed; }


So the big news this weekend is that Google Chrome is coming out soon. For those of you who don’t know, grab a cup of coffee and check out the comic about it here, it’s a long read.

FINALLY!!!

Centerflow has been a work in progress for months now. I’ve gotten a good amount of feedback who like the tool, but have trouble installing or configuring it. Ever the problem solver, I decided that the next step for centerFLOW was to follow Wordpress’ lead and offer the web application as a service for people to signup and use, instead of downloading and installing

Feel free to signup at Centerflow Signup

I’ve released a new version of Centerflow. It’s pretty much ready to go.

Before, the Projects and Messages model were using scaffolding. I’ve changed it so that the Projects model can now edit, merge and delete properly. Deleting a project will also optionally merge tasks into the parent project (unless, of course there IS not parent project)

Messages no longer use the scaffold page. I jacksoned the Message listing so that editing messages happens inline, much in the way tasks are edit.

Last year, many states (including my home state of California) moved up their primaries to happen in early February. The idea was that the earlier their primary happened, the more influence their votes would have. Ironically, the exact opposite has. “Super” Tuesday didn’t really change much. The only thing that has happened is that the later states, such as next weeks “Crucial” Tuesday with the highly populated states of Texas and Ohio have more impact than before. Looks like the idea has backfired.

For the past couple of months I have been working on a project management tool using CakePHP.
It’s now available for download so check it out.

I’m watching CNN right now and in the most recent democratic debate they noticed that the democratic candidates have much of the same stands on issues. How is that a big suprise? They are part of the same political party. What’s more the “talking heads” opened up their remarks by talking about how Hilary Clinton is speaking more from her nose than her diaphram; Barack Obama was more “at ease” and had a lot of warmth.

Anderson Coopers “360 Raw Politics” is not very good.

http://blog.lunarpages.com/2007/01/31/eric-meyer-interview-css/

Eric Meyer, writer of many CSS books, and overall CSS guru held an interview for blog.lunarpages.com. They used some of my questions, even!

Check it out at The Lunarpages Blog