Friday Music Video: Assembly of Dust
“Telling Sue” from Langerado 2007 – sounds not awesome, but I really like the energy of the cut…
MySQL Table Locking & WordPress Scalability
I ran into an interesting issue recently, and since I had so much trouble finding a solution, I’ll post about it. We have a very large WordPress site with somewhere around 32,000 posts. Sometime during may the database (MySQL 5.10) started to randomly crash, taking along with it the Apache server, etc. Every time the crashes occurred, we’d find that the number of users had climbed over the available processes, in this case, 501. We went through a whole host…
Harvard Business Review Criticizes “Long Tail”
Yup, apparently the fine folks at the Harvard Business Review have been looking, and the mantra of web marketing, “The Long Tail” apparently may be long, but it’s also very flat, almost impossible to monetize and it smells really bad (okay, maybe it doesn’t actually smell…). The patterns that emerge in my research suggest that we won’t soon leave what Anderson calls “the water cooler era.” These patterns are far from new: They were described by William McPhee in the…
Reel-Time.com Acquired By NameMedia
In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com – the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer. It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here) and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no…
Friday Music Video: Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
Yes…again…I love Grace…
Yet Another Newspaper Outsourcing Post
Sean Pollay pointed out that the Boston Herald will be outsourcing printing and laying off up to 160 employees. This from E&P: The Boston Herald will layoff between 130 and 160 workers under a plan to outsource its printing operations to other locations within the state, the paper reported Tuesday. The publisher attributes the action to the fact that some of their newspapers have presses that are more than 50 years old, which one would expect are a maintenance nightmare. …
More on Newspaper Outsourcing
CNBC posted on the newspaper outsourcing issue yesterday, and noted that not only is copy editing going overseas for a trial, one of the OC Register’s parent companies papers is now sending pages to New Delhi for layout. Mindworks Global Media will copy edit some of the papers stories for a one-month trial starting next week. And a community newspaper owned by the O.C. Register’s parent company–it didn’t name which one–will outsource page layout to Mindworks, which is based outside…
Newspaper Deathwatch: OC Register Tests Outsourcing Editing to India
When Reuters did this 6 years ago, we all laughed at them. “Want curry with that?” Now respected American daily The Orange County Register has begun a test using a New Delhi firm for editing tasks. From BusinessWeek: Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register. Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality…
WordPress Security 101
Last Wednesday I delivered a presentation entitled “WordPress Security 101” which got the discussions started in earnest about WordPress Security among our team. | View | Upload your own Here are the takeaways: Keep your blog up to date Don’t use plugins that aren’t in general public use unless you know who wrote them or have thoroughly reviewed the code Forms for reader upload/feedback are the single biggest point of attack – be sure if you code one you use…
Friday Music Video – My Morning Jacket
The word is these guys utterly kicked a$$ at Bonnaroo last week. Unfortunately, the videos in circulation from that event aren’t up to even the marginal standards of YouTube. So instead, I bring you an appearance they did in 2006 with the Boston Pops on the Letterman Show here in the US. It gives you a real taste of their range. This is a band I see really going places in the next year. FYI, for those in the UK,…