Tag: WordPress | David Coveney

A little change on this website

In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.

But then the day came when I upset some far right people, and I realised some content had to go away. My trust in the world diminished. A man shouted abuse aimed at me at our house one night. Nobody else in the family witnessed this, incredibly – the kids were asleep, my wife was brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush, and all I did was simply close the bedroom window and ignore the man. No point feeding a fire.

That was the moment when I realised that being hyper online, sharing everything, and also trying to fight to protect people from the malevolent sides of society came at a cost. Before that I’d been campaigning against Brexit, and continued to do so.

A year after that abusive night – I had a heart attack. I document some of that here, and here. I don’t recommend it, but I did realise that for most of my life I lived under a constant strain. As a kid I attended seven or eight (I actually lost count!) schools before I was twelve. I’d lived in multiple countries, and most of that with an abusive, violent and frequently drunk father. Each school was a new challenge – standing out, but then also being reasonably bright, and a bit weird was tough. But I learned about people, what makes them tick, and also that the only thing that really worked once a bully had decided you were a victim was to fight back. You could win a battle with words, or you could win it physically. It worked.

It always worked.

And it has to stop. I’m too old, too tired, too spread thin to fight and, more importantly, to take the damage. Obviously I haven’t been in a physical fight in a very very long time, but verbal fights? Arguments? Online battles with the world? Plenty. And I see many people just quietly standing at the side. They might agree, but they’re not going to fight that battle.

I disagree with ignoring injustice, but I’m also at that stage where I think that fighting small battles is pointless when there’s a broader war going on. So instead, from today, I’m turning my mind to making this blog about the intersections between design, technology, publishing and ethics.

Why? Because this is the stuff I know about these days. That’s all. And I hope I can make it interesting and useful to others.

Interesting times in the world of software

About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was a two year project and he’d got £100k funding. I asked if it was just him… and no, he had a colleague. So £100k, for two people, for two years? £100k didn’t sound a lot… £25k/yr each, basically. Or what you can earn in a much simpler tech support role. I decided not to say anything and leave the poor guy in peace, although this sort of work seemed a lot like gambling to me.

Today, things are different although there’s still a sniff of gamble about it overall. If you’re a developer it’s relatively easy to find a highly capitalised employer that’s positively dripping with money who will pay you £60k-£90k a year. Potentially quite a bit more. This reminds me of the late nineties dotcom boom. In 1997 I myself quit my safe but somewhat dull job at a multinational to become a freelancer, doubling my income almost immediately, and quadrupling it another year later. The new work was, in some ways, more interesting. It was also a lot more stressful, bad for my health, and definitely wasn’t the most exciting coding work. But it paid. I honestly don’t blame developers who decide to do what I did 25 years ago. It set me up. I think it was also a large part of why I had a heart attack in 2019… living out of hotels for a decade wasn’t healthy, and cheese became far too much a food staple for me as a vegetarian. However, the money was very good and it helped set me up. When you’re poor, it’s very hard to catch up and a good income was necessary for a while.

I bring this up because today I’m not ‘just a developer’ but actually run a web development company that specialises in websites and custom software for clients. And things are happening today that are reminiscent of the dotcom boom on the late nineties. 25 years have passed, but people don’t really change nearly as much as you may think.

The dotcom & Millennium Bug era

The late nineties were a period of post-recession growth and capital release. Banks had been deregulated, money was being created in the way it can be, and we were riding high on increasing productivity. Life felt good. And when money is created it can be invested.

There’s only one little problem in that. Sometimes, people get giddy and start splashing the money out too readily. The boom of the late nineties and early noughties, and the deregulation that encouraged it around the world, eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008. I’m a bit of a cautious soul, so even though I had plenty of income, I resisted borrowing too much to get a bigger house. In some ways I was foolish, because I could now be living mortgage free in the house I have now. But I figured that not having a big mortgage would afford me some other freedoms and I could use my money elsewhere. Mostly I just invested my money in solid companies. Friends, however, were telling me to invest in dotcoms. But I looked at the fundamentals. One example was a firm called Vocalis. They did, basically, telephone voice services software. Small team, and had some crazy valuation that was effectively equivalent of £20m per member of the staff. I rightly reckoned that was mad. My friend went ahead and pumped money in, and I mocked him. For a while I looked a fool. The value of the shares rose and rose.

Right now, there are loads of speculation bubbles. At the café at work I was trying to explain Bitcoin’s fundamental problems to our barista, when our receptionist came over excitedly wanting to know more. Both seemed interested in getting involved. That means the crash is likely imminent. They’re both lovely people, but in the economic chain, they’re nowhere near the top, which means that the speculation bubble is reaching it’s limits.

“If shoe shine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.” – Joe Kennedy, 1929 as the stock market was about to crash and lead to the Great Depression

So the dotcom boom and Millennium Bug led to a boom in demand for developers. New software was being created to replace supposedly outdated software that couldn’t be fixed (narrator: “It could”) and salaries were rocketing. I took advantage of that boom. I also knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. My day rate as a PeopleSoft developer went from £200 a day in 1997 to £600 in 2002. It could have been higher. Cisco did an amazing job of raising funds in that era and I remember they kept offering me more and more to go to work for them in the Netherlands. But I didn’t really want to go to work there. I never really chased the money, so that’s about where I peaked. But I remember people with the right skills, experience and self confidence were on as much as £1k a day. That’s getting towards £2k a day at today’s prices. Some skills seen as super hard and rare could command double that. Most people didn’t, of course, make nearly that much, and some people preferred a job with reasonable hours and close to their families – a very valid and decent decision. But I was single with no ties.

There are a lot more developers around today – good incomes have brought many people into the trade. I meet people who called me a nerd in the eighties and now they’re working in IT. It’s a bit weird.

Today’s situation

Now it’s a bit weird. Rates still aren’t at the dotcom level, once adjusted for inflation, but they’re close. You can do very well in tech. But in my little firm we pay typically around £40k for a developer, plus various benefits, kit, resources etc, meaning you’d need to make around £70k as a freelancer to equal it. At least the way I calculate things and always did. I nearly swapped my £600 a day for £60k a year and kind of regret not doing that.

But why have the rates risen? Well, there are a few hot areas, and they can be summarised as AI, analytics, mass market apps, and blockchain. I’ll discuss each briefly:

AI

This is a hot one – the idea we can replace rooms full of people doing dull and not very high value work (from the perspective of the company) such as service desks with AI bots is very attractive. It won’t work though. Most “supposedly AI” bots are just following decision trees and the only bit of AI is in parsing the meaning out of a sentence in a very tightly defined context. AI is useful today for categorisation problems – e.g. looking at a picture and deciding “this is a cat” or “this is a threatening comment”. It’s not brilliant at the job, but I like that an AI can work out which pictures are of my Mum, for example, even if it misses about a third of them… it still makes my life easier. A bit. But what an AI can’t do is right a decent blog post. Sorry, it can’t. They’re awful at it. There’s loads of AI generated content out there and it feels obviously fake. The main job of these AI generated blog posts is to trick other AIs (Google, Bing etc) into categorising a website as useful. And because AI’s make toddlers look worldly wise, they can be easily fooled… and that means you can’t trust them with anything of real importance. Like your business decisions.

But, it’s a hot keyword, and naive venture capitalists like the idea. So in comes the money.

Analytics

Tracking and stalking customers across the internet is very attractive for advertisers believing that doing so makes them seem more interesting to consumers. I’m not convinced. People often find it creepy. They feel like they’re constantly stalked. They visit the website of, say, a printer supplier and they receive ads for a month for printers… but not only for that supplier, but for other printers because the tracking provider is cheerfully using your data as a supplier against you and selling that information to your rivals! I think advertisers are starting to cotton on, but are unsure of what to do… but I know there’s a lot more direct selling of adverts between publishers and advertisers than there used to be.

But, the siren call of analytics is strong, and people love a nice chart on which to justify a decision, so the more nice charts your system can create, the more people will pay to use it and try to gain an advantage over competitors. And advertising is huge, so in pumps the money. For now.

Mass market apps

Can you build the next Facebook, Instagram, or Slack? What’s the potential for an app that lets people read books from any publisher for a fixed monthly fee? How about an app that revolutionises food delivery? Interestingly, some apps are about replacing old and inefficient intermediaries and putting new ones in place. Uber is a nice way of hiring a minicab with flexible pricing that rewards drivers for being available at the right time. They don’t disintermediate, however. The customer is both the driver and the passenger. The new intermediary takes their share.

If you can replace old intermediaries you can make a lot of money. Imagine taking 0.5% of every single financial transaction, like Visa do? That’s a lot of money. Then you have intermediaries between the card firms, providers, and networks, such as Stripe… and then there are those replacing old ones, like Wise, for money transfers across borders.

What other things can be improved? Well, literally anything.

But most attempts to build these apps and the supporting infrastructure are doomed to never turn a profit.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a really interesting concept for a public ledger, using an interesting concept called proof of work to make it hard for any one person to try to dominate the network and win the consensus mechanism on new transactions. There are theoretical ideas out there to improve on this, but at the moment they remain just that and haven’t been proven.

And it’s a scam. Pure and simple. But it’s a hot topic. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many others are actively speculated upon, as well as being used for the exchange of value – often in a hope to evade regulators. It appeals to the natural rebels amongst us because it’s outside of government control… and given that governments aren’t always a force for good, I get that.

Problem is, Blockchain breaks the rules of good software development… if you look at the big O notation for software, it has to follow certain rules or it will fail at some point and need to be re-engineered. Big O matters. I don’t have academic access to papers, and the internet is full of vested interests pretending that Blockchain scales just fine. I used to see the same in WordPress land, where people said the software scaled fine… but it doesn’t. In WordPress we get scale by putting a layer between WordPress and the internet to balance things out – the work the software itself does goes up in line with the number of people talking to WordPress. We can define that as O(n) so long as you know what you’re doing – that’s OK. We can live with that. But the consensus mechanism required for multi node agreement of transactions as required to track transactions will, by its nature, follow a curve that is likely to be somewhat greater than O(n^2) (each node does O(n) work in a linear fashion but the total work done on the network as each node is added therefore grows as O(n^2) plus a bit for network latency and overheads. Yet bitcoin transaction cost isn’t following that curve in spite of huge interest because, I reckon, most Bitcoin trades aren’t real.

Yes, that’s right. And what does that mean? It’s because wideboys, crooks and the overly-optimistic are involved. Given it is, by design, a pyramid scheme, it will have to fail at some point. But people are motivated to hide that, so there are Bitcoin tracker schemes, rather like gold purchase schemes, that never hold the asset in question. They will pump and pump values as hard as you like. And as long as there are new people coming in, like our receptionists wishes to, all is good.

And there are enormous amounts of money to be made. As in a goldrush, the people making real money are the shovel makers and traders. And they need developers. So for as long as there’s money to be made, coked up wide boys will be gurning their way through stressful meetings, fidgeting and anxious to cash in before it crashes out. You can earn a lot there. For a while.

OK, so thanks for the very long essay. What does it mean then?

Well, it means developers are really expensive right now. Small firms that do actual useful work and aren’t highly capitalised (like mine) can’t grow because we can’t suddenly charge our customers double for the work so that we can compete against these booms. It’s as if a very rich person has moved into your town and hired all the builders possible to create a huge mansion. They even approached builders working for firms and offered them double to come build that mansion. Soon builders are all swanning around town in Teslas and feeling pleased with themselves for being so cunning as to be in the building industry.

Same in software. Locally there’s a Tesla with a crypto referencing private number plate and a young, bearded and muscular techbro driving it. Fine, I’m not going to judge. He’s happy and making good money.

But if builders are all hired by the rich, the rest of us get priced out. Same in software. Small firms are going to find they can’t afford websites unless they just use some cheap web builder platform – it’ll give a less good solution, but it’ll do the job. Ish. And the firms that can afford will do that bit better. And better. And the gap will grow.

At my firm I’ve had to raise salaries, but we still struggle to clear a profit with the raised salaries. I’m fiscally conservative, so we’ve always had decent cash reserves. This lets us ride out the storm. From 1997 to 2002 dev rates went crazy. By 2005 they were back to normal again. We as a firm can’t handle eight years of this. But it’s not quite the same as back then – you can now hire developers globally and have them work remotely, if you really wish to, which can save some money and also help those countries out with extra foreign revenue. I, however, really like quality and good communications and I find that a geographically tight team works the best. It also makes it easier to hire new people into the trade. So, for now, I’m sitting tight. I won’t seek venture capital, or borrow. And if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll add AI to something that does basic statistical analysis, and blockchain to something with two computers in the network and hope someone out there fancies throwing us some money so we join the party. In the meantime, however, there’s still a healthy living to be made as a business doing useful things and avoiding the hot trends. I never set out to be rich, merely secure – I’ll ignore the rich mansions and do my own thing, creating good code for good people.

n.b. about the above – the above isn’t a paper. It’s a set of opinions designed to inform and illuminate about what’s happened. It relies on anecdotes. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t use it as the basis for what you want to do with software and investing in software. Or crypto. Do your own thing with the information you gather from multiple sources. Also remember that a lot of people say misleading things because it’s in their interests to do so, and that you shouldn’t trust a random blog or news source on the internet. Mine included.

Blog “Reboot”

Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients

But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme. I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters. The typography is pretty good. The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme. Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years. It’s just not our business. So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme. And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually. I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do. But the problem with that is that there’s not much need. My blog is not an important one. It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business. Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit. Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good. A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?” And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme. I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t. One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible. This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import. If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links. And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost. Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do? Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue. I have my tools. But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images. Every post with an image in it. That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time. Way too much time. This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud. Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on. Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up. But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on. And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins. The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it. I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better. Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask? Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

New Spectacu.la Discussion Updates

My colleague James has been extending the threaded comments plugin that I use(d)* on this site. It’s available from http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk for those of you with SVN clients, and for download and easy installation from WordPress.org and Spectacu.la within a few days.

If you wish to test it out, feel free to comment here…

It adds a quote button for content (try selecting some text here and see what happens!), an extending comment box, so if you like people to write long comments they’ll find it easier, and a quote button for comments. These features all enhance the WordPress commenting engine and make it easier for your community to engage with you.

A proper release after final testing and updates is due in a few days.

* Still a good plugin that we use extensively – but on this site we designed something custom. Better that way.

WordCamp UK – Great Stuff + a Little Controversy

I went to WordCamp UK 2010 in Manchester… this is my write-up of the event, and its controversies along with my presentations…

I’m just settling in at the office having spent the weekend at WordCamp UK 2010 which was staged in Manchester and is a community event for WordPress users and developers. I gave two presentations, one about WordPress in Big Media, and another about WordPress in the Enterprise. These followed on from presentations given at last year’s WordCamp.

The Craic

Yes, this isn’t the logo actually used, but I prefer this one :o)

I’m going to say now that one of the key elements of a good conference or unconference is the socialising – this is where you meet people, bond with them over beers/food/dancing and form alliances that in the future could prove to be very powerful. You certainly get to make friends and feel like you’re a part of an actual community, and this happens in a way that you’ll never be able to reproduce with online technology. As a consequence it’s no surprise that the awesome Thinking Digital conference has been nicknamed Drinking Digital by some wags.

As ever,Tony Scott excelled himself by getting us access to the famous Factory Manchester (FAC251) which also happens to be across the road from a magnificently geeky pub that sells good beers, has various classic 8 bit and 16 bit computers adorning the walls, and classic arcade games on free play. Awesome.

The Presentations

There was a typically varied range of presentations running across three rooms, along with other folk busy coding up for the WordHack (the fruits of their labours are online). One particular stream that particularly caught my attention was that of a sequence of involvement from John Adams of the Department for International Development. He ran a free-form discussion group on testing strategies which was followed by an interesting talk on PHP unit-testing Nikolay Bachiyski of GlotPress fame. This session showed up some of the lack of structure in general testing of WordPress core code, plugins and themes. Although the approaches used were probably fine for a publishing platform, they would struggle to gain ISO approval. In other words, you wouldn’t want to fly on a WordPress powered plane!

Other presentations that I particularly enjoyed were Michael Kimb Jones’s WOW plugins, and Toni Sant’s very underattended Sunday morning slot where he discused the way WP has helped with a range of Maltese websites.

The Controversy

What’s a WordCamp without at least a little controversy? However, for the attendees of this one, this was a biggie… Jane Wells is Automattic’s Master of Suggestion (seriously, that company has some weird job titles) and she made a suggestion that we shouldn’t have a WordCamp UK, but instead locally organised WordCamps for cities.

There’s a number of issues I have with this:

Everyone in the UK knows that quite quickly WordCamp London would be the big one with all the attention in both media and attendance. It would quickly dominate – in large helped by the enormous population density of the capital. A WordCamp UK in London would be fine and popular (also considerably more expensive) but that’s all that’s needed.
Many British cities have intense rivalries whilst we all still stand together as a nation – there are folk in Glasgow who would never attend a WordCamp Edinburgh, but would definitely be more interested in a WordCamp Scotland. End result? Cities would have small attendances by and large, and our impressive capacity for indifference for minor events would mean that they’d end up as little more than tiny, cliquey gatherings. Anyone who’s tried to run GeekUps will understand this problem.
A lot of work, energy and our own money has been spent on building up WordCamp UK. Is Jane seriously suggesting we should dump that?
What is Jane’s authority on this? She’s simply an Automattic employee. We chose WordCamp UK and its structure – it’s ours. If someone else wants to run a WordCamp UK in the country they’re perfectly entitled and there’s no real reason why we couldn’t have three or four running each year – that would be a huge success. A highly capitalistic organisation that is just one of thousands of contributors to the project and which plays no part in actually running most WordCamps shouldn’t get so involved.
The UK is also very small – 90% of the population can reach all past WordCamp UKs in less than 3hrs – there is no real problem about accessibility.
None of the UK’s key WordPress community members want to give up WordCamp UK.
Jane admitted only six or seven people had complained to her about the situation, two of which turned out to be in Ireland – which except for a small part isn’t in the UK at all. She couldn’t confirm whether they were Northern Irish or not, which was actually something of a poor mistake to make in front of 150 or so Brits.
Us Brits are a pretty apathetic bunch at the best of times – actually running a WordCamp in each major city would be surprisingly unlikely to happen – there were only two bids submitted for this year’s event – one in Portsmouth and one in Manchester.
The whole point of the *camp suffix is that it’s all free and easy with no big organisations sticking their oar in. They are inconsistent and joyful. They’re fun. Automattic should keep out.
The WordCamp name is not trademarked, and we’ve been using it in the UK for some time now. It’s ours!

Of course, there are two sides to each argument. Here’s some reasons and benefits to splitting up WordCamps in the UK:

If somebody wished to run a WordCamp for their city they may feel that the UK badge is dominating and there’d be little interest as a consequence if it was called WordCamp Bristol, or WordCamp Salford.
A national event called something like WordConf could happen.
Erm…

Thing is – we can’t necessarily win this battle here in Britain. We don’t control the WordCamp.org website – Matt Mullenweg does (he has the domain registration in his name) so if we fight to keep calling it WordCamp UK there’ll be no ongoing support for the event from Matt and his team if they wish to stop the use of the UK moniker.

Which would mean standing up to them. Do we want to? Are we prepared for a fight on this? What do the likes of Mike Little (co-founder of the WordPress project) and Peter Westwood (a UK based core developer) feel about this?

Interestingly we were told the same thing applies to the likes of WordCamp Ireland which will now face this problem – but I wonder if Matt understands Ireland particularly well (we know Jane doesn’t) and that in that country the dominant WordCamp would quickly become an expensive Dublin event. You may get one doing well in Cork, but Kilkenny, with a population of just 22,000 and which staged this year’s event, probably wouldn’t be able to sustain an annual WordCamp.

So, Jane has to really allow each country to understand its own social constructs and history and let their own communities choose how they do things. One or two may complain, but it’s not possible to please everyone.

And we showed off too…

My company Interconnect IT have released, through our Spectacu.la brand, the following plugins which you may find useful:

I couldn’t help using the Discussion plugin to run some live discussion sessions.

And The Thanks

I can’t say thank you enough to the people who make WordCamp UK a success for no personal reward. Tony Scott leads it up, with Mike Little, Nick Garner, Chi-chi Ekweozor, Simon Dickson and many many more working hard behind the scenes. Also to Nikolay to letting me play with the fastest 85mm lens I ever saw! Thank you, you’re wonderful people.

WordPress in the Enterprise Presentation

WordPress in the Enterprise II

View more presentations from Interconnect IT.

WordPress in Big Media Presentation

WordPress in Big Media on Prezi

Live Threaded Commenting on WP

At Interconnect IT / Spectacu.la my colleague James has developed a new version of the popular Spectacu.la Threaded Comments plugin. It’s not yet in release form, but you can grab it from the WordPress.org repository via svn if you know how at http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk/

I’m bringing it up here because I’ve decided to trial the plugin out here on my own site. It was designed to work in conjunction with a webinars project, allowing visitors to have an active discussion, in real time, on a WordPress site. It can be dropped into almost any theme, and adds nicely to the standard WP comments functionality.

Threaded comments are a powerful way to turn your WordPress site into a mini discussion forum. Adding live commenting can now turn it into a chatroom full of ajaxey goodness.

Try it out below, if you like….

WordPress Performance, Make it 3x Quicker!

I’d started to notice that my site could often be slow to load – other sites on the same server weren’t suffering the same way, so I wanted to document a simple way in which one can identify performance issues on the site. This is one of them.

A little while ago I reported that my site, since some WordPress upgrades, had started to slow down. I’d wondered whether it was WP becoming increasingly bloated, or some other problem.

Well, it took me a while to get back to the issue (babies and a booming business don’t help!) it’s continued to get worse and worse, until a recent change has improved things… but only marginally, as shown by the Pingdom chart below:

performance up to 19th may 2010 — Not looking good…

This is dreadful, really – daily average of 4,000ms responses just aren’t acceptable where, two years ago, I was getting 800ms.

So, now the process starts. The recent small improvement came after installing our Spectacu.la Advanced Search Plugin, which runs a regular database optimisation to help keep things nippy, but it was still dreadful.

Is it Pluginitis?

My first suspicion is always that of plugins (and sometimes themes, if they’re complex). In our office we have a term called ‘pluginitis’ which refers to the problem of a site having too many plugins installed, many of which are poorly written. I hate to say it, but when clients call to ask for a plugin to be installed that we’ve never tested we go through it and, 90% of the time, discover serious performance or security flaws that will cause long-term issues.

And this site here is old – I’ve been running a WP install for four and a half years with nothing more than upgrades and, like an old PC that’s been upgraded too many times, that causes issues with old drivers and code. Same can apply to WordPress. So let’s see what we can do to improve things.

First stage is to disable as many plugins as possible so as to isolate the issue. I’m using a division based approach – ie, I’m going to disable half of my plugins to see what happens. If I get full performance back, then the problem lies in that half. I can then reactivate half the plugins and see what happens. If the performance is still good, the problem is in the other half. I think you can see where I’m going here.

I’m also going to go for plugins that aren’t written by us. Not because I’m biased (ok, maybe a little) but because I know all of ours are carefully tested for performance – many are run on major sites such as the Telegraphs blogs site. Speed is of the essence.

I’m also going to skip plugins like Akismet, because anything that’s essentially ‘core’ is usually going to be reasonably performant – at least on a small site like this one.

It’s worth noting that I could easily delve into SQL statements and code efficiency – but that’s only interesting to developers – if you’re simply a WordPress user, performance is interesting but what you can do to find problems is somewhat more limiting.

Plugins being disabled:

Add to feed – a simple plugin, but sometimes simple plugins miss simple tricks.

Headspace2 – I have my suspicions about this plugin as it’s massive. Could be fine, may not be. Only way definite way to know – measure it.

Search Meter – a nice plugin to see what people are searching for, but is it adding load somewhere?

Social Bookmarks – it shouldn’t cause issues, but you can never be sure.

wp-typography – I love what it does for the typography on the site, but it’s also running a lot of javascript.

First results:

I do use YSlow to test the site, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a large enough series of data to be statistically relevant. It’s good for seeing the extra load (and why I knew the amount of javascript was an issue) but for longer term analysis it’s flawed.

So, we go back to Pingdom and look at the one day chart. As I type this it’s now an hour since disabling the plugins above – so let’s see what’s happened:

performance up to 1650 19th may 2010 — A dramatic improvement!

As you can see, in this afternoon alone there’s been a dramatic improvement – from around 2500ms per visit to 1230ms per visit. In one single step I’ve halved the load time of the page.

What we don’t know so far is whether that’s because the page got smaller to load or whether it’s down to a reduction in database load – but that’s really for another article. What this is all about is trying to document how I’m improving the responsiveness of the site in a way which relatively non-technical folk can follow.

What I’ll do in the next feature is to turn off some more plugins to measure the impact they had. I’ll also be interested to see if the spikeyness of the response times has varied much – are they caused by simple server load, or is there something else at play?

I will then start to switch plugins on again in a structured way in order to measure which was causing the heaviest loads on the site.

Keep watching!

Of WordPress Training and Learning

Over at Interconnect IT, where I work, we’ve found that demand for our WordPress Training Courses has shot up over the past year or so. And it’s certainly interesting to see where the work comes from.

Curiously, it’s very polarised – we either work with smaller one man band companies like Jason Nevin who runs a house removals company site who are looking to switch technologies, or big corporates and government agencies such as Shop Direct, The US Mission to the UN and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

I’ve been thinking about why there’s such a big dip in the middle of our client base – 90% of our business is groups with over 500 staff or with fewer than three.

The Gap

Small, one man companies tend to involve highly motivated individuals. They understand the important of their skills, and they know that in the tech sector they have to always stay up to date. Large corporates tend to understand this too, and have allocated training budgets to make sure they keep up to date. Government departments are often a little slower with new technology, but they too need to keep efficient or tax payers will kick up a stink.

And WordPress is a very efficient platform for running many informational websites.

But why are medium sized companies not coming to us in nearly such large numbers as micro enterprises and large corporates? Let’s see…

Budgets

I’ve noticed that medium companies often have people who are extremely good at what they do, but I do find that there are often significant skills gaps. I’ve dealt with someone from a school (medium) who didn’t realise that you don’t have to close an application in Windows in order to see another application. Each time she cut and paste she’d open one document, select the text, close the document, then open the receiving application and paste the text there. Productivity, as you can imagine, was pretty poor.

I think a lot comes from budgets – many firms around the 50 people size aren’t always able to make good money. They have to be careful where they spend it – they’re not big enough to have training departments who make sure everyone is up to date, and they’re usually busy.

Culture

Another thing with smaller firms, I believe, is that they’re often started by individuals with a lot of skills – these are flexible folk who can teach themselves and learn quickly from books and the internet. As they grow they try and hire similar people, but eventually there comes a point where a lot of staff are there for the job. They need training because they aren’t going to go to the trouble of autodidactism. They have a job to do, and they’re going to do that and no more or less.

At best, they’ll get on-the-job training.

Our Marketing

We don’t do a lot of it, to be quite frank. But perhaps our website, approach and costs simply don’t ring true with people in medium sized companies looking for WordPress training? Do we need to get advertising in business magazines, such as those sent out by the FSB?

Summary

I suspect that the truth is that a company always needs to look at the skills of staff, but as they reach a certain size they have too much going on to give it much thought. Once they break through that difficult 50 man barrier things seem to start to change again.

But how do we change this? I’m not sure we can, easily. Governments often give generous grants, and around here we have Skillworks which helps a little, and we do get local approaches – however, the person paying still has to pay a significant contribution and specialist training is never all that cheap.

Do you have any ideas of how skills can be improved in small to medium sized enterprises? Should we be marketing our courses more proactively? What about scheduled classroom courses that keep things at a lower cost, albeit needing more time from the attendees? I’d love to hear your thoughts – especially in the field of WordPress.

Is WordPress Slowing My Site Down?

I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!

I don’t really look at server response times too much, because generally it’s a bit dull, really. If our server is really sick then the automatic alerts and text messages from Pingdom tell me to get fixing.

Anyway, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs. And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is getting slower. Here’s the graph:

Now, what you’ll notice is that generally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deterioration in performance. Then it plodded along just fine until December 2009 when it got worse again.

Is It WordPress Bloat?

I wondered what had happened to cause this – I’m especially shocked that a page load is now so slow. I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plugins are generally ones I use elsewhere. So I did a bit of thinking, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:

The dates correlate exactly with the worsening performance of this site.

Now, correlation absolutely does not relate to causality. At upgrade time I usually take a moment to review plugins, upgrade the theme, etc. It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plugins in use here that has caused the slowdown. I know it’s not traffic to my site – that’s been flat for ages, with only the occasional blip. The server is a dedicated machine running about fourty sites that we manage, but the load is generally quite consistent and impact on different websites is fairly well managed.

But I’m a speed freak. I like it when a website zings into view. I love fast cars. I love computers that don’t dither. I love telephones that respond instantly. So I hate that response times are now below 1s. That’s not on!

So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slowdown – I’ll be running some experiments on this site, profiling queries, checking the database over and so on. And I’ll document it all as a way of showing you how we at Interconnect IT do our performance tuning. Whether I document it here or there I haven’t decided yet – I think it would make a good case study for the site. We’ll see! Watch both sites…

note 1 – deactivated Twitme on 03/02/2010

What it’s Like to Present and Attend at WordCamp UK

Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with. In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators. People who will make things happen. And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.

Presenting at WordCamps

I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life. I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer. I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.

But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers. So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media. I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers. I have no history or background in public speaking.

Both got accepted.

Damn!

But it had some great potential too. I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results. So what did I learn? Read on:

1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky

The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V. At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.

I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject. But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience. In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions. It’s almost impossible.

2. Consider an Assistant for Demos

One can work the computer, the other can talk. Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.

3. Get in Early

I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event. I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic. By the end of the conference people were flagging. Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage. You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!

4. Start Funny

In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote. The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood. It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.

5. It’s a Great Audience

I was dealing with fellow geeks. People in the same situation as me. It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine. The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet. This was a whole lot more relaxed. Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.

6. Get Engagement

I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t. It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.

7. Be Prepared

At conferences opportunities come up. Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.

8. Freebies

You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts. Good gifts though. I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days. What geek in the world needs a calculator? So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.

9. Matt

I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend. I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL. So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat. He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.

Funny hat tho’ ;-)

Summary

An ace time, basically. I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.

Here’s to WordCamp UK 2010!