If your web site requires a lot of CPU time to generate pages, then nginx may not hold any advantage for you. [2. I define “A lot” as more than a second.]. You can test to see what your page-generation time is using webpagetest.org — and what you want to look at is the bar that shows how much time elapsed between the browser’s request and the delivery of the first byte of the page. The time it takes to serve that first HTML file is pretty much composed of CPU and MySQL (database) time. If the time between the HTTP request for the page and the first byte served is long (a couple of seconds) then your site is probably too CPU-intensive and nginx may not help you out very much.

That said, more and more people are moving toward specialized WP-hosting, where they don’t have to worry about what web server is used at all. And within a few years this may be a moot point, as nobody may be self-hosting their own WP any more!

Footnotes:

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[If you’re reading this on an iPhone you’re already seeing how it works, if not you should feel free to pull out whatever your smartphone is and go to my blog home page to see how it works.]

When you visit a blog that has this plug-in enabled, if you’re on an iPhone (or some other smartphones) you’ll see a concise display of the most recent entries in the blog. It includes titles, dates, and categories only. [Illustration left.] My blog theme is white type against a black background, but the plug-in takes just the pertinent information and displays that using a substitute theme that looks fine on the iPhone screen.

Then… Then, if you tap the title of an article, it opens up to show you a short excerpt. [Illustration right, where I’ve selected Phonebooth 2.0 to expand.] It’s javascript, so the “opening up” is a smooth sliding open motion. Notice that my white-on-black theme has been replaced by a gray-on-white theme, which is easier to read on the small smartphone screen. It’s still using the body copy of my article, but re-theming it so it looks good.

Oh yeah, and if you don’t like the look on your smartphone, there’s a slider at the bottom of every page that lets you return to your regular site rather than use the WPtouch framework! And when you’re in the regular view, the slider is also at the bottom of every page so you can return to the WPtouch theme.

If you like the preview of the article, you can tap to open the entire article. [Illustration left] Again, it’s in the WPtheme format, colors, backgrounds, and looks the way you’d expect an iPhone app to look, and I was surprised and happy that my white-on-black theme still looks great when translated this way!

Photos look OK, and embedded YouTube videos look OK, and on an iPhone they play (unlike many other video streams). Photo “alignment” doesn’t work, but I think I can fix that… This is really slick.

As I said, the only shortcoming right now^[2] is that I can’t get to a page on my site if it’s only listed in the menus. (The top menus/tabs don’t appear.) If it’s linked within an article, then it’s OK and you can reach the page, and it in general looks fine (there are a few glitches), so I hope this will be fixed up in the near future. Meanwhile, it’s still a great idea and a great implementation.

The plug-in’s creators also show graphs proving that their plug-in reduces the loading time of sites, probably because it eliminates a lot of the heavy code overload that most WordPress sites carry with them.

[2] The problem is that there is no easy way to get to a page rather than just the posts on your blog. I’ll contact the developers and see if there’s anything I can do to help them enable this feature. Here’s a page that works— The Social Graph of Malware. Here’s a page that doesn’t— About the Photos.

The post WordPress iPhone “Theme” is Fantastic! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Recently I became my own private OpenID provider. I did this using phpMyID (see below). I created a private page that sits on my personal web site, and when I’m at a site that uses OpenID I supply the URL of this private page, type my name and password, and bingo I’m logged in at the third-party site. I used phpmyID, which is listed in the OpenID directory.

On the utilization side, when DiSo Project created an OpenID plugin for WordPress, I immediately installed it on my blog. And it works. Lets you log in at my blog using your Yahoo or gmail (or other OpenID provider)^{[3] [4]} information without creating a new account.

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust.  At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to.  And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

[2] AOL, Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, Blogger, Flickr, LiveDoor, LiveJournal, Orange, SmugMug, Technorati, Vox, WordPress.com … and probably some others. See the OpenID site for a current list.

[3] Do you know your gmail Google OpenID? You can find it with just a few clicks.

[4] If you have a WordPress.com blog, (like let’s say you have a blog called myblogname.wordpress.com) you use the URL http://myblogname.wordpress.com/ as your OpenID. You will have to log in at WordPress.com in order to validate your password, but once you’ve done that, you can log in using this URL.

The post Use OpenID on your WordPress blog! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

(If you want to know the history, see my original article about embedding Flickr slideshows, which is based on Paul Stamatiou’s experience with embedding Flickr. It no longer works.)

But now you download the flickrslideshow plug-in from Kumara Sastry and enable it. Then you can use a simple plug-in notation to embed your show. You can only embed a Flickr set, which means you have to do a little work on Flickr, but who cares, it looks beautiful! Substitute your own Flickr user ID and your set’s ID number…here’s the way you embed a show in your blog entry.

[cc][flickr user_id set_id][/cc]

1. Download the plug-in and enable it;
2. Put your photos on Flickr and create a set containing the photos you want in the slideshow;
3. Find out your Flicker user ID or the Flickr ID of the person whose photos you want to show (yes you can show anybody’s public photos);
4. Or you can get your user ID and set ID all in one fell swoop at flickr.com when you are logged in -> Flickr / You / Your sets / (then click the set to show it); look at the URL in the browser header; your user_ID is of this form “numbers@Nxx” and the set ID is the long number at the end of the URL;
5. The slideshow will be 500 pixels wide – if your blog is narrower and you’re comfortable hacking simple PHP you can change the width inside the plugin’s PHP file;
6. Put the [] stuff into your blog entry or page as a part of the text in the page – in my case for the Project Happiness Behind the Scenes set it’s what you see below. The photos in this show are mostly by Shmuel Thayer, who accompanied the Project Happiness group to India:

[cc][flickr 7874830@N02 72157607078483851][/cc]

[flickr 7874830@N02 72157607078483851]

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