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TwoSeven

2008-12-12

M27 Oh well, the 2 and the 7… This on the right is M 27, the Dumbbell Nebula (image: ESO (Wikipedia)).

27 is a cubic number – and a pretty one at that, 3³. If you start at 0 when counting Pi’s digits, 27 is found at location 27 – apparently a rare case.

27 is (in base 10) the first composite number not evenly divisible by any of its digits.

On January 16, 27 B.C., the Roman Senate votes Octavian the title of Augustus. He accepts this honor, having declined the alternative title of Romulus. He is known as Augustus afterwards – the first Roman emperor.

And this blog, too, is now running WordPress 2.7. As usual: If you notice something that’s not working as expected, drop me a line, please.

Tadaaa!

2008-11-29

knüll Good feeling if you can crumple an A4-sized sheet full of things to do and toss it in the bin because everything is done… and thus my new theme is finished already today! A few notes:

  • I made the theme myself. (I used the default theme as code base, but there’s not much left of it.) It’s hard to publish because there a quite a few things tailored to specifics of y blog; and including header images isn’t trivial either (besides I’m not sure about the redistribution licence of some of the photos (those I didn’t make myself))…
  • Default fonts are the “C” fonts from Microsoft – Calibri (text), Cambria (headlines), Constantia (poems etc.), Consolas (code); I don’t use Candara and Corbel here – which are included with Windows Vista and Office 2007 (and the free PowerPoint viewer) (» more info). They’re optimized for ClearType font smoothing and look quite elegant then – the first screenshot shows the “ideal” example (for those who don’t have the fonts); the second shows IE6 without smoothing and with the substitute fonts (Tahoma etc.):
    cim3 ideal cim3 IE6
  • Some rounded elements (e.g. the search box in the top right corner) need a sensible browser for this display. ;)
  • Instead of four randomly selected small header images there’s just one per month now – but larger. (With a few exceptions with additional images, such as on new year’s day.)
  • If you notice any errors – or something that looks ugly – please tell me. And I don’t mind any expressios of opinions. :)
  • Update: … and the comments now are working again (thanks for the info)… seems I tested that only in my WP2.7 beta test installation.
    :wand:

High database load from Ajax Edit Comments…

2008-11-18

… and a preliminary solution:

The WordPress plugin “Ajax Edit Comments” from The Reader Appreciation Project1 allows the commenter to edit his comment for a certain time – useful especially for typos and minor corrections. (Admins can do more.) Visitors utilize it here for about every 10th comment, by the way.

Now Pierre notified me yesterday about the high number of database queries (and that the response time could be better, too) – higher than what I always saw when logged in. (See the blue footer line.) Doing a little research, I found that it’s the aforementioned Ajax Edit Comments that uses 4 additional database queries for each comment in order to check if the visitor is allowed to edit it (unles (s)he’s logged in as admin who is always allowed to edit). That can sum up to quite a lot if there are many comments on a single post.

I quickly added a little modification to the plugin2 which check the comment age in advance without database access – in my quick tests, these modifications appear to work fine. If you too don’t see any problems – feel free to test it here or maybe later for the music quiz on 16:00 – I will, of course, send the changes to the plugin’s author, hoping they will be included in future versions. :)

  1. for WordPress 2.5 and higher – old version for 2.1–2.3.x here [↩]
  2. in both the old version I’m still using here and the new in my test environment where I’m preparing the WordPress 2.7 update [↩]