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I’ve always cared about WordPress performance. I’ve optimized my database, tweaked the server’s configuration, used plugin profilers and installed WP Super Cache and PHP Speedy WP – the “heavy artillery” of performance-related plugins. However, only recently did I decide to finally track down and fix all the remaining subtle issues that may cause slow loading […]

In this post I’ll discuss some of the failings of existing RSS readers and suggest a few wistful and highly hypothetical improvements. The genre is moderate technobabble, the layot – web2.0 bulletpoint-y. A lot is left to your imagination to allow for personal interpretation (and other things that rhyme with “elation”). Would you like to […]

If you’ve ever tried to write a program that fetches search results from Google, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the excrutiating annoyances of parsing the results and getting blocked periodically. Run a couple hundred queries in a row and bam! – your script is banned until proven innocent by entering an captcha. Even that […]

As the year is coming to an end, perhaps it’s time for a different kind of “Top X” post. Instead of a list of new WP plugins to try out, here are the top plugin authors – the brilliant people who create outstanding tools and share them with the WordPress community. The list is ranked […]

Sometimes you may need to randomly select items from a list so that some items are selected more frequently than others. For example, you might take a list of applications and their download counts, and randomly pick a “featured application” based on the number of downloads. There are several ways to accomplish this in PHP. […]