Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » March

I lost a full two days of birding in California when JetBlue canceled my Friday flight due to bad weather. I couldn’t get out till Sunday. :-( Monday morning I taught XML, but as soon as that once done I headed for the hills, literally. I decided to spend the afternoon at Ed Levin County Park and Alum Rock Park in the eastern hills. Local birders had been reporting some good stuff here, and I’d never really gotten up into the hills so I thought it would be worth checking out.
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Testing for some plain text problems in WordPress title formatting. Hmm, looks like this one is OK. WordPress turns the double quote into a curly quote which does not terminate the attribute value. The greater than sign is escaped inside the attribute value. so the problems only arise if there’s real markup.

The curly quote may be an accidental fix. I’m not sure what would happen if I figured out how to publish a real straight double quote in a title. I wonder if there’s a preference for that somewhere?

More interesting results from yesterday’s experiments with dumping some markup in the title of a post and seeing what breaks. I noticed the markup made its way into the WordPress Admin section. Is that just because the markup I used (strong and span tags) was relatively innocuous or is there a potentially deeper problem? Let’s find out.
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I’ve been hacking on Benjamin Smedberg’s Atom 1.0 plug-in for WordPress. I’ve added a preference panel for choosing between full text and summary feeds. Now I’ve fixed the double escaping of content in titles and summaries. (Escaped HTML is evil and should never have been allowed into Atom.)

However I’m not sure how my hack will react when posts contain markup in titles and summaries so I’m playing with that now. Hence this post. I may delete it once I’m convinced I’ve covered the various special cases well enough.

Things may look a little funny in the feed until I’m done since I’ll be deliberately breaking things to see how WordPress behaves.
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I stumbled across the first issue of Season 8 by Joss Whedon at the Forbidden Planet this afternoon. <span style="voice-family: comic book guy, male;}">Best Comic Book Adaptation Ever!</span>.

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I know this site is more than a little slow on occasion. I also know that the static site www.xom.nu which is hosted on the exact same server runs like a bat out of hell, so it’s likely not the server hardware (Mac Mini) or network connection (Speakeasy DSL) that’s at fault. The remaining candidates are:

• PHP (Very likely)
• WordPress (Maybe, but unlikely except in so far as it’s written in PHP)
• Traffic volume (especially comment spammers)
• MySQL (Possible, but I tend to doubt it.)

I’ve got a lot of suggestions for improving performance, and I plan to start trying some of them. I don’t, however, have any good measurements of where this server is spending its time. I’d appreciate it if anyone could share knowledge and experience as to how to determine where the server is taking it’s time, and how to find out what’s making it so slow. Thanks.
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