Mike Little’s Journalized

For those who have been waiting, WordPress 2.0.1 has just been released. This version has seen a month of bug fixing (over 100 bugs squashed), the majority being issues with the administration screens and their behaviour. There were some pretty detailed discussions on the developer and testing mailing lists to resolve some of these issues.
Alas, the WYSIWYG post editor is still not accessible to keyboard only users, so if you can only use a keyboard and not a mouse make sure to turn it off.
If you want to mark up your posts semantically you might want to turn it off too. With this new “Visually rich editor”, if you want to quote somebody, you need to think “indent”, and if you want to stop quoting them, think “outdent”.

The all singing new media uploader, which is right on the edit page where it should be, at least seems to work better now… but only if you can use a mouse. If you are unable to use a mouse, you will be unable to upload images and other media to your blog. Even with the fancy editor turned off. You are unable to perform this task. I know it wasn’t very friendly in the last version, but it did work, you were able to upload images, and copy and paste their tags into your post. You can no longer do that — it does not work.

I’m sorry to harp on about this but removing basic functionality, even if it were for a small number of people (which it is not — a large number of people have trouble using a mouse with precision, if at all), is still a step backwards in my book.

Wow, WordPress is a mere three years old today. It seems like it’s been going a lot longer, but the birth of what turned into WordPress was three years ago today.

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

Comment by mike — Saturday January 25, 2003 @ 3:58 pm

For a three-year-old its doing very well. It’s got a great team behind it, a massive community, a lot of big name endorsements, a book
(well a third of a book), or two, and a great future ahead.

Many happy returns!

There is a new beta release of my Journalized theme for WordPress: Version 2.0 Beta 1.

There a few things different about this new version:

• All previous ’skins’ (Blue, Sand, Winter) combined together
• Three new skins + more to come
• A new administration interface to configure the theme.
• All known browser bugs addressed
• Support for plugins
• Compatible with WordPress versions 1.5.x and 2.0.x
• Lots more to come

See the theme page for details. Please download it and give it a try.

After monitoring the comments that Akismet blocked very carefully, I can report that I’ve had no false positives for nearly a week. I’m not quite sure what changed to fix things.
With a dynamic system like Akismet, things will change over time. That is the nature of the beast. I don’t know whether Matt and the crew tweaked something, or whether a concerted poisoning attempt stopped being effective, but I’m glad I can start trusting it again.
I suspect it was the former because the change back was very dramatic, though I’m sure Automattic would not want to admit to it.

Server Trouble

In the meantime, at around one this morning, my server went down, or rather my blog stopped working. After a quick investigation, I determined that the database server was complaining of too many connections. I checked and there were a large number of httpd processes running. Presumably each, or most had a database connection open. Static files were being served ok, but anything involving the database was failing.

I restarted the Apache and that seemed to cure it. I started checking through log files to see if I could determine the culprit, but found nothing suspicious. Fifteen minutes later the site was down again. I then spent the next two hours monitoring the situation. A quick script allowed me to watch the process count:

ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l

It was growing quite rapidly from an initial 16 to over 100, though the site would start failing at about 80. In the end I gave up when the process count stayed stable for 20 minutes. Though when I checked after a few hours sleep, it had gone down again and was down for over 5 hours. I’m presuming it was an attack of some kind.
It has since gone down again, but the growth in number of processes seems to take a much longer time. I didn’t find anything obvious in the logs that I checked, but maybe it is one of the lesser sites which is being attacked. I will continue to investigate…