I’ve changed MacMegasite’s theme to a more mac-like theme with a single sidebar. I think two sidebars looked too cluttered, although I had a commitment to display those ads. I was able to fit all of the necessary items into one sidebar, which I think seems a bit less cluttered. This probably won’t be the final design.
Web
New photo sharing site
Divvyshot is a very promising new photo sharing site, still in beta. It’s based on public events. Members can create an event such as Macworld Expo, and other people who attended the same event can add their pictures to the event.
True openness in government
Aaron Swartz notes that the stimulus bill requires that each government agency report the money they give out with Atom or RSS.
For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.
Furthermore, the recovery.gov website is based on Drupal.
Google Friend Connect
Last week I added Google Friend Connect to MacMegasite, with a member widget in the sidebar and rating/comment widgets for each article. Today I added Friend Connect to WorldBeatPlanet with a social bar at the top of the page.
Unlike the sidebar widgets, the social bar won’t work when placed in a block. I had to paste the code into the page template.
New features at MacMegasite
I’ve added a new MacMegasite Store, powered by B&H Photo, which sells Apple computers, including the new MacBooks, and Nikon cameras. I’ve also added Google Friend Connect, although I’ve only added the member widget. I’ll probably create a separate page for other widgets instead of adding more stuff to the sidebars.
Twitter FAIL
I’ve been locked out of my Twitter account all night due to “too many unsuccessful login attempts”, thanks to Yoono. I haven’t used Firefox in several months, and before that I was using 3.1 betas, which aren’t compatible with Yoono, I had changed my Twitter password since the last time I had used Yoono, so it still had my old password. I haven’t been able to change my password in Yoono without it trying to log in first and locking me out once again. This is very frustrating.
New openness at whitehouse.gov
The new whitehouse.gov web site embodies the openness and accessibility of Obama’s administration. There’s now an official white house blog, displayed prominently on the home page. The blog doesn’t allow comments, but that’s understandable, since it would be a huge target for comment spammers and would require constant monitoring.
In addition to the blog RSS feed, there are also RSS feeds for agenda articles, press office, photo gallery, and videos.
Unlike the old site, the new white house site is now open to search engines. Codeulate analyzes the robots.txt file. The current robots.txt consists of two lines, allowing search engines to visit the entire site, except the include directory containing the CSS & javascript code:
User-agent: * Disallow: /includes/
The Bush-era robots.txt was over 2300 lines long, blocking search engines from almost all of the site.
Change.gov will become Whitehouse.gov
According to Federal Computer Week, at 12:01PM Tuesday when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president, Obama’s change.gov site will become the new whitehouse.gov.
This is huge. Until now whitehouse.gov has been a one-way static site for dispensing information, announcements, and press releases with little or no interaction and no way to get involved. It’s also a very dull and old-fashioned looking.
Change.gov, on the other hand is highly interactive and encourages participation. It’s a clean modern-looking Web 2.0 site that has been described as a bold experiment in interactive government or “open source democracy”.
This is one change I can believe in.
A present for MacMegasite readers
I’ve decided to remove the annoying IntelliTXT popup ads from MacMegasite. It was one of our best sources of income, so I will be investigating less obtrusive advertising.
WordPress CPU usage
It looks like I’m about to have my first GPU usage overage charge since I switched to MediaTemple due to a large usage spike during my switch from Drupal to WordPress.
Most of the heavy usage occurred during the actual switch and soon after the switch. Although WordPress has a reputation as a CPU hog, I was able to get the usage down to where it was before I switched.
As you can see in the usage chart below, enabling Zend optimizer helped, but enabling WP Super Cache really got it back down to where it was before the switch. Unfortunately WP Super Cache disables the WPTouch plugin, which reformats the page for an iPhone or iPod Touch.
One interesting thing I noticed is that 404 error pages use almost twice as much CPU as successful page requests, so I added static pages for a few invalid incoming links, which also made a big difference.
