MySQL performance nightmares: Solr to the rescue
11 May 2011
For almost a year we have worked very hard on a huge project: Oneindig Noord-Holland. In case you were wondering why it’s been a bit quiet from my side: That’s why.
One of the key features of this website was its search feature. It’s going to be a huge collection of items of different types: stories, events, news, profiles, images, videos and a lot more… All these types of items can have the same properties: title, author, description, tags, dates, date ranges, specific locations, location areas and links to other items. These items can also have content which contains text, images, videos, links to other items and more. As a visitor you need to be able to work your way through all these items and that’s where the search comes in.
Betatest: Beating formspam with brandnew SpamBeetle
18 January 2011
Brandnew formspamkiller is ready for Bètatesting.
Since a few years triptic has been acquainted with the guys of onlinespamfilter.nl. Onlinespamfilter.nl promises their clients to get rid of e-mail spam within 24-hours. The guys at onlinespamfilter.nl have built an ingenious filtering systeem that will recognise well over 99% of all spam. And it works! So when the developers at triptic were working on some of our clients’ weblogs, trying to get rid of form spam, we discussed this issue with Gerard and Jasper at onlinespamfilter.nl. We talked about using the powerful spamfilter combined with an API, in order to get rid of formspam in much the same way as getting rid of e-mailspam.
As you might know -when you’re a blogger for instance- that formspam can be a drag. Your blog makes it possible for people to post comments. That’s what makes your blog lively. Yeah! Sadly, spambots can also find their way to your commentbox. Result: you have to work your way through hundreds of irrelevant comments before you get to that one intelligent comment made by a designated reader. There is a “solution”. Of course! Just let readers type an unidentifiable series of letters, numbers and dollarsigns in a small box and all will be fine. <Not>.
So, the task before us seemed easy enough. Together we had to come up with someting clever. And we did! As a result you now can bèta-test our formspam killer. We lovingly call her SpamBeetle. SpamBeetle is available as a WordPress plugin. Little as she may be, she will beat the hell out of spam. Want to try it for your self? Send an e-mail to let us know that you want to be one of our béta-testers. We’ll send you al the information and API’s you need.
Moving wordpress using the ezmigrate plugin
29 March 2010
Following up on my rather complex post about how the ezmigrate plugin came to life, this will be a simpler tutorial style post in which I will explain how to actually use the ezmigrate plugin to move or migrate your wordpress installation.
Simulating closures in php versions prior to php 5.3
28 March 2010
Now that PHP 5.3 has closure and lambda function support, we all would like to use it. However, not all of us are able to do so because we are still stuck with hosting providers not able or willing to upgrade to PHP 5.3. Wanting to use closures myself on servers that only support PHP 5.2 I came up with a solution to be able to use closures in PHP 5 versions prior to 5.3:
ezMigrate plugin for WordPress
3 March 2010
While setting up a development environment last month for an extensive blog using WordPress I once more encountered a problem which I ran up against every single time I had worked with WordPress. The absolute urls stored in constants, options and post contents got in my way again. Now it was the time to find a solution for this and take matters into my own hands.