New Theme, OpenID, and Sorry if I Spammed

Hey, so the 10 of you that actually visit my blog and don’t read it through a planet, you may have noticed me having some fun today. I decided that my blog was going to support OpenID, despite my hosting provider not having the needed math libraries, so my apologies if logins aren’t as speedy as you would like. However, dependencies and the like were not the hard part of the process at all, the OpenID WordPress Plugin doesn’t really integrate into the site unless your running Kubrik or a derivative.

Luckily, there’s an easy enough solution, the OpenID API is pretty easy, and it didn’t take much to get everything (including Comments, and logging in via that link!) more or less running smoothly. On that note, don’t hesitate to nag, I hope its something people actually want to use. Its in that spirit that I have this little poll, no obligation, I was just thinking about pushing for Gnome to consider the MoinMoin plugin on live.gnome.org.

Ajax Polls and Planets do not like each other! Please participate in the poll here.

My last fun tidbit for the evening is actually really useful, if anyone runs a WordPress blog, they know that its not the fastest or lightest thing in the world. But, most likely they have heard of wp-cache2, and have reached a comfortable compromise. One thing that really sucks about wp-cache2, is you can’t compress pages and use it, which means were missing out on the biggest web speedup there is. I realized this evening that you can totally utilize php’s native compression, and completely bypass the issue. If you add the following to your .htacces in the wordpress folder, your looking at a significant speedup, at least, I noticed one.

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2

I believe the compression levels are 1-5, but don’t quote me, I’m using 2 for the moment, and I’m happy, I might do some more tweaking later though.