Also worth reading through this thread.

• Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs – Jeff Atwood rants about WordPress’ resource use; Matt Mullenweg responds with a list of suggested MySQL settings.
• WordPress Optimization Bible – Another set of MySQL settings to refer to. It also suggests enabling eAccelerator, which apparently works nicely with W3 Total Cache.
• One MySQL Configuration Tip That Can Dramatically Improve MySQL Performance – Suggests adding max_write_lock_count = 1

/scripts/suspendacct 'username'

If the cause of the usage spike is unknown, however, it won’t necessarily let you diagnose it.

The first post I read, a rant by Jeff Atwood, lead to suggested MySQL setting configurations from Matt Mullenweg. Based on the conversation there, I looked over a few posts related to MySQL optimization including a conversation on Stack Overflow, explanation on a lightweight configuration on Debian, and a lengthy WordPress optimization tutorial. I also came across a forum thread on WordPress.org that indicates high CPU usage may actually have to do with pretty permalinks.

The steps I took today were to implement a few of Matt’s suggested memory settings. I also ran a Perl MySQL tuner script that suggested I disable InnoDB, which I did. The most proactive steps we can take, I think, are to better configure MySQL to cache queries, and reduce the number of queries made by the theme. The changes I made today, though, anecdotally have dropped the CPU usage by a third to a half.

• From Aardvark, we learn the value of reaching people wherever they are, however they consume and communicate information. Push notification on my iPhone during my commute home? Sure, I consume information that way.
• From Hunch, we learn that if we hand a person a multiple choice quiz, we can record the results and let our algorithm learn something about them to bring to the table when they ask their next question.
• From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don’t assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You’re building next year’s tools, not last year’s.

All three together? Mmm… delicious.

scp -rv source_dir/* username@domain.com:/full/path/to/target/directory

More on Wikipedia. I had it backwards originally and copied a lot of files to the wrong place.

The second is a profile view for a news organization. Similar to the user view this would bring together contact information as well as support history for the news organization as a whole.

Any feedback, critiques, or ideas are completely welcome.

I’m adding the type of field the data is for the edit view. Users will be able to edit their own profiles and the organization profiles they are the administrator for. CoPress admins will be able to edit any profile and any organization profile.

People – Profile model extends the Django User model and includes:

• First name (text field)
• Last name (text field)
• Date created
• Position (text field)
• Organization (foreign key to an existing organization within the system)
• Phone (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
• Email (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
• IM (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
• Websites (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
• Address/Location (multiple text fields)
• Photo (uploaded file
• Bio (multi-line text field)

Organization model includes:

• Name
• Date created
• Slug (unique)
• Summary (multi-line text field
• Websites (same as People profile
• Email (ditto)
• Phone (ditto)
• Address
• Photo

The organization view will also have a list of staff depending on which users in the system have the organization in their profile. The user’s position and photo in the staff view will be pulled from their personal profile. Lastly, every object in the system will have the ability to be tagged with various topics. Clicking on fields like Location and Position will produce a filter view where you can see all of the People or Organizations with that piece of metadata.

I did a bit of research last week on what startups normally do with their advisory boards. Fortunately, OnStartups Answers has a few really valuable threads on this topic. Basically, there are two directions we can go. One is to recruit a board of advisers that is volunteer, not necessarily required to respond to queries, and that we talk to occasionally. Two is to recruit a board of advisers that we compensate in some form and have a more formal relationship with. After talking this through a bit, it makes more sense to go with the former with where we are currently. Albert made a good point that if we are depending on the advice and input of any one person heavily, it would probably just make more sense to hire them as a consultant.

I see the steps as:

1. Email the people we want to have as our advisers and see if they’re interested
2. Put together a Google Group or some sort of mailing list for conversations
3. Encourage them to subscribe to this blog and send the bigger things we want input on to the list serv

Related, there’s a really good interview with Giacomo Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq, that a couple of threads pointed to:

We don’t have any formal agreement nor do we meet regularly. Mostly I email them whenever I have a question I know they’ll be able to the answer, to or we meet on Skype once in a while (we try to shoot for once a month but somehow haven’t been able to keep a regular schedule with anyone. Things get in the way.) We all got together for a big crab-dinner feast in San Francisco in May, something I hope to turn into a yearly tradition.

It’s pretty informal, but every time I have some sort of contact with one of my advisers, I learn something. Or they say something that gives me an idea, or gets me unstuck. That’s what talking to smart people will do. I always say that one could do a lot worse than trying to be excellent, because “excellence attracts excellence”, and when you’re in that circle, even once in a while, magic happens.

He’s got an example letter for when we want to put together an advisory board page. I’m also very interested in his approach to transparency on the company blog, and want to reopen the discussion on how transparency applies to us in the form of a blog post when I have the time to put it together.

• Challenge and Solution – In some senses, this is the support ticketing mechanism. I want to move away from the support ticketing paradigm and instead focus on having well defined “Challenges” leading into documentation of the steps to produce a “Solution.” Once the Challenge reaches the Solution stage, then the tread is closed. A user can spin off a new Challenge from a closed one, however, that will create a relationship between the two.
• Profiles for People and Organizations – I’d like to duplicate a lot of the base-level functionality that Highrise offers us currently such that we can tie it closer to the Challenge and Solution functionality.
• Invoice and finance management – Basic accounting software that ties into the Profiles application and builds upon what Albert is already working on.

I’m focusing on the Profiles first, and it’s actually going to be two applications initially: People and Organizations. My goal is to define the models for the first, get them to validate, and then build the models for the second. Once I progress further on that, I’m going to start on HTML mockups that will provide a foundation for starting to work on the logic.

With this post, I also want to articulate a couple of issues worth solving at some point with this application. Well, couple of issues that are different sites of the same bigger one of communication. It’s about documenting the work that’s being done with any given project in such a fashion that both the person doing the work and the client have a really good sense of what’s going on. Having an experience for this will allow the client to submit a Challenge/support ticket, see that we’ve opened it and are working on it, read through the work we’ve done to resolve it, and then reference it later if they have an additional question about it. I think a highly-structured work log as a part of the Challenge to Solution process will be very important as we scale the number of projects we’re working on and need to have memory of what was done when for when the inevitable questions about it come later.

As such, I think it might be worthwhile to make it standard operating procedure to import authors as custom fields and then have a secondary script that checks the custom field for author information and then creates the user if the author doesn’t exist or assigns the post to the author if the user does exist.

Related to the time required to migrate archives, I wonder if we should go back to importing the content directly into the database and bypassing the creation of WordPress eXtended RSS files. If we did this, we could likely automate more of the process. Thoughts?