April 24th, 2008 Curt Monash
There’s an amazingly long comment thread on Coding Horror about WordPress optimization. Key points and debates include:
- WordPress makes scads of database calls on every page. (20 is the supposed default number. That sounds a little high to me, but not wholly incredible.)
- Therefore one should use a caching plug-in. WP-Cache is the preferred one. WP-Super-Cache gets some votes as perhaps being even better.
- In theory the database cache should handle most of the problem. (After all, many of those database queries are the same for every page.) In practice, it often doesn’t, even if you use dedicated (as opposed to shared) web hosting.
- LAMP vs. Microsoft stack (uh-oh).
- Drupal vs. WordPress vs. Movable Type vs. Joomla vs. do-it-yourself (uh-oh too).
Another theme is — well, it’s WordPress “theme” design. Do you really need all those calls? The most dramatic example I can think of one I experienced soon after I started this blog. Some themes have the cool feature that, in the category list on the sidebar, there’s a count of the number of posts in the category. Each category. I love that feature, but its performance consequences are not pretty.
As previously noted, we’ll be doing an emergency site upgrade ASAP. Once we’re upgraded to WordPress 2.5, I hope to deploy a rich set of back-end plug-ins. One of the caching ones will be among them.
Please subscribe to our feed!
Posted in About this blog, Application areas, Cache | 1 Comment »
February 23rd, 2008 Curt Monash
The server move has completed. The brief outage is behind us. Comments have been turned back on. All SHOULD be well.
I plan to write a little more soon about web hosting over on the Monash Report, if for no other reason than that what’s there is not wholly accurate and needs updating.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2008 Curt Monash
I’m moving servers again. In connection with that, I’m turning comments off for a few hours.
Everything SHOULD be fine again by Saturday.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
January 4th, 2008 Curt Monash
On New Year’s Eve, I got the impression there might be trojans being served up on monash.com. New Year’s Day, Melissa Bradshaw confirmed that there were indeed trojans on both monash.com and dbms2.com. My web hosting company tracked this problem down into the server OS, and recompiled it last night. The resulting planned outage caused our FeedBlitz-based email feed to include broken links.
The malware appears to have been inserted during a Christmas Eve mailbombing, so I can’t be sure how soon trojans first appeared. What I CAN be sure of is that some of my email was lost forever, and that other mail was sent back with bounce messages.
Needless, to say, this has not been fun. And I am very apologetic to any of you who have been inconvenienced. I’d offer you all a refund — but the blogs are already free. 
So the best I can do is try to have great posts going forward, making it worth your while to keep reading here.
At this point, I am optimistic that the technical problems are behind us. My sites are up. My email is working. I’ll be shocked if the feeds don’t work.
More detail on all this mess has been posted on Text Technologies and the Monash Report.
Posted in About this blog | 2 Comments »
November 30th, 2007 Curt Monash
DBMS2, obviously, has a parent company — Monash Research. It’s time to fill you all in on some of the exciting things we have going on.
We’ve upgraded our whole line of vendor services, adding attractive new consulting packages, starting the new Monash Research webcast series, and sharpening our white paper services as well. Most important, we enhanced our flagship Monash Advantage executive program, based on how members have actually used it in the inaugural year. Monash Advantage membership now includes significantly more consulting than before. Membership also remains the only way to get access to our Monash Letter analyst reports — such as our blockbuster guide to strategic marketing (coming soon) — and to our webcast and white paper sponsorship opportunities. Over half the companies listed in the sidebar are clients; and at this time of year, more are joining every week.
We also updated our main website at www.monash.com. It’s now even easier to keep up with all our research, or just with our most important news. We added to our already stellar lists of customers and testimonials. We redesigned the users’ guide to our white papers. And of course we updated the descriptions of our services. We even changed our name, for the first time in 17 years, although we’ll continue using “Monash Information Services” for financial dealings only.
Of course, we’re not stopping there. For example, there will be further changes when the Monash Research webcasts start being announced, held, and archived. User-oriented services will continue to be expanded, just as the vendor-oriented ones have been. And we plan to redesign DBMS2 and our other blog sites, some time in early 2008.
I look forward to working with you all over the next year.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
July 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
The Monash Advantage site is down. It should be back up in a few days.
I had been intending to send an email blast to registered site-accessers anyway. Now I’ll do that for sure. If you’re a Monash Advantage member, details and explanations will be in that email.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
April 16th, 2007 Curt Monash
The site move went fine, for the most part. Everything’s at the new host. Please comment away.
Even better, my email addresses at dbms2.com and monash.com (both firstnamelastname, and I check them both) are now with different hosts. The chance of a simulataneous outage is much reduced.
Posted in About this blog | 1 Comment »
April 13th, 2007 Curt Monash
The blog is being moved from one hosting provider to another. Comments made today might get lost in the transition. The weekend won’t be so hot either. After that it should be fine.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
April 4th, 2007 Curt Monash
For a couple of months, I’ve been pushing everybody to switch their subscriptions from individual blogs to my integrated feed, because I write about closely related subjects on several different blogs. There are two subscription options, RSS/XML (via Feedburner) and e-mail (via Feedblitz), both of which can be found via this link or this one or, for that matter, on the Monash Information Services home page.
But I just heard today from a customer who was having trouble subscribing via Bloglines. Fortunately, Feedblitz e-mail worked for her just fine. Is anybody else having difficulties too? Please let me know! I really want you to have the full integrated-feed scoop.
Posted in About this blog | 2 Comments »
January 4th, 2007 Curt Monash
We’ve finally redesigned the Monash Information Services website. In particular, we’ve created two great new ways to read our research. First, there’s a new, Google-based integrated search engine. (And it really works well, the one glitch being that it brings back feeds and pages interchangeably. Try it out!) Also – and I really encourage you all to subscribe to this — there’s a new integrated research feed.
The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
October 2nd, 2006 Curt Monash
As previously noted, this blog is under serious attack from the comment spammers, and there’s a slight chance a legitimate comment will get lost as supposed spam. That said, I know of only one such confirmed incident in all the time I’ve had Wordpress-based blogs.
Also, the spam blockers are imperfect, and some vile spam comments do get through until I delete them, commonly the same day. Sorry about that. It’s nothing that you haven’t also seen many times over in your email, I’m sure.
I just checked a few minutes ago, and Akismet intercepted 372 comments since the last time I cleared the buffer, less than a day ago. The top 150 (all I could check) were certainly real spam …
EDIT: 51 more spam cleared out 4 1/2 hours later.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
September 22nd, 2006 Curt Monash
EDIT: Now they seem to be working again, with no action on my part and no known software updates through the whole process. Go figure. I do not know Wordpress well enough to guess just exactly what had to have been broken and then fixed at my hosting provider to have caused these effects.
As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, is still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
September 6th, 2006 Curt Monash
I use Akismet as a spam-catcher. On the whole it’s good, but it has one annoying deficiency — you can only review the 150 most recent suspected spam. This time around, however, I had 766 suspected spam. If you had a valid comment in the 616 I couldn’t review, I’m sorry. Please be so kind as to resubmit it.
Thanks,
CAM
EDIT: The attack continues. Today I deleted 245 real or imagined spam. A couple of days ago it was 135, all real.
Posted in About this blog | 1 Comment »
October 10th, 2005 Curt Monash
I was going to let this blog sit idle until I could get around to dressing up its look and feel more. But I don’t want to wait for that, nor take the trouble to do it quickly, so what you see is what you get. Please excuse any dust or exposed girders.
For now, we’ll go with a very simple policy on comments.
1. I reserve the right to delete any comment at any time for any reason, without notice. The same goes for closing off comments, in a thread or overall in the blog.
2. If I EDIT your comment and still leave it up over your name, I will post a notice saying I’ve done so. I feel strongly about this; the blog editor’s refusal to adopt the same policy is the principal reason I no longer blog at Computerworld, despite the high regard in which I hold the print publication and almost everybody on the staff. (I continue to be very happy as a columnist there.)
3. The usual no-nos are forbidden here — plagiarism, spam, death threats, etc.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
August 8th, 2005 Curt Monash
This is the first blog I’ve ever administered, and it was launched in a hurry so that I could follow up on my column introducing the DBMS2 concept. In other words, it’s very much under construction.
Please forgive the exposed girders, loose wires, missing amenities, and dust.
If you need to reach me directly, try curtmonash at monash.com. Please put “DBMS2″ in the note title so that I can pick it out from among all the spam.
If you just want to check out who I am, my Computerworld landing page is as good a place to start as any right now.
Posted in About this blog | 2 Comments »