Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

10,000 tweets

I just noticed that my Twitter stream has passed 10,000 tweets.  Here is an obligatory screenshot.

Of course, not all of these were handcrafted – there were plenty of automated tweets from Delicious, Evernote, YouTube, and even Flickr.  Many are simply automated notifications of blog posts on this site.  But still, a good chunk of them were either written by hand, or thought of before pushing a button one of those connected services.  Not that that’s a particularly large number of tweets either – but it felt like a milestone.  There aren’t so many things that I’ve done 10,000 times off.  So here’s one.

Solution to WordPress with WP Super Cache blank pages problem

This took me a while to figure out, so I’ll post it here in case someone else ever gets into this problem.  After enabling WP Super Cache for a project at work, we’ve started seeing really weird and really random white page issues.  WordPress would show a blank page and then a few minutes later it would start working again.  But then it would disappear and so on and so forth.

Tracking the issue down, I’ve tweaked the WP Super Cache configuration quite a bit, but that didn’t help.  And I was sure that it was related to WP Super Cache, since periods of appearing and disappearing were consistent with cache timeout settings.  Browsing through WordPress support forums (threads one, two, and three) game an idea that it wasn’t just WP Super Cache on its own, but a combination of WP Super Cache plugin with something else on the system.

After a lengthy troubleshooting process, I think I nailed it.  APC – an alternative PHP cache module – wasn’t friendly with WP Super Cache.  So, as a short-term solution to the problem, I’ve disabled the APC and now everything seems to work well.  I’m a bit busy now to troubleshoot the problem further, but if you have any idea of why that could be happening, please share.

Pentadactyle Firefox add-on for Vim and Links addicts

Pentadactyle Firefox add-on for Vim and Links addicts

Pentadactyl is a free browser add-on for Firefox, designed to make browsing more efficient and especially more keyboard accessible. Largely inspired by the Vim text editor, the appearance and finger feel of Pentadactyl should be familiar to Vim users. Additional web-specific features, such as our ‘Hint’ mode, command interface, and key bindings to automatically follow back and forward links, make it easy to navigate without touching the mouse and give Pentadactyl a habit forming nature of its own.

Pentadactyl is a fork of the Vimperator project by most of its primary developers. Major differences include a 7-fold startup speed improvement and other speed improvements elsewhere, the command-line is hidden by default, better private mode and :sanitize support, better forward and reverse incremental find support, and the ability to separate multiple Ex commands with a |.