I spent the last five years pretty much exclusively coding in C++. Strangely enough, I haven't really touched a C++ compiler since leaving Vancouver, and instead have been pretty much coding non-stop in PHP. Obviously C++ is a compiled language, and PHP is an interpreted one. In terms of enjoyment, I think I like the challenge of coming up with cool C++ code, but without a doubt, PHP is far more enjoyable overall. The main reason, at least for me, is because I can write some code and instantly see the results of that code in PHP. ...

I spent some time working on Viper Cache last night. It's going to get a new name at some point, but it's close to being done. I'm going to test it on this site for a while and see if I can iron out any bugs.

So I've had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I've actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they've answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great. The one thing I've found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn't powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren't successful. Every once and ...

I did a bit of work to my links page tonight. I wrote a piece of code so that now the people I follow on Twitter show up as well. It's sort of a neat mashup, and I'm hoping to do a bit more with Twitter soon.

San Francisco is without a doubt one of my favourite cities in the world. It's situated right on the Pacific Ocean, nestled snugly between Marin Country and Oakland. While Napa Valley is usually extremely hot, San Francisco boasts a fairly moderate climate, with sunshine occurring on most days of the year. In August, there's going to be a WordCamp session down in San Francisco. Given that I'm a huge WordPress advocate, and that I love the Bay Area, I registered today and made the quick, impromptu decision to attend. Flights out of Vancouver are around ...

Thanks to everyone who left some feedback the other day about the new translation plugin. I've had some really great comments about it, and even the odd person that's really anxious to test it out. I'm hoping to put a version up online tonight for people to download and try for themselves. For those people who didn't catch it, what I did was write a Wordpress plugin that takes advantage of the Google AJAX language API to dynamically translate the content of my blog into whatever language you as a reader ask for (by adjusting your browser settings). ...

I've spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for Wordpress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website -- a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about Wordpress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. ...

Today I took the plunge and quickly upgraded my Wordpress installation from 2.3.3 to the Beta for 2.5. In terms of look and feel on the front-end, I doubt you'll notice any major changes (especially on sites where you don't have to login). However, they've completely overhauled the administration section in the back to make things a little easier to find. I'm not going to really review it, because in all fairness it's not quite done yet. However, the back end does seem a bit slower, maybe due to the new additions. Also, I have ...