The server edition wasn’t overlooked though, it now includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Organizations that use Ubuntu Server can now take advantage of cloud computing.

• Ubuntu Desktop
• Ubuntu Server

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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After downloading both of these and running them against my blog both were suggesting what I thought at the time would be a major project, enabling caching and gzip compression on my server. To enable caching I found this site that had great examples of a simple addition to the .htaccess file in the blog directory would enable caching. The only thing needing to be edited in Apache is making sure that mod_cache and mod_expires modules are loaded. Most standard installations will already have these loaded for you.

After this I started working on enabling compression. I again found another good resource on how to do that here. I left out the section of mod_expires since I had a .htaccess file with that code already. After doing this and a few other minor adjustments, my page load times were cut in half. On average 7-8 seconds for a first time visit and under 2 seconds for opening a post or another page thanks to most elements already being cached.

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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First you’ll want some way of letting the theme user choose what will change in the stylesheet, I explain how to do this with a theme options framework here. After you’ve got all the options set the way you want you need some way of getting those into your theme. At first I was just using <style></style> tags in the header of the theme, while this works it just isn’t an efficient way of writing a theme. What I wanted to do was have an external file that changed with the options but that could also be cached by the web browser, to improve performance, save bandwidth and overall have a better written theme.

Now if your using a framework similar to mine or your using mine then you know you have to pull some info from the WordPress database to fill in your variables from your option page. This posed the biggest problem because since this was an external page none of the WordPress functions would work. To get around this in the first version I just loaded the wp-config.php and wp-load.php files in the top of the file. This is bad practice because WordPress site owners can move these files around now and there is now way to know where to load these from. So I spotted the solution from another theme developer. Making an array of all the option values then using php GET variable on the external stylesheet. Now onto the actual code.

First this is the code that my framework uses to pull the options from the WordPress database.

<?php
global $options;
foreach ($options as $value) {
	if($value['type']!="checkbox" and $value['type']!="multiselect"){
		if (get_settings( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = $value['std']; } else {
		$$value['id'] = get_settings( $value['id'] ); }
	}else{
		if (get_settings( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = explode(",",$value['std']); } else {
		$$value['id'] = explode(",",get_settings( $value['id'] )); }
	}
} ?>

I just modified it to add all the values to another variable seperated by a |.

<?php
global $options;
foreach ($options as $value) {
	if($value['type']!="checkbox" and $value['type']!="multiselect"){
		if (get_settings( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = $value['std']; } else {
		$$value['id'] = get_settings( $value['id'] ); }
	}else{
		if (get_settings( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = explode(",",$value['std']); } else {
		$$value['id'] = explode(",",get_settings( $value['id'] )); }
	}
$css .= $$value['id']."|"; }
$css = urlencode($css);
?>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/style.php?css=<?php echo $css;?>"/>

So now the variable $css now holds all the values of the options set by the theme user. Then for the external stylesheet it should be named whatever you like except instead of a .css extension give it a .php extension so the php processing engine of the web server will know it has php in it. Then the link tag gives the path to the style.php file but also notice it appends the?css=<?php echo $css;?> this actually sends all the options to the dynamic stylesheet called style.php. Then you’ll just need to add this to the top of the style.php file.

<?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate");
$offset = 72000 ;
$ExpStr = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT";
header($ExpStr);
$css = $_GET["css"];
$css = urldecode($css);
$s = explode("|", $css);

This tells the web browser to process the output of this file as plain text and use a stylesheet instructions. This also sets up the caching that was important to me. Then it gets the value of $css which was passed to the style.php file when it was called in the header.php of the theme. After that it decodes it and then explodes it into an array. Now to access your option values you’ll just use variables like this.

$s[0]
$s[1]

It’s important to know the order your options will be added to the array so you can call the right value when needed, also keep in mind that arrays start at 0 so the first value will not be 1. For an example you can download my Techozoic theme and look in the controlpanel.php for the options framework then in the header.php for the code to pull the options into the array then in the style.php file itself to see how to use the variables in the stylesheet. In my theme however since I already had most of the variables already named I just assigned the value of the array to the different variables I already had setup. It makes it easier in the long run I think because you can give more descriptive names to make everything more readable and easier to understand.

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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The first difference with using PHP in a stylesheet is the extension of the file has to change, from .css to .php for the web server to know how to process the PHP language in the file. Then since the file is now a php file it wont be cached by web browsers and will be reloaded every page view which is unnecessary, but there is a way to fix that. I’ll now show a very simple dynamic stylesheet then explain each part individually.

<?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate");
$offset = 72000 ;
$ExpStr = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT";
header($ExpStr);

$bg_color = "#FFFF00";
$body_font = "Tahoma";
$link_color = "#0000FF";
$alt_color = "1";

echo <<<CSS
body {
background-color: {$bg_color};
font-family:{$body_font};
}
a {
color: {$link_color};
}
CSS;

if ($alt_color = 1) {
echo <<<CSS
body {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
CSS;
} // Closing If tag
?>

Lines 1-6 setup the headers of the file to allow for browser caching, the will reduce bandwidth usage and save on some server processing.

<?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate");
$offset = 72000 ;
$ExpStr = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT";
header($ExpStr);

Next 8-11 then set up the variables that will be used through the rest of the stylesheet. Notice that everything is enclosed in quotation marks, if for some reason you need to include quotation marks in the variable then you must escape it by adding a slash in front of the mark like this \” .

$bg_color = "#FFFF00";
$body_font = "Tahoma";
$link_color = "#0000FF";
$alt_color = "1";

On lines 13- 21 the actual styles are echoed which will print it to the text of the file, but the good thing about having the php is that you can mix in your variables when echoing. Notice the echo <<<CSS this tells php to output text until it sees CSS again which is on line 21. Then you also see the {$bg_color}, this is the way to use your variables the {} tell it that it’s a php variable and to output it’s value instead of the actual text $bg_color.

echo <<<CSS
body {
background-color: {$bg_color};
font-family:{$body_font};
}
a {
color: {$link_color};
}
CSS;

Finally on lines 23-30 is a simple if statement checking the value of the $alt_color and if it equals 1 then to add lines 24-28 to the output as well. Then you’ll see the closing ?> tag which says to stop processing the file.

if ($alt_color = 1) {
echo <<<CSS
body {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
CSS;
} // Closing If tag
?>

Other Resources:

• PHP Documentation
• W3Schools PHP tutorials
• W3Schools CSS tutorials
• Digital Web Magazine Article

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: PCMag

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Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.
– Mozilla Labs

One interesting idea is already floating around from Mozilla Labs, having the tabs on the side instead of the top.

Source: PCPro

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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AMD processors have AMD-V (hardware virtualization) on all but their Sempron line. Intel on the other hand used the feature as a way to divide their processor models and don’t have as many models with the support. Tom’s Hardware has a list of all the Intel models that support VT-x.

Source: ArsTechnica

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: Mozilla Links

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: The Register

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Ubuntu

The biggest new features of Ubuntu are:

• GNOME 2.26
• X.Org server 1.6
• Boot performance – Dramatically improved boot times, as low as 25 seconds on some machines.
• Linux kernel 2.6.28
• Ext4 filesystem support

Kubuntu

For the KDE fans Kubuntu is also available today and here are the newest features for it. Download it here.

• KDE 4.2
• Quassel IRC client
• Amarok 2.0.2 for your music needs
• KTorrent 3.2
• Digikam 0.10.0
• Qt 4.5
• Intel Atom Support for netbook support

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Sources:

eWeek

VMware vSphere

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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As of 8:00 am Monday, IE8 — released Thursday — held 1.86% of the browser market, down from a high of 2.59% on Sunday, according to market watcher Net Applications. The most likely reason for the decline is that early adopters of IE8 are switching back to the more familiar, and –at this point — reliable Explorer 7 browser.

I was never even able to download IE 8 when I tried Thursday, server timeouts, I guess it’s all as well, because I’d probably be in that .73% downgrading. I’ve actually tried IE 8 on Windows 7 beta and I wasn’t all that impressed, just looked like IE with a couple of new buttons. The whole web slice thing drove me crazy too. Every time you would highlight the little button would pop up and be overall annoying.

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<?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) : if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php $excerpt = strip_tags(get_the_excerpt());
        echo $excerpt; if ( $cpage < 1 ) {}
else { echo (' - comment page '); echo ($cpage);} ?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="
<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) { echo $category->cat_name . ','; }
$posttags = get_the_tags();if ($posttags) {foreach($posttags as $tag) {echo $tag->name . ','; } } ?>" />
<?php endwhile; endif; elseif(is_home()) : ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>

Line 5 thru 7 are the ones that deal with the keywords.

<meta name="keywords" content="
<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) { echo $category->cat_name . ','; }
$posttags = get_the_tags();if ($posttags) {foreach($posttags as $tag) {echo $tag->name . ','; } } ?>" />

This code depends on the loop code on line 1 to be able to pull the posts category and tags. This code basically pulls each category out and prints it out follow by a comma and then does the same with the tags. The comma is important because that is what separates the keywords. Even if this has marginal benefit it’s not that hard to implement and the cost as far as page load time should be minimal.
You see the whole series here. Be sure and rate each post, thanks.

©2009 Jeremy Clark - TechNet.com. All Rights Reserved.

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