The “Feed Key Generator” plugin is now released for all UBC Blogs users. The plugin enables access to your private blogs’ feeds through a 40 character key which you can give out to anyone that you wish to enable access for. Furthermore, you can always reset the key if you feel the current key might be compromised or there’s been a change of staff/students.

To activate the plugin on a private blog simply go to “Dashboard -> Posts -> Plugins” and click on the “Activate” link in the “Feed Key Generator” section.

The following leads to our complete documentation on how to use the plugin: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Documentation:UBC_Content_Management_System/Plugins/Feed_Key_Generator

Lastly, please report any comments or concerns to weblogsupport@exchange.ubc.ca

The Open Attribute plugin has now been added to UBC Blogs.  The plugin allows a user to add licensing and attribution information into a blog post / or entire site.  Advanced options such as the ability to opt out posts from licensing,  add multiple licenses and tweak the look of the license output.

Top enable on your blog goto Posts->Plugins -  Then “Activate” Open Attribute. Plugin Settings are under Settings->Open Attribute.

Now share that content!

The Manifest theme is all about the content. No widgets and sidebars just 500px of single column content space nice and clean. The wordy types will appreciate very “McSweeny’ish” .

If you like clean minimal styling this theme for you. Oulipo puts the focus on your content with a grid-based design and elegant typography, it makes a perfect theme for e-portfolio, journal or photo blog.

Features:

• Three Columns
• Threaded Comments
• Right Sidebar
• Fixed Width
• Custom Background
• Custom Header
• Custom Menu
• Theme Options
• Sticky Post

A long standing bug has been fixed that was preventing users from using the xml-rpc remote publishing features on UBC Blogs.

For those unaware of the feature you can use this to post / edit content using native iPhone/iPad, Android or BlackBerry apps.

To get this going on your blog follow these three steps:

1) Enable Remote publishing on your blog. To do this goto your writing settings page (Settings -> Writing) at the bottom of the page under remote publishing select the

Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

2) Set a services password. You do this on your profile manager page on your blog dashboard make sure it is strong!

3) Download an app for your platform and configure by adding your blog url, username and password.

That’s it you are mobile now.

Apps:
iPhone/iPad
Android
BlackBerry

We’ve added a new plugin: FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com.

If you are already using Feedburner.com, it’s very easy to add an email subscription box to your blog.  Check out my blog post.

Plugin Description: Control the amount of time that the feed cache is stored for. (this time is important if you want to updates external feeds more reguraly)

This update changes the available options under the Profile page. The options are Public, Edit Profile, Change Avatar, Privacy Settings and UBC Info.

For those wondering how to do query caching here is a quick run down.

1) Edit the MySQL conf at the following to /etc/my.cnf for a 26M query cache use:

query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 26214400

2) Restart MySQL

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

3) Login to MySQL and run the following:

mysql> SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 26214400;

4) Check if it was loaded:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'query_cache_size';
+------------------+----------+
| Variable_name    | Value    |
+------------------+----------+
| query_cache_size | 26214400 |
+------------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

5) Check the cache “hits”:

mysql> SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Qcache%';
+-------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name           | Value   |
+-------------------------+---------+
| Qcache_free_blocks      | 1079    |
| Qcache_free_memory      | 4635984 |
| Qcache_hits             | 210991  |
| Qcache_inserts          | 52877   |
| Qcache_lowmem_prunes    | 17821   |
| Qcache_not_cached       | 23497   |
| Qcache_queries_in_cache | 2273    |
| Qcache_total_blocks     | 6990    |
+-------------------------+---------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

6) Compare that to the questions:

mysql> SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘Questions%’;
+—————+——–+
| Variable_name | Value |
+—————+——–+
| Questions | 354695 |
+—————+——–+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

from this we can determine that at that point roughly 59% 210991/354695 of the database queries are “cached”.

We implemented MySQL query caching yesturday and the results are quite impressive.

ab -n 100 -c 40 http://blogs.ubc.ca/blog/category/community/latest-posts/

Requests per second: 325.78 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 122.782 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3.070 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

We now have PHP APC opcode caching, content caching with WP-Super-Cache, content compression with mod_deflate and the MySQL Query caching… still alot more tweaks that can be done but this is a good foundation.