50 Wordpress Tutorials

Glen Stansberry provides some nice links in Top 50 Wordpress Tutorials including: Multiple Wordpress Installations Using a Single Database, How to Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 Minutes, Dynamic Sticky Pages, How to Write a Simple Wordpress Plugin and How to Add Photo Captions.

12 Good Ideas for Scaling Rails

Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way

The HTTP protocol lets you tell browsers what static content they can cache. You set this in apache. Rails automatically will put timestamps in the IMG / javascript / CSS tags, assuming you're using the helpers. The Firefox plugin YSlow coupled with Firebug are your friends here. The improvement is significant and well worth your time, especially if you add gzip'ing. 100KB initial page load can be brought down to 5K (just the HTML file) on subsequent clicks around your site.
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Fix your DB bottlenecks with query_reviewer and New Relic
This basically saves your ass completely. Everyone complains that Rails is slow. Rails is not slow, just like Java Swing is not slow. Rails makes it easy to shoot yourself in the face. If you do follow-the-textbook-example bumbling around with Rails ActiveRecord objects, you will end up with pages that drive 100 queries and take several seconds to return.

Very good post, definitely worth reading.

Related: Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Joy in Work for Software Developers

Publishers Fight Progress Again - Against Amazon Kindle

Once again publishers are talking a stupid stand on copyright. They are claiming the ability of Amazon's Kindle 2.0 to read aloud the text on the screen violates copyright. Neil Gaiman, provides a Quick argument summary of his discussion with his agent:

When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Publishers really seem to be out of touch with the way the world is moving. Pretending the world doesn't change and holding onto outdated ideas is not useful.

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Innovation and Creative Commons - Recent Reading - Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science

Why Copyright Extension is a Very Bad Idea

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Lessig Video: Information Revolution