vBulletin Tagging

Wow it’s really been 1 year since Gravatar joined the Automattic family.  Time sure flies when you’re having fun!

Gravatar has come a long way from the service that it was back in October 2007.  My wife likes to laugh at me because I’ll pick something up in one room, like a remote control, and move around the house fidgeting with it.  Then I’ll absentmindedly leave it in some random place like the bathroom, or the freezer.  One year ago we picked up a small struggling avatar service with a great name and an awesome fan base.  Now, in an attempt not to leave it in a random location, we’re looking back on the last year (and letting you look with us.)

The service was running version 2.0, and set up on two rented (or collocated, I don’t honestly know) servers.  The servers were running at loads of around 20, and could spike to well over 100 (that’s a lot.)  It was obvious that we needed both some stop-gap fixes and a plan. The first thing we did was throw some caching servers in front of the service — a couple of varnish servers as I recall.  This dropped the workload of the two boxes considerably, and allowed us to look at Gravatar without bringing the service down.  Next we replicated the setup 1 for 1 to two of our own (more powerful) servers.  This gave us a bit more breathing room.  And we began to plan.

It was obvious, from the very beginning that the service was going to have to handle a constant torrent of requests from the internet.  Most of those requests would be for email addresses with no Gravatar and come from URLs that could be crafted in an unlimited number of ways.  On top of that we knew that we wanted to make all the paid features free, and expand the size a Gravatar could be from 80 pixels to 512 pixels.  So basically instead of our goals being to make the undertaking less daunting we we’re actively making it a more intense challenge than it could have been.  But that was OK with us, because our goals for Gravatar weren’t to make it easier but to make it better.  We wanted to make Gravatar the kind of free service that we could use, would want to use, and would be proud to share with the world.  I know that last bit sounds like marketing crap, but that’s really what we wanted to do and is really how we look at Gravatar.

Pretty much the next thing we did was port Gravatars code from RoR (Ruby on Rails) to PHP.  As I mentioned when we announced this change the reason for this wasn’t about Ruby or Rails.  Simply put we’re a PHP shop, and once rewritten in PHP we have many more great minds that we can easily throw at it than if it were still in RoR. Since we ported it *pretty much* directly from rails there are some left-over rails-isms in Gravatars code that you wont find in, say, WordPress. Shh…. Don’t tell Matt

In the rewriting we tried to tackle the largest scalability problems with the design of the service.  You can imagine that for an avatar serving service… storing, searching, and serving avatars is paramount.  Gravatar 2.0 (pre PHP) suffered from some pretty significant inefficiencies in this regard, and I think that a big part of that was limited resources (time and servers.)  Luckily we we’re now not significantly limited by either of those things.

– warning beginning technical details which may be safely skipped over if you don’t care –

The way that images were stored originally was: a complete image was made for all sizes between 1×1 and 80×80 pixels, a directory made for each rating, and a symlink placed from the rating to the appropriate image (either the users image or the default image in case the rating was too high.)  So that’s 80 images, 5 directories, and 240 symbolic links.  The reason for this, I believe, was to attempt to serve the avatar content without any database interaction whatever.  The files were then archived, uploaded to Amazon S3, and an entry added to Amazon SQS.  Finally the SQS entry was retrieved by the serving server, the file downloaded, extracted, and placed on the filesystem.  So this is why it took several minutes once you uploaded and cropped your image for you to be able to browse the rest of the site again.  You can imagine how many files Gravatar was comprised of by the time we got a hold of it!  We knew that this would simply NOT work for our new 512×512px avatar sizes.  Lastly there were a couple of directories which had several hundred thousand entries (either files or other directories) which were nearly impossible to even get a listing inside of.  So we had a list of things NOT to do.  We just needed to figure out what TO do

So we decided that we would render all our avatars dynamically from the highest quality copy of the image we can manage… down.  We would only store one version of the image, though we would store it in multiple places (a local file server for speed, and S3 for redundancy.)  We would still rely heavily on caching.  And we would asynchronize as much of the workload as was possible, so that you don’t have to wait for things to happen after you finish cropping (to do this we employed various techniques and hacks best left for another day and another story.)

– ok this batch of details has been concluded –

So the problems were many, one year ago, and the challenges were fascinating.  I recall being overwhelmed by support requests for quite some time.  I would get 40 emails on a good day, more on a bad.  And believe it or not your emails very much shaped the future of Gravatar.  I would group them into specific problems, and always fix at least the largest problem (volume wise) each week.  Over time the service has grown quite stable, support requests have gone down to just a handful every day, and things are generally peppier than ever.

We had some some bumps tuning our caches… for a while there we accidentally told your web browsers never EVER to re-validate an image. But we got that handled in short order… and things are zipping along quite nicely.

Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers. 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server.  That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day.  That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests each and every day! 96% of all of those requests are served directly from cache.  These days we get around 5,000 uploaded images every day.  Even with this staggering increase in the number of requests we’ve been able to make Gravatar faster, and more reliable than it’s ever been.

So here we are, one year later, looking out over the vast frontier of the internet and contemplating the future of Gravatar.  There are a great many things that it could become.  We know that we don’t want to loose focus on the core of the project: Serving your avatars (that’s what it’s all about!)

We know that an avatar is “a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet,”  But it’s also “an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.”  And that is exactly where we are headed:  Making Gravatar a place where you can do more than just store an image, making it a place that can be your presence online.  So we’ll be rolling out more features in the near future to allow you to store more data inside Gravatar — and more importantly to allow you to use that information in other places on the internet through open standards.

We hope that you’ve had as awesome a time using your Gravatars as we’ve had making it all work.  And we look forward to the future — to when your identity doesn’t have to be cemented to a specific site, but is fluid and flexible, and persistent.  We hope to see you there!

Cheers!
The Gravatar Team.

When I was asked to speak on how WordPress changes lives at WordCamp Portland in September of 2008, I was faced with a dilemma. While WordPress does change lives, blogging changes more lives. How do I connect the dots between WordPress and the life changing experience of blogging?

I didn’t realize that the WordPress Community would give me the answers I needed to that question. Their inspirational answers led to the following video on how WordPress changes lives, and the creation of the WordPress Fairy Blogmother.

WordPress changes lives because of the community. Over and over again, people told me that WordPress changes their lives because of the people it brings into their lives. While it doesn’t really matter what blogging platform you may use, it’s the community that supports and encourages fellow WordPress users that makes the difference. Without the WordPress Support Forums, the incredible free WordPress Themes created by imaginative and altruistic fans, the powerful WordPress Plugins created and shared by those who saw a challenge and found a solution, and the support and willingness of WordPress users to educate others on how to use the program and make it work better - there would be no community.

WordPress has inspired many to learn about coding, design, web development, marketing, but also how to be a part of a community. WordPress fans are the definition of the social web. With the passion that comes with learning and sharing WordPress tips, tricks, and techniques, they’ve founded a grassroots community, which led to WordPress meetups and social gatherings, and now to WordCamps around the world.

When I attend the many business and professional conferences to speak and present programs, it’s fairly serious. I’m there for business. They are there for business. It’s serious stuff.

When I walk through the door of a WordCamp event, I’ve found family. We’re instantly friends. We all know each other, and if we don’t, we will within a few moments. We’re risk takers and yet communal spirits, sharing the risk together. When one person pushes WordPress, we all benefit from the results.

As I interviewed people and asked the WordPress Community for help in discovering how WordPress changes lives, I knew I had to put faces on the many people who’ve had their lives transformed by their involvement in WordPress. In the first half of the video, I honor those whom I’ve known for several years since early in the development of WordPress, as well as a few new friends. Many of these people have gone from interested enthusiasts to friends of WordPress to employees of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. By using WordPress and being involved in the community, they’ve built their businesses and reputation as WordPress experts, and in turn, powerful forces on the web.

Sure, any blogging platform can do that, but there is something about Matt Mullenweg and his vision for WordPress and blogging in general that brings people together to achieve more than they could alone. This is what changes people’s lives. Together, we’re stronger with WordPress than without.

Enjoy all the inspirational reasons WordPress fans offered for how and why WordPress changed their lives. And don’t forget to check out Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, the video made especially for the finale of my presentation.

Video of How WordPress Changes Lives

There are two versions of the video. The YouTube version is low resolution and a smaller file size. The Viddler version is higher resolution and 138.5 meg file size. The video is ten minutes long. The transcription of the video is below.

YouTube Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Viddler Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Transcription of How WordPress Changes Lives

I haven’t found an easy way to add subtitles or captions to this Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum v9 program. Any help would be appreciated. Until then, this is the transcript of the video.

Fairy Blogmother: Hey, is this thing on. Hey. Is this on?
Is it working? It’s not working.
Bang! Bang! Hello, are you working.
Ah, there we go.

* Instrumental Music “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio *

“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are.
Anything your heart desires will come to you.”

“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
“When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.”

“Fate is kind. She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.”

“Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through.
“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”

Featured WordPress Community Members:

• Matt Mullenweg
• WordCamp Portland Attendees
• Barry Abrahamson
• Liz Danzico
• Andy Skelton
• John Dvorak
• Darren Rowse
• Donncha O’Caoimh
• Ben Huh
• Liz Strauss
• Daniel Brusilovsky
• Mark Ghosh
• Michael D. Adams
• Chuck Lewis
• Tantek Çelik
• Patrick Havens
• Trisha Miller
• Mark Jaquith
• Jonathan and Crystal Bailey
• Jeff Chandler
• Wendy Piersall
• Nathan Rice
• Aaron Brazell
• Alex Frison
• Jane Wells

*Music*

*Static*

Fairy Blogmother: Hello! Is this working?
It’s stop working again, dang it.
What’s going on here? Okay, wait, wait.
Bang! Bang! Ah, there.

Barbara Rozgonyi: Hello, my name is Barbara Rozgonyi with wiredPRworks.com, and Lorelle, thank you for interviewing me in the bathroom. How has WordPress changed my life? I can’t tell you everything in 15 seconds but I can tell you that it’s really made me into the person I’ve always wanted to be. Now, I can be an author, I can be a person who really influences lives. And boy, it’s so interesting to see what readers have to say. To see them take just a little piece of information and take it and make it huge that will help so many people. And I get to hang out with cool people like Lorelle in the ladies’ room.

John Hawkins: Hi, this is John Hawkins from johnhawkinsunrated.com. WordPress. WordPress changed my life how. Let’s see. I’d say I’ve met some amazing people through WordPress. I Twitter and I answer people’s questions, and you would be amazed at the amount of people who are just dying to connect with you through WordPress. Go WordPress!
Hey, come to WordCamp Las Vegas on the January 10-11, 2009. See you there!

Stace Baris:
My name is Stace Baris with aceinternetmarketing.com. And WordPress has changed my life because it is open source, lots of great Plugins for doing SEO getting my content out there, lots of widgets I can use and also made affiliate marketing really easy with great Amazon Plugins and all sorts of things. If you are serious about blogging, WordPress is the way to go and Lorelle is the person to get your info from. She’s great.

Susan Patton: Hi, I’m Susan Patton the Marketing Eggspert from Sparkplugging.com/marketing. How WordPress has changed my life? Besides getting me interviewed in the bathroom at Blog World Expo, the height of experiences, it makes it really easy. I have some tech experience but I love the creative side. So I don’t want to deal with the hard stuff. WordPress makes it easy to do what I want to do. There are Widgets for everything. There are template for everything. It’s easy. And I can worry about everything else and not my blog.

Kim Woodbridge: WordPress has changed my life by giving me confidence in my abilities and helping me earn money. I’ve found that I love
working on it. Plus, I’ve met so many interesting and talented people online.

This sounded so much better in my head but it didn’t come out quite right Well, I hope it gives you the idea. Thanks! Kim Woodbridge kimwoodbridge.com [Via email]

Naked Bones: I would say WordPress has changed my life, and it has made it easier. It gave me the room to empty my mind of the everyday stuff we all go through. [Via blog comment]

Wendy Piersall: Hi, I’m Wendy Piersall. I’m CEO of the SparkPlugging.com. Looking back I was remembering when I first started my brand. I kicked it off with WordPress. WordPress made it absolutely easy for me with little-to-know tech experience whatsoever to create a powerful brand that is now rocking the blogosphere. I tell everybody now to just start with WordPress. It’s brain dead easy and it’s extremely just brilliant and I don’t know how we could function with out it. We owe a lot to you WordPress. We love you.

Owen Cutajar: [from Twitter] WP means I can build a great new website, secure and loaded with functionality, all b4 breakfast. Good Luck at #wordcampdx.

Heather Rasley: Hi, my name is Heather Rasley, the deputy at Automattic. I made the switch to WordPress after discovering that all my favorite awesome bloggers use it. I’m very happy to be working for Automattic and making other people happy, too.

Jane Wells: Hi, I’m Jane Wells and I’m the user experience person with Automattic. WordPress has changed my life by exposing me to a kick ass community of open source developers and allowing me to work with the best guys in the world.

Karen Jackie and Dana Rockel: I’m Karen Jackie partner of Content Robot and Dana Rockel from Content Robot. WordPress has changed our lives because it has actually given us an entrepreneurial spirit and we produce WordPress blogs for clients all over the world. WordPress is a great platform. We started out as a blogging company and moved to WordPress and we don’t do any other platforms right now. WordPress is it.

Nathan Moller: My name is Nate Moeller from MollerMarketing.com. Without WordPress I don’t know where I would be in the blogging community. What else is there. Blogging is WordPress.

Fairy Blogmother: Oh, no. Not again.
They must be redesigning the interface. Sigh.
Can’t they leave anything alone. They keep messing with things.
It was just fine the way it was. Why do they have to keep changing things?
ARGH!

At WordCamp Portland, I surprised the audience from behind, wearing my WordPress Fairy Blogmother outfit. I spoke about the points mentioned at the beginning of this article, and asked the audience to come forward with their “testimonies” on how WordPress changed their lives. I was stunned at the number of people wanting to share their stories, nearly bringing the audience, and myself, to tears.

You can see the video of part of the presentation by Dale Chumbley streamed live from Cubespace in Portland, Oregon.

The end of the program featured Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, a video on how this woman uses WordPress to blog only with her left thumb. Because WordPress continues to be the most accessible and disabled-user friendly blogging platform around, she has opened up her sphere of influence and network of relationships around the world as her blog allows her to “speak out” when her body won’t.

As we design and develop WordPress Themes, Plugins, and code, the WordPress Community needs to remember that Glenda is an important representative of our users.

Thank you again to everyone who helped me put this together, everyone whose lives have been touched my WordPress, and everyone who has helped changed my life with WordPress.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in WordPress News      

If you haven’t reviewed the GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps, do it now.

As of Wednesday this week, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband and DSL for Internet access in the United States is going to be restricting your data transfer levels to 250 gigabytes a month. According to Om Malik:

With this move, the cable company will become the symbol of a new Internet era, one that is both monitored and metered. It is an era that threatens to limit innovation and to a large extent, the possibilities for new startups.

Many bloggers are part of online businesses and startups as well as suppliers of video, podcasts, and downloadable and uploaded files across the web. As web designs and WordPress Themes become more graphic and code dependent, increasing our bandwidth access levels, these limits impinge upon that grown and that access.

While WordPress Themes, Plugins, and Widgets account for very small levels of data transfer, what about a new WordPress user who wants to download and experiment with a lot of Themes and Plugins? Downloading more than a gig or two of WordPress stuff is rare, but if you add that to their other file downloads, like software, instant messaging, IRC, email, flickr, YouTube, podcasts, music, news, television, VoIP, and all the information and data that enters our world through our computers - those numbers add up fast.

I just moved from a satellite connection with a 17 gig limit. We hit the limit all the time and we weren’t downloading music or shows. I didn’t even download podcasts until I went on a trip. There were three of us using the web for our work. Download a few software programs, update your computer’s operating system, test out some Plugins, and it all adds up fast.

According to the White Paper, “today’s power users are tomorrow’s average users” with a predication that by 2012 we will be paying about $215 a month for Internet data access. Malik and others are fighting back with words in hopes of changing this “walled garden” limitation. I hope you join us in spreading the word.

The Web Must Be Free

The timing of this announcement comes the same time as the announcement of the new World Wide Web Foundation was announced. In the welcome statement, the founders, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stated:

The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.

One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information.

While I’m totally in favor and support breaking down communication and language barriers, as well as all social, cultural, and technological barriers, the biggest barrier we have to fight is greed.

It’s getting harder and harder to find free access to the web. Someone has to pay. With belts tightening around the world, will Internet access be only for the rich?

The Internet was originally started and built on lines abandoned by the phone companies, the same companies who struggled to find ways of charging for that access after they realized they were missing out on the financial possibilities of connecting via the Internet and web. They have been looking under every rock to find ways of making money off this “web thing” ever since.

Yes, we must pay for the continued growth and access to the web, but restricting bandwidth and data transfer hurts an economy already showing the flashing red danger signal.

Be warned, be aware, and let Comcast and others know that you do not want this. Fight back with your voice. Spread the word.

I remember when Arthur C. Clarke predicted that long distance telephone calls would be free by the end of the century. I thought it odd since he was a very intelligent man and he lived in the same world that I did, one where corporate greed controls everything. I couldn’t see such a thing as being possible, but with the web, it became possible. Will that freedom continue or will corporate greed continue to slip into our pockets?

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in Web Wise, WordPress News      

I was so thrilled when Glenda Watson Hyatt of the Do It Myself Blog volunteered her story of how WordPress changed her life for my WordCamp Portland keynote presentation. I’ll be sharing the videos and pictures of the program in the next few days, but I wanted to share with you Glenda’s personal story.

As you design and develop WordPress Themes and Plugins, and even WordPress itself, remember that you are serving thousands, maybe even millions of people just like Glenda. Creative, energetic members of society determined to give back to their community, yet unable to communicate in person or easily interact with a computer. They are reliant upon those of us who make the web possible, and social, to communicate with others by maintaining web accessibility standards.

Glenda tells her story in her book, “I’ll Do It Myself.” Imagine being unable to communicate but having a lot to say. With the help of determined friends, family, and an off-and-on-again support community, made her way through high school and then into college, and eventually into her own consulting business without much ability to talk “normally.”

Glenda Watson Hyatt, Darrell Hyatt, and Lorelle VanFossen at Blog World Expo

When she started blogging, she discovered that she could leave behind all the years of “I don’t understand you” and “What are you trying to say?” and people thinking she was retarded or a vegetable. She could express herself. She could communicate with others with no barriers. A whole world opened up to her.

I was extremely lucky to spend time with Glenda and her wonderful husband, Darrell, at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. We had a great time visiting and both were extremely excited about being included in the WordCamp Portland event through video. I’m lucky to have found two wonderful new friends and I look forward to visiting them soon in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area.

If you have a social media or web technology conference in the Pacific Northwest - or anywhere for that matter - and you want an incredible inspirational blogger to speak to you, get Glenda. She will change your life with her smile and attitude.

Thanks, Glenda!

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in Web Design, WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips