I stepped on the scale yesterday morning and to my dismay, it read 199 lbs. Geeze, even for someone 6′ 2" that’s a little more tubby than I would like. So this morning I stepped onto our new nifty Gazelle Edge that I bought my wife for Christmas (for a cool $20 from Goodwill). My 40th birthday is coming this September and I aspire to be in better shape at 40 than I was at 35. So, I’m launching my second experiment.
For regular readers of thoughtsparks.net you’ll remember The 35 Day No Caffeine Experiment. On August 27th of this past year I stopped drinking caffeine for 35 days. The lasting effect has been that I permanently have stopped drinking coffee and my overall consumption of caffeine has dropped considerably.
So here goes experiment number 2. By lifting this to a totally public platform it keeps me accountable to my goal. The two objectives to reach this goal are: 1. exercise everyday, and 2. reduce my overall caloric intake. Both of these are real challenges for me. Exercise seems to be one of the easiest to measure. I’m still working on my plan to reduce calories. Any input on that would be appreciated. I figure increased exercise will take off the first five or so but dropping below that is going to take some real self-control on my part. Ah, such is life.
After nearing completion on a mid-size WordPress site, it seems an appropriate time to ask some questions about the scalability of WordPress. How far can you push the puppy before it yelps. This post is a follow-up to the previous posts:
The site, which will be launched in the next couple of weeks, has several hundred pages going several levels deep. It is definitely a good example of how far one can extend WordPress as a content management platform.
My overall take on the platform is fairly positive. For anyone with a decent knowledge and sense for development, it offers some built-in components that allow for creative and flexible applications:
Custom Fields. This powerful feature allows for populating either viewable data or variables for custom apps.
In one case the name and address of a teacher was published to the page with a custom field.
In another case custom fields were used to populate the variables needed to query and display rows from a spreadsheet. This enabled a very efficient application of a custom application.
Page Templates. I have not found a really good plug-in yet that provides a rock-solid way of inserting code into a WordPress page. My biggest beef with WordPress is it’s inability to run PHP natively. Page Templates provide a good alternative for including a file or application to the page. They also work nicely for redundant information on multiple pages.
Parent-Child Relationships. For the most part I’m very satisfied with parent-child relationships in WordPress. It handles multiple levels and I have not yet seen any indication of a ceiling for the number of possible pages one could publish. That said, the interface for parent-child assignment is through a single drop-down selector. You can imagine how unweildy this could get after a point. After a couple hundred pages WordPress also does not display all pages in the Manage section. It’s not a deal breaker per se as pages can be searched with a filter or edited by navigating through the site directly. Still, it reveals some limitations.
WordPress shines brightly for small scale sites. This specific client is looking towards expanding with a multiplicity of sites rather than scaling-up this one site. For that reason I believe the platform will serve them well.