Mark’s Tech Blog

I often see customers & friends implementing wordpress blogs or websites. Wordpress is an amazing tool, its a great enabler and tool to get people off the ground at very little or zero cost. But (theres always a but) the problem with that results, more often than not, that most of the important things are overlooked.

Now dont get me wrong, wordpress is awesome, the people using it just need to take a bit of time to learn about it, how it works and how to get the most out of it.

Here are my suggestions for improving your customers/readers wordpress experience.

Caching – WP-Super-Cache / Hyper Cache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your wordpress site is installed on to do less work. I have typically seen on busy wordpress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved. Dont use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing wordpress sites less.

To install, search the plugins from the Wordpress admin panel and install them, double check the configs, but most can be used out the box if you have a pretty standard installation.

Permalinks
These making your website more visible. Instead of having your sites link looking like this: http://www.slingsby.za.net/?p=225 your link can look like: http://www.slingsby.za.net/2009/08/29/tour-of-cape-town-2010-stadium/ – Google likes it more, its also a lot easier on the eye! Google uses keywords from your link to determine what the content in the article is, this means it scores higher on searche, which means you get more traffic! You can turn permalinks on in the settings tab on the admin menu.

Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps allow search engines to crawl your website easily and look for your new content, check old content is still there etc. Sitemaps give Google, Bing & Yahoo more confidence in your website, ranking it higher than the next website. This is easily installed, in wordpress search for the “Google Sitemaps’ plugin, install & activate. This creates http://www.slingsby.za.net/sitemap.xml

Google will like you even more if you tell it where the sitemap is. Use Google Webmaster tools, go and create an account at http://www.google.com/webmaster/ – then update the sitemap location on Googles site. There are simple instructions on the site on how to do this.

Unused plugins
If you have plugins that are enabled but you arent using, disable them and get rid of them. You can always reinstall them. The more junk you have clogging up your site, the worse it is.

For Wordpress Hosting in South Africa.

So, there you have it. I have worked with many wordpress sites and seen some interesting things! If you need any advice, hosting or assistance, post me a comment.

Today I went off to the new Cape Town Stadium for a look see and checkout whats going on in and around the stadium.

Undoubtedly, the roof has to be the most advanced part of Cape Town’s new 68000 seater stadium and has some amazing features. It has been designed to withstand Cape Town’s notorious black south easter’s and the roof can move as much as 1.5m in the wind horizontally. It even comes with earth quake dampners (Cape Town had tremors in 1969 from the Tulbagh earthquake of 6.3). The floating roof is suspended on an inner ring of cable that was lifted by tightening the connecting cables from the outside to the centre ring and it lifted off the ground! Each glass panel weights an average of 95kg and there are 9000 of them!

At its peak there were 3500 people working on it. With construction running 24 hours a day. There are 13000 temporary seats that are going to be done away with afterwards and the area converted into conferencing facilities. Water runoff from the massive glass roof is channeled to a holding dam and then utilised to water the golf course and surrounding areas.

It will have 2 x 75m2 electronic screens from Sony. All the doors, lights, cooling etc are all centrally controlled from the VOC. The stadium has 3×1.5MVA generators to power the whole stadium, no worries about blackouts!

The grass for the stadium is being grown in Milnerton, the steps, seats and most of the concrete was actually formed offsite, transported at 2am and put in place in the early hours of the morning to prevent congestion on Cape Town roads.

We visited the VIP area, the media centre and the changerooms for the new stadium, quite smart!

Excellent ride today at Oak Valley (one of the overnight stops for the Cape Epic.

The ride is in the Grabouw valley and up onto the hills below Groenlandberg mountain. There are 3 trails. Green 14km, Red, 21km, Black 25km. Each for each increasingly more experienced riders.

The major advantage is the hot showers and bike wash at the end. In winter, what a bonus! There was a large percentage of single track on the black route as well as a new Expedia Gutschein black section that has been opened up (2.8km single track) so overall a great ride.

There were a few weird moments on the A-frame wooden stys over the fences and I managed to smash my head on the overhead bar (it was really low – i checked) – so beginners watch out – hit them head on or you will slide, especially if its wet.

Ride Stats:
Distance: 25km (Black Route)
Time: 1:30-2hours
Location: oak Valley, Grabouw, Cape Town
Difficulty: Intermediate (but good for beginners)
Notes: Showers, Bike Wash, Secure Parking
Cost: R30/rider
Overall Rating: 4/5

BMC has been my bike repair place of choice for a while now. Their service is nothing short of outstanding.

I bought a new Specialized Epic Marathon frame and wanted to move my existing components off my current GT frame. I had to buy new cable housings and front XTR derailuer (top mount) – my other one was bottom mount so wouldnt work.

I was late to collect it (friday) as I was in a rental (thats another story) and couldnt get it to start at the office. So I arrived at 5pm on a friday and they had already locked up. I smsed them as I am due to ride a race tomorrow (saturday) and we organised to meet back at 5:45pm.

I got my bike, its done brilliantly, all the right bits in the right places, all the leftover spares, cable routings correct, nice clean components (after the last few muddy races) and a great looking bike.

The test is tomorrow morning, the Willow Creek / Nuy mountainbike race – not the ideal testing ground for a “new” bike.

Thanks again to BMC, Jared, Kevin and Kerry for your awesome service. Check BMC out.

Early this morning a whole pod of Pilot whales beached themselves on Kommetjie Beach, Cape Town.

The 47 whales that beached themselves are suspected to be following the matriarch who apparently beached first.

We arrived at 11am to assist in getting the whales back into the water, around 10-15 whales had already been returned to the sea by other volunteers but unfortunately some of the already returned whales were re-beaching themselves further down the beach onto rocks, making rescue nearly impossible. It was freezing with the icy north wester coming in straight off the sea.

Disaster Management were trying to sort logistics out to get some of the smaller whales transported to Simonstown, but I couldnt see how they would get it all together. They needed hoists, trucks with padding to prevent the whales moving around and a way to get them onto the navy ships and back off again into the sea. Even this might create too much stress for the whales to handle though.

Update: 31-05-2009
I definitely think that Disaster Management hadnt a clue on how to handle this situation. Clearly there was no scenario planning on how to deal with this type of event. I felt that was the situation on the beach when attending the discussions on what to do.

I felt horrible to be there and not being able to help these clearly very healthy animals – they were strong, a guy fractured his leg when one of the whales tails connected him. Most of the whales were euthanased (ie shot) even though they were strong. It was evident that MCM / Disaster management didnt know how to deal with this disaster.

They would have been able to make a massive difference if they knew how to source whale slings (very similar to horse equipment), padding, trucks for transport to simons town (if needed) and boats that are able to carry this type of whale. Its all possible it just depends on the preplanning and willingness of the relevant authorities.

More photos available at: Beached whales

Its always a bit worrying when Eskom wants to build more dirty low grade coal power stations and increase traffics to the consumer by 34%.

But theres some hope on the horizon. The National Energy Regulator (NERSA) recently published feed-in tarrifs for the different alternative energy types. Feed-in allows independant private power producers to sell energy back to Eskom at a guaranteed price.

Technology	Tarrif
Wind	1.25 R/kWh
Small Hydro	0.94 R/kWh
Landfill Gas	0.90 R/kWh
Concentrated Solar	2.10 R/kWh
Solar Panel	N/A R/kWh

Whats glaringly obvious is that there is no price for standard solar power (PV cells) – this will only be released in 6 months time, why?

The City of Cape Town has a 22c/kwH surcharge for Green Electricity, with standard consumer rates at 57c/kWh and commercial at 48.7c/kWh. This is about 50% more than current rates but definitely still attractive to small commercial customers.

The new feed-in tarrif creates several new business opportunities, a wind farm project at Hopefield up the West Coast has been announced and the landfill sites are being looked at to provide peak power by storing methane gas.

One thing that notably missing is a a higher feed-in tarrif during peak power usage times. Such a method would encourage the producers to store and release the energy during peak demand allowing Eskom to reduce its dependance on very expensive to run open cycle gas turbines that burn millions of litres of diesel each year.

Ref: City of Cape Town Tarrifs

Today was an amazing day by all accounts. We have had some much awesome feedback already from the speakers, attendees, press etc.

We have been blown away by the quality of the presentations and how relevant the topics are to a wide audience.

I was trying to keep track of the tweets and we were hitting upwards to almost 10-20 tweets a minute sometimes. #Netprophet trended in twitters top10 for more than 6 hours – heck the conference was only from 8am to 4pm and during lunch the tweets dropped off substantially.

Some articles/blog posts so far:
Netprophet a great success – WhiteWallWeb Blog
Netprophet – perfect wakeup call – Marlon parker
Netprophet-How conferences in SA should be run – Mike Stopforth
The Netprophet afterthoughts – Jason Bagley
Netprophet update from RSAWEB – RSAWEB
Summary of the day – Khalil Aleker

Wow! What a lekker place!

We popped over there for a few days to swim with the Dolphins, Whalesharks, dive with zambezi sharks and do a bit of kiting. Well I got to do ALL of those things!

The water was 26 degrees. At 39.1meters with the Zambezi it was 24degress – awesome! We dived with The Whaler and did some swimming with Dolphins with Dolphin Encounters

We had some stunning prawns at the one restaurant on the hill, although rather pricey. Everything is still in rands because nearly all goods come from South Africa. It was amazing to see how 1st world SA is, we got to the border post on a nice tar road and then went through the post into super sandy tracks, NO tar.

I was rather bummed by the annoying jetskiers from joburg who would drive fast right up next to people, some of which you could see boozing on the beach from 8am. A lady drowned whilst we were there and the local guys said that drownings had become a regular issue. Some of the local divers and dolphin encounters ran a lifeguard service (for free) and were shut down by the Mozam government – go figure.

Anyway, it was a super trip, flew to Durbs and then hired car, stayed in St Lucia for the night and then parked the car at the border post, walked through and was fetched by Dolphin Encounters – we had a lekker stay and allround it was a brilliant break.

Call us crazy, but Laura and I are sitting 2k from the finish of todays stage. The people! Everwhere for 14k of the last climb of todays 210km over 3 monster hills, throne we are on is the last. We are so high there is snow very close to us.

Driving through last night from the finish of yesterdays stage took us almost 5hours. People people everywhere!

We rode the climb, hectic 14k of min 10% gradient.

Last saturday I popped in at Suntrax to see when the new Naish kites were arriving. (I wasnt planning on buying a new kite till Sept/Oct/Nov)

So the Naish Helix’s were in. DAMNIT. So I had to buy one. Naish Helix 2008 12m2.

I managed to get out on langebaan lagoon on sunday in the north wester and there was just enough wind. I mean it was gusting up to a reasonable level, so the rest of the time was a bit trying.

I find the kite great, far more responsive than my Naish 2006 12m2 Boxer. Its not that easy to relaunch in the ultra light wind, no 5th line (thats what I am used to!) The line and bridle did drag in the water a little, but I think this will improve dramatically with decent wind. The kite turns over nicely on relaunch with the new leading edge shaping.

Otherwise I think the kite is awesome! It flies brilliantly, turns are quick and it is very responsive, massive depower, low bar pressure. It also handles gusts really well. My girlfriend who hasnt flown a kite until about 1 month ago even flew it for about 30mins and loved it. (What was I thinking!!!) But it was all good, no damage, no tears (although I must admit my heart was in my throat a few times!

So, I gotta see how it will perform in the South Easters! I am also gonna check the Torch 08’s out, whilst chatting to Brian @ Suntrax he did mention that most of the pros are using the Torch’s and not the new sigma series yet.

I will try post some new photos when I get out into some decent wind, its still a bit light in Cape Town at the moment.