After trying a few WP cache and CDN plugins it becomes pretty obvious that slow query is the real culprit and it doesn’t get cached by default. Things get even worse when you need to have a pagination. Flavio Tordini, an Italian developer, discovered that every time you run WP_Query or get_posts “…even when you don’t need pagination at all SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS tells MySQL to do additional work to count the total matching rows…” (flavio.tordini.org/speed-up-wordpress-get_posts-and-query_posts-functions).
Not having pagination was not an option but at least the queries needed to be cached in order to make my otherwise crippled blog well… usable. WP Transients is the solution. The queries will be temporarily stored in the database. According to “Speed Up Your WordPress by Caching Custom Queries using Transients API” article setting up the transients alone is a big improvement, but the article doesn’t mention that “transients are inherently sped up by caching plugins” (codex.wordpress.org/Transients_API).
WP Transients implementation is pretty straight forward. The only tricky part is generating individual “sub-transients” for paginated queries. Tag name concatenated with current page variable generates a unique transient name:
I discovered this artist about 7 years ago on flickr.
“Refusing to water his style down, his photos are raw, pure, grainy, erotic while remaining the delicateness and finesse of someone who puts thought in every aspect of his work. Just have a look at his photostream and you’ll notice that your heart pounds faster.” cfye.com
Ran into something unexpected today. To preserve the details of something as contrasty as this amp I usually underexpose the shot and then pull the darks up. It didn’t quite work this time. Even though the panels’ texture can be easily brought back the nylon mesh fabric just doesn’t look right. The fabric texture does become visible with the adjusted exposure, but that’s just not what it looks like in reality.
Unedited 1st shot (underexposed to get a well saturated brass control panel)
1st shot with adjusted exposure in PS — wooden panels show the texture, but the fabric doesn’t look like nylon
I have to take a second shot with longer exposure (at the expense of control panel which is slightly blown this time). The fabric looks much better now. This is something I can work with. And the raw file still has the color info in the slightly blown area so it can be fixed. It’s far from perfect though, because I’d rather have a flat, well saturated control panel.
Unedited 2nd shot — brass front panel is slightly blown
Finished photo
Korg NanoPad2
XY pad makes all the difference.
I think keytars (“music’s most ridiculed instruments”) should have an XY pad like this.
I would never say that there’s an umbrella here. I guess it’s because the logo is “completely intellectual”:
“The Citi logo is completely intellectual. It was a marriage of the Traveler’s umbrella and the word ‘Citi’ to create an umbrella in the middle of the word.”
– Paula Scher, creator of the Citigroup logo
