Rob's Rants

Changed Rating System

November 22nd, 2009 Rob No comments

In my seemingly never-ending quest to speed up this WordPress installation, I’ve killed another plugin; the post ratings plugin I had been using. In its place I’ve added a new one from a company called Outbrain. How does changing one plugin for another make the blog faster? Well, the Outbrain plugin keeps data on the Outbrain servers rather than keeping it locally. So much of the processing power is offloaded to Outbrain. In addition, the plugin code has been written to interfere with the site as little as possible. So I hope this will accomplish two goals — speed up the site and keep a mechanism for people to tell me what they like.

And no … I didn’t do this just because someone gave my Rudy Giuliani post 1 star.

Categories: Technology Tags: plugins, WordPress

Random Quote

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim? — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, p. 11

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I'm old enough to have been around the internet since the beginning -- starting with private BBS systems which I accessed via a Hayes 300 baud modem and then moving on to a genuine CompuServe account! I have a degree in Environmental Science and have had a varied career starting in a laboratory, followed by 10 years in Service & Operations for a large networking equipment manufacturer, and now in a Product Management role for an innovative healthcare organization. I started making web pages on Angelfire and other free services, and can remember when NetZero actually provided Internet access for free (hence the zero in the name). Among other things, I build my own PCs and run my own Linux servers at home for fun.