Live on the Bleeding Edge of WordPress with SVN explains how to keep your WordPress Blog running the latest sub-version build of WordPress. It is highly recommended that you do not use the sub-version builds in a production environment. They are meant for testers.

In 6 Must Have Symbian S60 Mobile Applications I’ve reviewed six applications that I can’t live without on my Nokia N73.

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 when it released last week and had a great deal of trouble trying to get things to work out here.

This is one major release of WordPress, that really requires you to check all your plugins.

Anyway, one of my favorite plugins is Flickr Photo Album, which allows me to easily integrate Flickr with my photos’ page out here.

The current version of the plugin throws up a

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_users_drafts()

This has happened because WordPress 2.3 has done away with admin-db.php and now uses user.php to call the same function.

I found a solution in the Flickr Forum. Open wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/admin_options_load.php and find

require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/admin-db.php');

Replace with:

// changed since WP2.3
require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/includes/user.php');

This should fix the error and get your album working perfectly once again. Just need to wait till the author fixes this.

Browsers are equipped to serve compressed pages. Most hosts too have mod_gzip or zlib extensions installed to ensure you can avail of these features.

Compression ensures that your browser receives a smaller packet and so you effectively save bandwidth.

WordPress by default also comes with this feature that enables you to compress the webpages and send them to the browser.

You can find it under Options » Reading. Scroll to the bottom where you will find WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them.

I’ve noticed upto 1 second difference between the loading times of my pages with this checked and unchecked.

After checking this, it is best to analyze your page to see if gzip is infact working or not. For this I use Web Page Analyzer.

In case you do have the above option checked and this is reporting that the files are not compressed, you will need to talk to your host.

Many of us have WP-Cache installed on our WordPress installation. When a page is requested for the first time, WP-Cache creates a cache file for the page. Subsequent requests are served from the cache. This ensures that the page doesn’t need to be recompiled, thus reducing the load on the server.

The problem with WP-Cache is that it doesn’t support GZip encoding. This means, that you need to first uncheck the above option that I talked about. This also means that you’re increasing the load time of your pages as well as consuming more bandwidth.

However, Mark Jaquith and Chris Stormer have found that a minor change in the the code of the plugin can turn on GZip encoding.

All you need to do is find the line

foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

in wp-cache-phase1.php. This is line 35 in my file.

Just before this line you need to add:

if ( extension_loaded('zlib') ) ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

Now, your file will look like:

if ( extension_loaded('zlib') ) ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

Save the file and upload it and your set.

You can analyze the page again using the analyzer to check if the files are compressed.

Note that the above option in WordPress has to be disabled, or your pages will be royally messed up!

For those interested, the line of code we added checks if the zlib extension is installed. If it is, then it calls ob_gzhandler which gzips the output buffer and sends it to the browser.

Mark introduced me to AuctionAds (aff) soon after it was launched. AuctionAds by default is not contextual, but my article guides you through establishing just that.