The site also has a “question of the day” feature. Today’s question is: “Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?” Currently, 71,844, or 55% of all replies say yes. 58,919, or 45%, say no.

Frightening.

More on Ahmadinejad here and here.

Update: apparently Ahmadinejad’s blog contains a trojan horse intended to attack visitors with Israel-based IP address who use Windows and Internet Explorer.

Update 2 (8/16/06): the latest word is that Ahmadinejad’s blog does not contain a trojan. For more, including technical details on what caused the initial alarm, see here (thanks, Steve).

• Jason Kottke. Among other things, Jason was asked if his weblog has led to other opportunities. His reply: “Yeah, between kottke.org and my previous site 0sil8, I’ve gotten jobs, job offers, speaking gigs, made lots of friends, and met my wife. So a strong “yes” on this question, I’d say.”
• Guy Kawasaki. “[My blog is] like crack–though I’ve never tried crack. I spend two to four hours a day on my blog. It’s an even worse addiction than email.”

What should you do if your company’s product fails?

Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, had a miserable July due to multiple service failures. For a hosting company, this is about as serious an issue as there is. That said, the company’s explanation, posted on their corporate blog, is superb: they clearly describe both what happened and their future plans to avoid new problems, taking responsibility where appropriate. They even included a few nice photos (like the one above).

At some point, incompetence trumps strong communication. For now, though, A Venture Forth is sticking with Dreamhost.

• Startup Review. Nisan Gabbay of Sierra Ventures recently launched a new blog that features weekly case studies of successful internet startups. For each, he will interview members of the management team and/or investor group. His first case is on Craigslist–check it out here.
• OnStartups.com. Dharmesh Shah, CEO of HubSpot, writes about software startups. He has a great, readable writing style and tends to offer very practical advice (ie the top six questions you should ask before joining a startup).
• Ben Casnocha: the blog. Ben founded Comcate, a provider of CRM software for local governments, when he was 14–he recently graduated from high school. On his 18th birthday, he asked his blog readers to describe something they did that they regret or something they didn’t do that they wished they had. The responses helped Ben to decided to take time off before college to travel the world, which he’s now doing–and blogging. He has interesting insights and his blog is a fun read.
• TED Blog. TED is an annual conference in California focused on technology, entertainment, and design. Recently, they posted video clips of many of last year’s speakers (link here)–these are worth a look. Similarly, the TED blog highlights related ideas.
• Creating Passionate Users. This is a group blog (meaning it has multiple authors) focused on the brain and metacognition–in particular, “how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory. Oh yeah, and how to recognize when someone else (including one of us) is applying brain-based techniques to get you to do something.”
• Chartreuse (Beta). Prince Campbell covers internet media properties, including social software, blogging, podcasting, videocasting and related technologies. He’s a tremendously creative thinker; his latest project is to sponsor (with $1000 of his own money plus sponsorships) a team of two to travel to New Orleans to investigate the current situation there.

What are you reading?

Anyway, following is my list of steps to take to improve Wordpress performance:

• Optimize your MySQL database. With time, database performance can degrade. Cleaning things up on MySQL isn’t hard–WebKeyDesign has a good guide (just make sure to have a backup in case things go wrong). In addition, I’ve found that dropping unused or unnecessary MySQL tables (especially if they are large) can make a huge difference.
• Turn off plugins one by one to see if any create performance issues. Certain plugins, such as those that only affect admin views, have no noticeable performance impact on visitors. Other plugins, particularly those that modify a post’s content or access the MySQL database in an inefficient way, can slow things down more dramatically. The best way to tell if any plugins are problematic is to go through each individually and see if performance improves after deactivation.
• Remove any external services one by one to see if any create performance issues. Just as plugins can run slowly, some external services run like molasses. Google Analytics, in particular, was a problem for me. The data was great, but it wasn’t worth an incremental ~10 seconds of load time. It’s gone for now.
• Install a caching plugin. Wordpress 2.x comes with some built-in caching, but I’ve found that the wp-cache 2.0 plugin makes a big performance difference. Recommended. Incidentally, wp-cache can also help your site stay up if you are lucky enough to experience the Digg or Slashdot effect.
• Check your web server and switch, if appropriate. As writted about earlier, I was frustrated with my old host because my site’s load times varied tremendously–the same page on the same day (with the same template and plugins) could take anywhere from 5 to 60+ seconds to load. Despite multiple calls and emails, the old host’s support team was unable to determine why performance fluctuated so much. In response, I switched hosts–and have been very happy with the results. Load times are consistently much shorter. If you’re interested in a new host, read here for more info.

Any other tips or ideas?

If you use Wordpress and are considering a move of your own, Podz has a good how to guide.

They’re off to an impressive start. Take a look at these Alexa stats, keeping in mind that Boing Boing, which has been running strong for years, is #1 on Technorati’s list of popular blogs (the service now claims to track 27.3 million blogs). Gawker is #20. TechCrunch, which is read religiously by just about everyone interested in new internet applications, is #44 (A Venture Forth is hanging in at #3,570).

Valleywag launched just last month. Looks like people want their Silicon Valley gossip.

But blogs have nothing on MySpace…

One could argue that both Technorati’s popularity index and Alexa’s traffic charts are flawed. Even if so, it looks like Denton has a winner. By the way, Valleywag’s actual traffic stats are public, so take a look for yourself.

Update: Fred Wilson doesn’t like Valleywag.

In any case, take a look; if there are other blogs I should be tracking, please let me know.

Update: I just realized that the list I sent is missing a number of the blogs I track. I need to eat dinner so will fix it later…

For what it’s worth, the upgrade won’t result in many obvious changes to the site’s front-end (ie interface and layout will stay the same); it’s mostly a reworking of the underlying infrastructure. More details can be found here.