Chameleon is a lightning fast drop-in replacement for the Zope Page Template system that Plone (and other Python applications) use.  By simply adding Chameleon to your Plone 4 buildout, you can immediately speed up your site by 20% or more, with zero code changes.

The homepage of a stock Plone 4.1rc3 instance yields 13.23 pages/sec on my laptop test environment[1].  With Chameleon added to the buildout, it jumps to 15.94 pages/sec.  That’s a 15% increase.  Not too shabby!  In the real world, where your page templates are doing considerably more work, you should see an even bigger boost.

Malthe’s been brewing this up for a while now, and it’s great to see it cross over into “ready for everyday production use.”  Give it a try!  Malthe’s taking bug reports if you run into any hiccups.

[1] 2GHz MacBook, 2GB RAM, Plone 4.1rc3 via svn, no proxy caching.  ab -n 20 -c 3, average of 10 runs

The staff at Cook Inkeeper dreamed up this “engagement superpower” in the course of living and working in, on and around the waters of Cook Inlet.  In Alaska, the weather is big, just like everything else.  And so are the tides.  And while there’s a ton of information about the weather and tides available online, it’s pretty scattered across different sites, and there’s no “single source” that pulls together all of the “must have” information for Cook Inlet residents.  That’s where we came in.

Inletkeeper staffer Michael Sharp, himself an avid sailor and surfer (when he’s not rocking campaign & communications strategy), identified the various sources for terrestrial and marine weather forecasts and current conditions data, and showed us a really cool iPhone app for generating tide predictions.   We took a look at the data sources–yep, all easy-to-parse RSS and XML.  And even better, it turned out that the tide prediction software underneath the iPhone app was open-source!

A few hours of development time later, my colleagues Matt Yoder and Ryan Foster had a slick, open-source and open-data powered “Weather and Tides” page for the new inletkeeper.org.  Then Cook Inletkeeper asked “Hey, can you make it work great on the iPhone, too?”  Matt got his mobile-fu on, and managed to “mobilize” the page with a few clever bits of CSS and Javascript.  No custom app required, this is all straight-up HTML.  I particularly like the way you can “swipe” to move between panels.  It’s hard to tell this isn’t a native iPhone app.

A few other nice details we managed to work in:

• The tide graph also includes a perpetual tide table, formatted to look just like Cook Inletkeeeper’s popular print tide tables booklet.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can point-and-click to edit the list of weather and tide stations shown.
• The page uses cookies to automatically remember your customized settings.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can automatically “hot-link” to custom settings, great for customized email marketing outreach.
• “Recommend on Facebook” button

One of the things I will miss most about Groundwire is the thrill of being able to help conceive and create fun, effective tools like that help environmental groups engage their audiences.

• Real-time simultaneous document editing (that’s right, just like Google Docs!)
• Instant messaging/status updates between Plone users (think Twitter or Yammer)

Yiorgis has a great little video that shows this in action. Pretty magical.

In addition to the obvious function of providing a quick and easy way to track how many pieces of content you’ve got in your site, being able to quickly click through any number to get a list of the matching content objects is a tremendous simple way for site managers to zero in on draft content that might have gotten abandoned before being published, or old, retracted content that is ripe for deletion.

We’re already using it on Groundwire.org, and I’m looking forward to rolling it out to Groundwire clients.  Thanks, Raphael!

I can’t wait to see what folks will be able to accomplish with Diazo.

Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design & Construction — the greenest commercial building in the world, currently in planning by our friends at the Bullitt Foundation.

Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust – leading and inspiring action to conserve and enhance the landscape from Seattle across the Cascade Mountains to Central Washington, ensuring a long-term balance between people and nature.

Harvesting Clean Energy –  a program of Climate Solutions, that helps accelerate rural economic development in the Northwest through clean energy development.

It’s great to be able to work with folks getting the good work done.

I’ll be starting a Masters in Public Administration at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs this September.  I’ll wrap up my work at Groundwire in June and take the summer off to be a full-time dad to Everett and to enjoy summer in Seattle through the eyes of a fifteen-month-old.

I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be a part of Groundwire over the past decade and a half.  I’ve learned a ton, worked for hundreds of amazing, inspiring environmental organizations and have been blessed with the most kick-ass colleagues and co-conspirators this side of anywhere.  I am more grateful to all of you (past and present) than I can ever adequately express.  Thank you.

I won’t be going too far away.  We’re staying here in Seattle.  I’ll continue to serve on the boards of the Plone Foundation and Green Media Toolshed.  It’s possible I’ll add a consulting gig or two to my plate once I get a handle on my academic workload.

While there’s no denying that this feels like the end of a huge chapter in my life, it also feels like a new beginning.  I’m really excited to plunge into the unknown and into what I hope will be a period of creative uncertainty.  While I don’t know what the next chapters looks like, I’m confident that they will remix familiar themes: public service, social change, openness, systems thinking, data-driven decision-making and smart use of technology.

Watch this space for further updates.  Be seeing you.

For the past couple of years, I’ve had this blog on a 256MB VPS slice at Rackspace Cloud, which, overall, has been a very nice ~$12/month experience.  But I’ve chafed a bit at having to restart my Apache web server instance every so often, because it has run out of RAM.  I’m just running a personal blog, goshdarnit.  How can that burn up 256MB of RAM!?!? Turns out the culprit is Apache.  Or, more accurately, the combination of Apache + PHP.  PHP prevents Apache from running in its more memory-efficient “worker” configuration, and the result is that even a site with almost no traffic can easily run out of memory.  Worse, tuning Apache to keep memory usage low means that it starts to perform really poorly.  Bottom line: it’s actually really hard to run a simple WordPress (or other PHP apps) behind Apache on a virtual private server with limited memory.

I’d been casting about for a solution, and had almost settled on using Ngnix, the increasingly popular open-source web server that lots of my friends in the Plone community really love.  But, truth be told, I was a bit intimidated by configuring it to work with PHP, even though it’s far simpler than Apache (which I also barely understand).

Then, David Bain turned me on to Cherokee.  Cherokee is a new-ish open-source web server that is designed to combine the speed of Ngnix with insane ease of configuration + deployment via a user-friendly point-and-click web administration panel.  And, sure enough, it didn’t disappoint.  In about an hour, I was able to install Cherokee, configure PHP, point Cherokee at my WordPress instance, and migrate a few rewrite rules to handle my WordPress shortlinks.

My site is now cranking out over 100 pages/second while RAM usage is well under the maximum and we’re never swapping into virtual memory. Suddenly, the WordPress editing interface feels reasonably responsive.  Vroom!

Looking into the future, I’m pretty excited about the potential to easily deploy Plone behind Cherokee.  Cherokee has built-in, easy-to-configure uWSGI support, which means that we’ll be able to start messing with Plone 4.1 + Cherokee.  (Plone 4.1 will ship with Zope 2.13, which is the first Zope 2 release to ship with unofficial WSGI support.)  This will remain “experimental” for a release or two, until the community’s had time to explore & document best practices.