Karmona Pragmatic Blog

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 – Carmen (named in honor of the jazz vocalist Carmen McRae) in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.9 Highlights

* Global undo/”trash” feature
* Built-in image editor
* Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
* Easier video embeds
* Over 500 tickets, bugs and enhancements

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.8 in less than 3 minutes…

WordPress 2.8 Highlights

* Speed!!!
* Theme Browser and Installer
* Ability to add Custom Headers
* New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new Widgets API
* New ways to customize dashboard widgets
* Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
* Configurable Views on Management Pages
* Faster Loading Admin Pages

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people who are worst at a task show the most illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average (e.g. “shut up I hack you“ :)

Justin Kruger & David Dunning have tested and verified the following predictions:

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own ability and performance 
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others (it takes one to know one ;)
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy (“One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled”)
• If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill (There is still some hope)

Do you have the confidence that this post isn’t about you? 

Think again… (!!!) - “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (Charles Darwin)

Do you think this post is about you?

Might be considered vain but interesting enough, the same research have shown that the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers (see chart below). 

So… if you find this post boring, obscure, stupid, annoying, poorly written or inappropriate than please keep in mind it isn’t something I have committed knowingly.

Last weekend I was wasting time on my Blog performance and all I got is 10 sec. and this lousy post.

Quick profiling with FireBug and YSlow FireFox extensions have done great wonders with my amazingly slow, not-really-that-interesting, hosted (webhost4life) WordPress blog.

Main action items:

• I have removed the sitemeter performance penalty widget
• I have installed the WordPress Super Cache Plug-in which wasn’t that simple with my webhost4life hosting limitations.
• I have removed couple of images and reduce the blog top image size from 80k to 5k (!!!)

Results:

• Main blog page returns after ~1 sec.
• I am still getting a lousy grade with the YSlow tests (62) but it seems like the YSlow blog post announcement have failed too… (57 :)
• Post pages are still slow (~2-4 sec.) but I know what I have to do the next time more than 1 million readers will complain…

Have fun!

I am very “proud” to introduce the ultimate geek widget: Base 64 Encode / Decode Online Widget

Q. Where can I see this dark magic?

A. Here… :)

Q. How can I add this cool Base64 widget to my blog?

A. Simply copy-paste this little script:
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<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://blog.karmona.com/base64widget.js” ></script>

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Q. Does this blog widget support ALL blog platforms?

A. Sure… (including dasBlog :)

Please contact me if you have any issues / questions / suggestions,

Have fun!