by jonathansoroko on February 8, 2011
There are two principal reasons for getting rid of the many saved incremental revisions of WordPress posts: compliance with your host’s terms of service, and in order to speed up the blog. It’s my understanding to that optimize speed, getting rid of excess files is only one of several necessary steps. A little bit of research let me to Better Delete Revision , a plugin which I’ve tested here and in two sandboxes with no problems, and a rapid clearing of hundreds of revisions.
There are 36 pages of plugins using the tag “revisions” in the WP Plugin Repository. Better Delete Revision seems best suited to catch up delayed maintenance; there are other plugins and WP solutions that ditch revisions at specified events (publication of post, after a certain number of days). But this works quite well; and taking a leaf from legal blogger Jeff Vail and medical writer/surgeon Atul Gawande I’m thinking about making a monthly or weekly maintenance checklist, and I think Better Delete Revision will be on that list.
Better Delete Revision comes from the site http://www.1e2.it – here’s the link to the plugin page – but be forewarned, it appears to be an Italian-only site. The plugin, however, seems to work fine on English post drafts.
by jonathansoroko on February 5, 2011
At Proof Branding, a really thoughtful, clever group of people use the metaphors of “proof” (as in scientific evidence), and “proof,” as in the measure of ethanol in a beverage containing ethanol – itself a metaphor and idiom indicating “strength” and “purity” – and some really beautiful graphics and text to make a great impression. Here’s the image that got me first (they’re on the list of recommended designers at DIYThemes, the home of the Thesis WP theme, which is sometimes the theme in use here, and also in use on some of my other WP installations):

Again – the laboratory glassware could be part of a scientific experiment – an informal distillery – or both. Ambiguity is fine as long as all of the meanings are intended.
The Proof Branding team also maintain a well-worth reading blog, have some pretty cool titles (see their “About” page), and manage to project a lot of confidence without a trace of pretension. Since I’ve spend most of my professional life nosing around fraudsters and con artists – one of my working hypotheses is that the fakers always hit one or both parts of that equation (confidence, pretension) with a false note.
We must note one disturbing tell-tale: like one other well-known designer who many suspect is actually just fronting for the actual work of his own dog – one of the named creative leaders at Proof Branding well, from the client’s point of view, it’s the work that matters, and any dog that good at site design – well, it’s hard to imagine a dog designing a website who didn’t want to.
Proof Branding’s portfolio – and every page on their site – will be well worth your time, and because it’s so good I can easily get a dozen blog posts out of it and look excellent merely by virtue of my good taste, I’m just going to close with a screen grab from their Services | “What We Do” page:
