Thanks to everyone who attended my talk this morning at Wordcamp Toronto! Here are the slides, although they are light on textual content. I’ve added some scalability resources and links for more information below.

Not many sites need an infrastructure like this, but it’s important to have a roadmap in mind and stay one step ahead of your growth.

Caching:
WP Super Cache
WP Cache
Batcache with memcached

WordPress Codex Resources:
WordPress Optimization
High traffic tips for WordPress

Web Server Software with load balancing:
nginx
Pound

Splitting DB Reads and Writes in WordPress:
hyperdb

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URL: http://www.joetek.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/joetek
Facebook:  http://facebook.com/joetek
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/joetek

Yesterday, we at b5media launched the third of our unique look at the blogs within our channels.  Splendicity is a new portal which pulls content from over 70 Beauty & Style blogs within the network, and pulls it all into a customized WordPress instance.  This follows on the launch of Bizzia last week to highlight our Business content, and Starked which highlights our Entertainment and Music blogs.  Yes, it’s been a busy month on the team!

Adding in some custom plugins built by Mike Schinkel, and a slick theme created by Todd Henwood and Bill Erickson, we’ve created a really cool site with all of the features you would expect from a mainstream site.  The best part about it, is that it’s all built on top of a WordPress base.  Taking advantage of the ability to extend the WordPress code using plugins and custom themes, we’ve created the ability for the editors to pull the best content from the blogs within those channels and present it in a way that can drive traffic and create a more mainstream audience.

That is the next great frontier for WordPress.  In the coming weeks, WordPress 2.7 will be released which is a huge refinement of an already robust product.  With this release, WordPress graduates from the realm of the geeky blogger, into a mainstream content tool. 

When sites like these portals, or mainstream news and magazine sites like my last project, Green Living Online, have the tools the WordPress provides, anything is possible!  When I look back on some of the large media sites I have built in the past (like TSN and DiscoveryChannel), there aren’t many (any?) features needed that couldn’t be provided within WordPress. 

I’m not suggesting that the folks at CTV should be rebuilding their tools from scratch, but for people out there looking to create competing products, you’d be hard-pressed to find a tool that provides all of the functionality, and the support community that is found here.

We’ve heard how todays economy affects Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-pack, but what about JoeTek?

This economic downturn has been compared to the Great Depression in the 1930′s, but the technology sector as we know it today wasn’t around at that time.  The dot-com bubble bursting 8 years ago was more of an indicator for how things will shape up for us in the coming months and years.

Economic cycles are to be expected.  They are typically a good thing for our industry – a filtering, a culling of the herd.  The weakest are taken out of the picture, so that the strong can thrive on the other side.  The problem is that some really good companies will not make it, and some really bad companies will. 

We are certainly not as vulnerable as we were in 2000.  We haven’t had the crazy IPOs and unrealistic valuations that plagued us in the 1990′s.  In fact, the big drivers of technology growth in the past 8 years were born out of the last recession – blogging, social media… The poster-children of tech today were all conceived during the last downturn, and grew through venture instead of going public.  We’ve learned from our mistakes in the 90′s and protected ourselves in advance.

The bottom line is that the technology industry depends on the health of the economy as a whole.  The hardware and software industries rely on the banks, manufacturers and big business to buy and upgrade thousands of PC’s on a regular basis.  The web industry depends on advertising dollars from traditional businesses to sustain itself. 

Without health in the overall economy, the tech industry will suffer.  When non-tech businesses are faced with tightening budgets, web marketing, advertising and capital expenditures for upgrades are among the most vulnerable for cuts.

So what should tech companies do in the face of decreasing budgets all around?  In the absence of client business, if you’ve got resources on the bench, now is the time to innovate. 

In the last downturn, web developers with too much time on their hands invented blogging, social networking, and ajax.  They turned static web pages into tools that have been used to connect people and change how we are productive.  YouTube launched.  Facebook connected people.  Even Google hit their stride and overturned the industry by launching AdSense and AdWords during the downturn. 

So, what will you invent as the economy crashes this time?

Those annoying telemarketing calls are almost a thing of the past! Canada has adopted a Do Not Call registry so that you can tell those companies that you don’t appreciate recieving random calls everyday!

The main registry
You can add your number to the registry at the Canadian Government National Do Not Call List website. It only takes a minute or so, but it will take up to 31 days for it to take effect.

The exceptions
It has some important exceptions though. First, any company you have done business with in the past 18 months are allowed to contact you. There’s not a lot you can do about those.

The other major exceptions are that Canadian Registered Charities, political parties, or candidates are still allowed to solicit donations, and Newspapers may call you to sell a subscription. (I get the charity angle, but why the exemption for newspapers?)

Michael Geist has found the solution here though. These organizations do not have to honour the national registry, but they do have to remove your name if you specifically ask them to do so. He’s created iOptOut which allows you to put your name in once, and mass mail all of the major organizations that are exempt from the national list in one go!

Combine these two sites, and you should be annoyance free!

The last year and a half has been a wonderfully exciting and eye-opening experience into the world of “Green”. When Green Living Enterprises realized that they had an opportunity to have a real content-rich website instead of their “About Us” site, they jumped on it with both feet. The Green Living Online team was able to design and launch this new site in a short 2 months, by using a WordPress backend, and the site has grown in leaps and bounds ever since.

During that time, I found myself surrounded by some of the most driven and passionate people I have known. Margaret, Kim, Lee, Chris, Christine, Vel, and the rest of the gang, it has been a blast working with you! I’m expecting some big things out of you guys, and I’ll certainly be watching!

But now, the time has come for me to move on. So what’s next for me?

In the next few weeks, I’ll be joining b5media, a global network of 340 professional blogs, covering diverse topics such as TV shows and Business, and everything in between. They are looking to continue to grow quickly, although they are currently hitting over 10 million uniques per month. I’ll get to work with some of the best minds in the blogging world, and build the business along with them. This is a really cool opportunity with a great team!

To the gang at Green Living, I’m really going to miss working with you. To the gang at b5media, I can’t wait to dive in!

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen some up to date traffic numbers from TSN.ca, but as they rolled out their new look and feel, they released some of their numbers.

Today, TSN.ca attracts an average of 4.9 million unique visitors and 90 million page views per month. This is more than double the monthly traffic of other English Canadian sports broadcasters’ websites.

Some of the highlights:

• 14.26 million page views represents the record for most page views in a single day (February 26, 2008 – NHL Trade Deadline Day)
• 1.9 million streams represents the record for most video streams served in a single day (January 5, 2007 – IIHF World Junior Championship gold medal game featuring Team Canada vs. Team Russia)
• 400,000 users are registered on TSN.ca
• 125,000 is the average number of user comments submitted to the ‘Your Call’ section each month
• 70,000 users receive TSN.ca’s morning email blast

Impressive stuff guys!

Alot of people were talking after last year’s timely visit from former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to the inaugural Green Living Show, about how we could top that. Well, I don’t know if you can compare, but this year’s special presentation will be former President (and hopeful First Husband) Bill Clinton.

His presentation, “Embracing our Common Humanity” is part of the William J. Clinton Foundation, and its Clinton Foundation Climate Initiative. Tickets go on sale this Saturday! I’ll be there!

Toshiba announced today that they would be discontinuing their production and support of the HD-DVD format, leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray format as the “winner”.

It’s nice to have the format war done so that the industry can move on… finally. The problem is that so many people have put off buying into either format, that now hi-def downloads are a real contender. In the process, both formats may have lost. I think High Definition downloads will soon eclipse sales of Blu-Ray discs and will be the method of choice for high definition content.

Although with the format war over, I suspect sales of the PlayStation3 will skyrocket. The PS3 is still the best Blu-Ray player out there.

Last week, after a long battle with Apple, Think Secret was shut down. Apple has been trying to muzzle the Apple rumour site for a while now, to stop them from publishing leaked reports of their upcoming products. Think Secret obviously has a “mole” on the inside, as most of their revelations are surprisingly accurate. It appears that Apple has succeeded. The site now simply shows a message that the site is being shut down as part of a settlement with Apple.

Fake Steve Jobs, is a blogger that is not affiliated with Apple, writing a blog from the Steve Jobs perspective. Kind of a neat idea, actually. He’s had a running commentary of his run-ins with Apple lawyers and claimed that they were trying to shut him down. Well, turns out it was a hoax, or fiction, or whatever you’d want to call it.

It worked. It got me checking out his site to see what would happen. My only complaint: when he did come clean, it was pretty lame. He had built a stage to talk about how big corporations swing their weight to silence the little guys. He had an audience that cared. All he could come up with is:

Yeah. It’s like that y’all. Sorry for any confusion, but it’s all a joke.

Lame.