I’m Mike

If you’re anything like me, you spend far too much time checking your web server stats, and not enough time actually creating content and coding. Thankfully, my logs are always close at hand since I work almost exclusively on the command line. With the help of a few common unix filters, you can quickly gauge how things are going on your site. These commands work with Apache, or Apache compatible log files, and can probably be tweaked to work with other log file formats pretty easily. Read the rest of this entry »

IBM Developer Works just posted a new article discussing a variety of “lightweight” Web Servers. They analyze a number of servers across a variety of dimensions including performance, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The article explains that “while it’s reasonable to assume the market leaders have been carefully optimized to be effectively unbeatable in performance (for example), many tiny competitors are faster for simple service of static Web pages.” This is in line with the results I found when I ran a comparison between longtime stalwart Apache and lightweight newcomer lighttpd. Read the rest of this entry »

John Resig, a programmer working for the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library spent last weekend putting together a server-side browser/DOM environment that he’s released on his blog. The application, written entirely in JavaScript, runs on top of Mozilla’s open source JavaScript implementation called Rhino. Read the rest of this entry »

Pownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends.” It’s a one-to-many “social messaging” application like Twitter, but it packs a bunch of additional features (full review). Backed by Digg.com founder and web wunderkind Kevin Rose, Pownce is a high visibility project with a good chance of success. The site held up fairly well to a barrage of traffic after its launch, which made me wonder what makes it tick. Lead developer Leah Culver was kind enough to answer some questions via email. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rather ironic that, while search is nearly ubiquitous on the web, there is no perfect solution for adding search functionality to a web application. Many developers simply use the basic search functionality built into whatever database server they’re using. Until recently, systems that required a more feature-rich, efficient, or flexible search solution had to turn to proprietary commercial software. But this is no longer the case. Apache’s Lucene project has brought the open source community a sophisticated and flexible search solution that rivals most commercial packages. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Google announced Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets web applications work offline (though I think there are more interesting ways to use the platform). Lots of blogs have picked up the story, including TechCrunch, Mashable, and lifehacker. But most simply regurgitate information from Google’s official press release. They don’t explain how the platform works at all.

I’ve spent the morning reading over the Gears documentation, and working through some sample applications. Here are my notes. I’m hoping they’ll provide enough of an overview to get started with Gears without wading through dozens of pages of documentation yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Many modern web applications utilize XML and XHTML. But developers often fail to realize the full potential of these standards. XSLT is a powerful technology that can be used to transform XML documents into something else (like XHTML, CSS, or SQL). This post will briefly introduce XSLT and perform some simple transformations to an XHTML document. Read the rest of this entry »

Is lighttpd faster than Apache? Can Wordpress handle high traffic websites? Rumors spread like wildfire on the web, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the truth from evangelism and clever marketing. Today I’m going to put Wordpress to the test, running under Apache and lighttpd, and see if a clear winner emerges. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first in a two part series where I’ll be describing how to load test a web server. In this post I’ll go over some basic load testing concepts and get everything up and running. In the next post I’ll compare the performance of two popular web servers (Apache and lighttpd) running a popular content management system (Wordpress) and explore how performance can be improved. Read the rest of this entry »

A Google Gadget is a small XML file that generates a widget on a Google Personalized Homepage. Google has excellent documentation describing how to make a Gadget, but it’s so verbose that it hides just how simple it is to make your own Gadget, especially if you already have a widget or feed on your website that you’d like to Gadgetize (TM). It’s really, really easy! And it can generate a ton of traffic for your site.

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