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 »
I was cleaning out some files on my PC and came across a paper that I wrote for a philosophy class a few semesters ago. Not surprisingly, the philosophers I read had difficulty finding moral justification for our current Intellectual Property regime.
Briefly, the paper argues that Intellectual Property rights can only be justified as a “recipient rights.” A bearer of a recipient right is entitled to some reward, but it’s difficult to determine the form of the reward, or who the duty-bearer is (e.g. who should pay them). Since IP can’t be justified as anything but a recipient right, it is unethical for right-bearers (IP owners) to demand retribution from a particular individual. Thus I, as an individual, do not owe the RIAA anything. If I download an MP3 they cannot ethically demand payment from me (by suing me, for example).
You can download the paper here [HTML Version].
In this post I’m going to describe how I got Alex King’s popularity contest Wordpress plugin to work with WP-Cache2. If you’re not interested in how it works, you can skip reading the article and just download my modified version of popularity-contest.php [pretty-printed version] that you can put in your plugins/popularity-contest directory replacing the original file. Make sure you delete your old cache files after installing it to get things working right away.
Update: Make sure you check that your feeds still work after the plugin is enabled. The PHP engine may try to interpret the XML declaration at the top of the file, causing a scripting error. If this happens you can tell WP-Cache not to cache your feed by adding /feed (or something else that matches your feed’s URL) to the list do not cache list under the WP-Cache options. If you really need your feeds cached, you could add some logic to popularity-contest.php to fix the problem.
I do a lot of web development work, which usually doesn’t require a lot of knowledge of low-level networking details. But from time to time it becomes necessary to work below the HTTP protocol, to debug a broken remote procedure call, or reverse engineer a third party ajax app. These tools make many low-level networking tasks a breeze. These are all command line utilities, by the way, since that’s where I’m most comfortable.
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I’ve been looking for a way to easily monitor stories from my website that appear on digg.com so that I can prepare if a story looks like it might reach the front page. My first solution was to simply subscribe to the RSS search results feed for my domain. Doing this is pretty simple: search for your domain using digg’s search utility, specifying “URL only” as the search criteria. Then subscribe to the RSS feed on the results page.
I’ve added the resulting RSS feed to my Google homepage, which allows me to keep tabs on upcoming stories from my site. But there are two problems with this method: it doesn’t tell you how many diggs stories have, and Google caches the feed results so you’re looking at old data.
After my recent foray into google gadgets I realized that a simple google gadget could solve both problems, so I wrote one. It’s based on the official Digg gadget with one additional option — monitoring stories for a specific website. If you want to try it out, you can click here to add it to your google homepage.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on the Vino2Vino development blog about a digg widget that displayed your friends’ digg activity on your blog. I wrote the widget in response to a request by another digg user. If you didn’t read the original post, the widget displays a list of articles recently dugg by your friends. As I said in the original post, the code was a simple proof of concept, but it drew a lot of attention and a lot of criticism.
The complaints were all pretty accurate (no built-in caching, scraping data instead of using RSS, poor styling, etc.), and I promised to address them in a future release of the widget. So here it is — DiggFriends 0.02 Beta. You can see a working example of the new version in the sidebar here on my blog.
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.
RobotReplay just launched tonight at the Web2.0 Expo. It lets you record your users’ browsing sessions and play them back later - they call it ‘cinelytics’. Membership is open to the public (unlike some similar services) and can be setup in seconds by adding a single script tag to your site’s HTML.
read more | digg story
Streaming video from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco… until my laptop battery runs out.
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