Category Archives: Web

Yesterday, Salvatore released version 1.0 of redis.  I thought now might be a good time to publish an update on how our redis installation is going.

This is an incredible tool (toy?) I just happened to stumble across: http://www.wordle.net/

Mediawiki uses MySQL’s full-text searching capabilities for its searching.  I’ve always been irritated that I can’t search for a three-letter word, like “nfs”.  It turns out that this is due to a default configuration in MySQL.  In this article, I’ll try to pull together various tips I’ve seen around the Web for enabling searches for […]

Recently, we were interested in measuring how many users allow third-party cookies.  While we were at it, we figured we might as well measure how many would accept first-party cookies and how many would run javascript.  We got some interesting numbers that I think are worth sharing.  WRAL.com has a 50% market penetration in the […]

I just had to tell the world about this sweet new database system.  redis is a non-volatile key-value database with speeds comparable to memcached.  For the right types of applications, it’s just perfect.

If you’re like me, you already know that there are 86400 seconds in a day.  Using UNIX timestamps, it’s fairly common to use this fact to move a clock forward or back by a day.  Just be careful to do it safely.

Like many other organizations, we’ve struggled to manage the bandwidth costs of serving a popular Web site.  Once you slice off extraneous images, trim up your CSS and external Javascript, and get control of your cache policies, you’re left with one thing: the size of your HTML documents. This article will give you a new […]

I spent a lot of time looking for a good (and, I’ll admit it, free) comment solution for smorgasbork.com.  The best I found was ChronoComments from ChronoEngine.  I like the wide array of configuration options that it provides, and the layout/presentation is very clean and works well with my site’s template.  One thing that isn’t […]

I have always prided myself on being savvy enough when browsing the web to avoid things like viruses and other malware. I’m not so confident anymore, after I got hit with the triple cocktail of Virtumonde, Smitfraud, and Worm/Downadup. The first sign of trouble was when Firefox started randomly opening unrequested web sites.  It turns […]

I have the pleasure of managing the technology side of a fairly large-scale Web site for a traditional media company.  We do somewhere around 2.7 million pageviews on a normal day, and as many as 7 or 8 million on a busy day. Obviously, with traffic levels like this, optimizing our bandwidth usage is critical.  […]