ProjectX Blog

Congrats to Eurekster securing $US5.5M in a Series B round of funding.

Here’s what Steve Marder says in the Press release:

“Not only are we thrilled with global investors TVP and Transcosmos joining the Eurekster family but this transaction marks the next phase of accelerating our leadership in the social search and vertical search areas. With their support, we will more aggressively deliver on our vision for social search driving brand reinforcement, user engagement and improved targeting all to the benefit of web publishers, end users and advertisers.”

Congratulations to Silverstripe for being accepted in Google Summer of Code!

They had a fantastic plug from Chris Di Bona.

“I feel SilverStripe is a great example of a well-constructed open source project. It makes innovative use of technology but it is easy to use, which is just as important for open source, so it is a good candidate for Google to support. With so much going on in the web- development arena, it will be easy for Summer of Code developers to contribute, and with the mentors having helped students in the past, we were happy to trust SilverStripe to be the first New Zealand organisation involved.”

— Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.

So, if you’re a student and looking to work on kick ass project with some serious cool people AND getting paid by Google. Check out Silverstripe’s projects and apply to the Google Summer of Code.

I subscribe to a RSS feed that shows me how ZoomIn hits the blogsphere. I discovered today that someone is using copied ZoomIn content to seed their link farm. At first I thought someone liked our site and wrote about here and here.

On closer inspection, I noticed that it contained a “cut and paste” of our “About Us” text . And they took time to include pictures ????

Arrrgghhh!!! Why why why???

Here are the slides from my talk this afternoon.

Here’s a tip on how to turn on HTTPD compression on your php site.

Option 1) Edit your php.ini file

; Transparent output compression using the zlib library
; Valid values for this option are 'off', 'on', or a specific buffer size
; to be used for compression (default is 4KB)
; Note: Resulting chunk size may vary due to nature of compression. PHP
;       outputs chunks that are few handreds bytes each as a result of compression.
;       If you want larger chunk size for better performence, enable output_buffering
;       also.
; Note: output_handler must be empty if this is set 'On' !!!!
;       Instead you must use zlib.output_handler.
zlib.output_compression = On

Option 2) If you haven’t got access to the php.ini file. Create this .htaccess file to your home directory to turn on compression.

AddType application/x-httpd-php php .htm .html
php_flag zlib.output_compression on

I’m speaking at the WDANZ conference tomorrow. I’m speaking about two things close to my heart – “ZoomIn” and “Optimising websites for Speed”.

I look forward to meeting web developers from all over the Canterbury region.

Our blog is now using Mephisto (0.7.2). I had a few problems getting the conversion to behave. I have tested the comments and everything seems to be working fine.

For those that are interested, I had a few issues converting our blog from Typo. Here are some tips on how to convert it.

• The typo conversion does not import the sections / categories. I had to add the categories manually and re-allocate all the articles to the categories.
• All of the user were converted, but the admin user was allocated to all the articles.
• The layout system can be a bit of a pain, especially working on the home page. Some times you need to delete the index.html to see the changes.
• The wiki is ok as a resource, the google group is better.
• Here is a snippet of our layout.liquid template that contains code for the sidebar to display monthly archive, category archive and last 5 comments.

Recent Comments

{{ site | latest_comments:5 | assign_to:"comments" }}

{% for comment in comments %}
• {{ comment.author }} on {{comment | link_to_article: article.comment }}

{% endfor %}

Categories

{% for section in site.sections %}
• {{ section.name }} ({{section.articles_count }})

{% endfor %}

{% endif %}


My patience with Typo has run out, it has some crazy javascript bugs and its development activity seems to have slowed. I’m moving across to mephisto software which seems to be behave much better than Typo. The transfer should be completed in a couple of days.

Does anyone have any good / bad experiences with mephisto ?

IE 7.0 has already over taken total firefox usage. How soon before it passes IE 6?

Browser stats: 9/02/07

Browser stats: 5/11/06

Browser stats 19/10/06

The guys from misshapenfeatures have created a movie that highlights the foo camp experience.

Enjoy!

I thought I’d do a write up on one of the technical sessions at Foo Camp, Artur Bergman’s of Sixapart fame on “How to run big f**king websites”. Being a system admin / network architect in a previous life, I found it very very interesting. As you know from my previous articles, I’m obsessed with website optimisation and make webpages faster.

Background

Sixapart run a number of large scale websites, typepad, movabletype, vox and livejournal. Artur provided some stats on livejournal to give us an idea of how big these site are. eg. There are 2,000,000 Typepad users and at any given instant there are about 500,000 people reading LiveJournal, with 100,00 to 200,000 live http connections!

How do they do it ?

One of the key concepts that Artur talked about was using software to manage application and operating redundancy. (Chris Di Bona also confirmed that they use software to manage redundancy at Google). Artur didn’t pull an punches, he slammed nearly every hardware manufacturer, raid system and file system. The problem as they have experienced is that all hardware or software drivers fail at one time or another. Why should they waste money on buying more expensive kit ? Does price really contribute to reliability? For SixApart, it has been better for them to buy cheap hardware ie machines, memory, hard drives etc. and solve reliability and redundancy via software.

Software Tools

Arthur spoke a lot about four tools that they have developed to help run their sites and keep them fast!

Memcache is a distributed memory cache that reduces hits to your database. (I have it on good authority that Yahoo and Google are heavily using memcache to speed up their sites.) Memcache stores “objects” in memory for access within your application, thus with some smart design you can dramatically reduce the number of hits on the database. Arthur warned that memcache does require a little bit of care when managing the expiry of your cache objects.

MogileFS is a distributed filesystem. MogileFS is flexible ie. it requires no kernel extensions and it is filesystem agnostic and it provides “better than raid” as it manages the distribution of files not only across disks but also machines. In this way it has been designed so that there is no single point of failure.

Perlbal is a Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server. Perlbal can be used to manage http connections among servers. It can act as a webserver or a reverse proxy. They have built in the smarts so that Perlbal can handle resuming downloads and connecting to another backend servers if one stream fails.

Gearman is a system to farm out work to other machines. It dispatches function calls to machines to do work in parallel and to load balance lots of function calls.

Wrap-up

It was an amazing talk to hear first hand what what worked and what didn’t and why they have developed the tools to make their site fast. The amazing thing is that Sixapart guys have released their software as open source for the benefit of the rest of us!