Coding | featured news

About a year ago, I decided to add an autorefresh to pages that contain feeds so that content would always stay fresh. I set it to autofresh every 3 minutes. I could have been done this via ajax, but my ajax kung fu wasn’t good enough then (or now). I went with the easiest method, which is a simple meta tag addition to those pages. I got the idea from Drudge Report.

It was fine for about a year until the week of the Panda Update 2.2, when all pages with the autorefresh would give the Googlebot errors and not get indexed.

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.

I’m working on a new site using Drupal on a LAMP environment. One of the things I want to install is APC - Alternative PHP Cache - for opcode caching. When I did it with Wopular, I’ve noticed the effects immediately. Because the site crashed so often before using APC, I had to have a script to automatically reboot the server, fixed db errors, and reload the site whenever server resources are used up. It works, but sometimes I would end up with a corrupt database and had to spend hours to days fixing it or restoring it from a backup.

I've integrated Facebook's Like Button and Like Box to Wopular's homepage and subpages. I don't think they're effective traffic drivers, but did it just to cover my bases; I think, in general, that's true for most small to medium sized sites. They're pretty easy to integrate.

In my continued efforts to make the site run faster, I’ve set my sights on query caching on MySQL. I think query caching is turned on by default when you install MySQL. At least for me, I didn’t have to do anything. I notice it’s been working because whenever I run a query a second time, it’s always significantly faster.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

Dropbox has became an indispensable web development tool for me. It lets you share and sync files across multiple computers - your desktop, laptop, and netbook. It also keeps a history of your edits, like google docs. I use it as a poor man's svn to keep track of my edits to pages on Wopular, in addition to syncing design comps, and to-do lists. Since I already use my HD2 to pick stores to feature on the site, I thought wouldn't it be nice if I could also do some coding with it.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I've started working for BookTeller.com, a website that offers animated children's books with voice-over narration for a monthly subscription fee. It's a great educational tool for parents and teachers to teach kids how to read.

FireFox 3.6 is officially released today. After 3.5's browser freezing problems which caused me to downgrade to 3.0, I was kinda reluctant to upgrade. I did it anyway, and to my surprise, it was as advertised.