My Nut Village: Photography & Homeschooling

Wow, so I thought that my wife and I maintained a packed schedule. And then I talked to Darren and Katy, proprietors of My Nut Village, and head of their blended, homeschooling family. Darren and Katy joined their families in 2004 and soon after started homeschooling — five children!

I was browsing Katy’s blog, part of the Mom Blog Network, and came across some gorgeous photo’s of Katy’s happy place. Thought you might like them.

 

Hexadecimal Web Colors

Hexadecimal notation is the most common method for designating color on a web site. A hexadecimal color code is a six digit number with a # (hash) symbol in front of the value. Computers use units of two to count, rather than base 10. Hex is base 16 or 2 to the power of 4.

In the six digit value, the first two numbers define red, the next two define green and the last two define blue. Each digit has 16 values, using numbers and letters 0-9 and A-F. A through F function as the numbers 11 through 16. Because each color is represented by a pair of base 16 numbers, there are 256 (16 x 16) possible values for each color. When you combine the values of the three colors there is a possibility of 16,777,216 (256 x 256 x 256) combinations of color.

For example, pure red is #FF0000, pure green is #00FF00 and pure blue is #0000FF.

At first it may seem difficult to determine what color you will get with different color codes. A simple solution to this is to remember that FF is the maximum and 00 is the minimum, and use one of the following codes for each component:

FF means full brightness
CC means 80 percent brightness
99 means 60 percent brightness
66 means 40 percent brightness
33 means 20 percent brightness
00 means none of this color component

Sometimes you will find hexadecimal numbers expressed using only three digits, such as #F32. This is an abbreviation for a color that has a pair for each of the three numbers. #F32 is the same as #FF3322.

You will also see web pages that use color names to describe a color that is being used. The W3C’s HTML 4.0 specifies only 16 standard color names: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. Most browsers today support more color names, but when specifying a color it is usually best to use a hexadecimal number as hexadecimal colors are supported by all browsers.

You should be aware that when viewing colors on a computer monitor, different monitors may display colors in very different tints. Neutral, earth-tone colors such as medium gray, tan and ivory can lead to even more unpredictable results on many computer monitors, and may even seem to change color on one monitor depending on the lighting conditions in the room and the time of day.

Practical Uses for RSS

Have I ever mentioned that I love RSS feeds? I’ve been experimenting more and more with them, and I’m finding them incredibly convenient for both producing and consuming information. And I’m not talking about blog RSS feeds, although they are of course the most popular use; I’m talking about other ways you can use RSS in personal life and in business.

How do you use RSS? That’s not rhetorical. Really, I’d like to know how you use RSS. What tools are you using, especially script-based tools used for publishing, consuming, or mashing up feeds (not readers or aggregators)?

Here are some practical examples of RSS at work:

Lifestream: we’ve all heard of FriendFeed and Twitter — I’ve been experimenting with a similar lifestream service just for friends and family. I can’t tell you how much more I know about people by getting these RSS alerts about what they’re doing. And because it’s a personal service, I’m getting more real-life entries, and not the polish or image conscious alerts that I get on Twitter.

Web site content: almost any web-based content can be transformed into an RSS feed. The only real requirement is that the information changes regularly.

Upcoming events: RSS is a great way to let people know of events and activities that may be happening soon. It’s easy to turn an “events” page into an RSS feed.

New Products: Got an online store with new inventory added regularly? Add details about your newly added items to an RSS feed to let people know what’s just come in.

Weekly/Monthly Specials: Do you regularly make special offers on different products in your inventory? Again, RSS is a great way to tell people what’s on special this week or this month.

Newsletters: If you regularly produce an email newsletter, then consider converting it to RSS format as well as continuing to email it.

New Links: If you have a links directory, considering creating an RSS feed of the new links added to your directory in the last week or so. If you have a category structure within that directory, with links added often, you can create a feed for each category.

New Members: Do you run a public membership site? Recently joined members could be listed in an RSS feed with links direct to their profiles.

Ticker RSS Feeds: Do you have timely information to communicate to your customers? Automate the process with software and RSS can feed new critical information on an hourly basis (or more frequently if needed).

Vacation feed: I wrote a WordPress plug-in that allows you to import friends’ RSS feeds into your blog. Set a start and end date and time, a post frequency, and a minimum post length, then head out of town for your holiday!

Build an affilate site: sign up for an affiliate site like Commission Junction or Share a Sale, apply to several vendor programs, and then grab their affiliate feed to publish in your blog. Add your own product reviews and posts, and you’ve got a convenient money maker. Or import several relevant feeds with the vacation feed plug-in and you’ve got an auto-pilot income source.

What other things are you using RSS for? Please share!

Protect Your Computer — It’s Easy

Okay, today’s post is a diversion from my normal subjects, but I just spent several hours helping a friend clean up his PC after it bogged down horribly. I was shocked at what I found. While most of this seems to be common knowledge, there are still far too many people whose computers are at risk. And that’s bad news for all of us! Because any weak link in the chain weakens the integrity of the internet as a whole and increases risk to other users near and far.

So here are a few simple steps that you must take to protect yourself, your computer, and the rest of the world.

1) Computer security is critical right from the moment you switch on your brand new computer, Ideally, buy a computer with pre-installed virus protection and a firewall. And buy a long-term subscription. Yes, you might be locked into a subscription that you won’t use, and maybe the software won’t be the top of the line out there, but it’s still less expensive and safer than renewing and upgrading every year. Especially considering just how problematic some anti-virus programs can be to upgrade. Don’t get me started.

2) If you don’t have anti-virus and anti-spyware installed from the start, install it yourself before connecting your computer to any public network. The difference between a computer virus and spyware is that a virus is a malicious piece of computer code that can be implanted on any computer and it can result in destruction of the file systems of your computer and can be transferred from one computer to another and spread like the biological virus. Spyware is a program that collects information about you without your knowledge or consent. Spyware does not spread like a virus, but is usually surreptitiously installed with other approved programs.

3) Keep your virus definitions up-to-date and keep your virus subscription active. Just turn it on — this is too easy not to do!

4) Always keep your software firewall on. Even better, get a router and plug your computer into that. Now you have a hardware firewall and a software firewall. A firewall is built into many security suites, and ships with the OS on most new computers. If you don’t have one, just grab yourself a free copy of Zone Alarm.

5) Keep your OS patched. For most of us, that just means turning on the automatic Windows Update feature.

6) Backup early, backup everything, backup often. Best way to backup? Partition your hard drive, and store all data on one drive, all applications on another drive. Setup a one-touch backup to an external drive. Store backups offsite with something Amazon’s S3 service.

7) Keep your passwords safe — i.e. don’t “sticky” them to your monitor; don’t use easy-to-guess passwords (did you see Patriot Games ); don’t use dictionary words; mix it up with upper and lowercase, letters, numbers, special characters, 8-10 characters long.

Protect your personal information. If you are asked to give out personal information like phone number, address, SSN, identification numbers etc. on the internet, use more caution. Find out exactly why and how they will be used. If there is a link in your email that asks you to login by clicking on the link, then don’t! Usually genuine emails don’t ask you to login directly by clicking a link in the email. If you want to login to your membership accounts, always open a new browser and then type the URL of the website (to login to Paypal account, type paypal.com on the new browser instead of clicking on the link from an email that is asking you to login.).

If you are giving out credit card information, then the page that accepts credit card information must have secure encryption. The URL usually begins with https instead of the regular http. If you right click and select properties, the Connection section should read something like 128 bit encryption (High) and also must have 1024 bit exchange.

Just do it. Computer safety is simple and requires very little time, but it does require some habit changes. But you’ll make me and millions of other netizens very happy.

Unlimited Hosting is a Myth. Sort of.

Five or so years ago and earlier, web hosting companies had very strictly defined hosting plans. Strict limits were placed on storage, bandwidth, e-mail accounts, databases — heck, many didn’t even offer databases unless you were on a business or development package.

But the tide slowly turned, and now it’s as common to see an unlimited hosting package as a limited one. Hosting is a fiercely competitive market, and many providers are now offering unlimited disk space, bandwidth, add-on domains, email accounts, MySQL databases, and more. But are they really unlimited? It seems I always inadvertently find a way to put them to the test!

Many hosting experts will argue that unlimited plans are nothing more than a marketing ploy, and that no hosting package can be truly unlimited. That’s an undeniable fact. Logic dictates that there must be a finite limit. Hosts can provide an expanding amount of hard disk space by chaining servers in a series (or a cloud, or several other ways). So when one disk reaches capacity, they simply add another drive or server. The same principle applies to bandwidth. When a hosting company’s bandwidth allowance is near capacity, they simply buy more from their provider. But all hosts will reach a point where there is no economic advantage to adding more space or bandwidth.

That’s why unlimited hosting is a myth, a marketing ploy. It’s only unlimited as long as the web hosting provider gains an economic benefit from calling the plan “unlimited.” Luckily for them, and the reason why the unlimited branding works, is that 99 percent of web sites use a tiny amount of server resources. The bulk of hosting customers overestimate their disk space and bandwidth needs. “When my site takes off . . .” I have had a shared account in the past where I shared a server with 1200 other web sites — and got incredibly snappy performance!

So that leaves is with the 1 percent of customers who actually use a large amount of resources. The bad apples, if you will. I’m a bad apple. Not intentionally, mind you, but inevitably one of my shared hosting sites begins consuming too many resources and I become a bad neighbor. Maybe it’s a traffic spike, a new script I’m testing out, who knows. Then I learn what “unlimited” really means. It generally means that my account is moved to a provisioning server while I sort out what is consuming the most resources. Then I move that site to one of my dedicated servers. Easy enough, but inconvenient, and certainly not “unlimited.”

Another issue I have with unlimited hosting is that while bandwidth might be unlimited, throughput is throttled. I was shocked the first time I placed a large file on an unlimited server for sharing. 30MB took over 8 minutes to download — conversely, the same file downloads in under a minute on a dedicated box.

So, if you are looking for an unlimited hosting package because you have many terabytes of data that you want to host, have an application that consumes a lot of CPU time, or require high throughput, then you would probably be better off using a dedicated server. But if that’s the case, I doubt you’re reading this article.

For the remaining 99% of customers who will not be an undue strain on a hosting company’s shared resources, then an unlimited package is worth considering because of all the other unlimited features you can use. For example, you may have many domains, each needing their own website. The individual websites probably won’t take up excessive disk space so your unlimited account won’t be suspended. Add-on domains are perfect for this. Maybe you want to setup several Wordpress blogs — go ahead, you have multiple MySQL databases available.

So unlimited hosting really isn’t unlimited. But it’s close enough for most of us.

Optimizing Server Performance, Part 3

Part 3 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This is part 3 in a series of posts covering server performance optimization. You should try to follow these tips in order; i.e. start at the top of post one and work you way through each post. If you’re coming here from anywhere other than Part 1 of this post, head there first before continuing on.

Most of the optimization tips presented herein will provide little incremental value. We’ve now reached the point of diminishing returns on our server tweaks.

Install Post Query Accelerator

Important: if you are using WordPress v2.1 or above, skip this step. This tweak is already contained in newer versions of WordPress.
The Post Query Accelerator plug-in improves your server’s perform-ance by ensuring that the MySQL query cache is able to cache query requests for posts.

1. Download the Post Query Accelerator plug-in.
2. Upload and extract it in your plug-ins folder.
3. Activate it in your WordPress administrative panel.

Edit Your Theme or Plug-ins

• Move comments to a separate page from your posts.
• Paginate comments.
• Optimize your plug-ins. Some are poorly written unfortu-nately.
• Optimize your themes: many themes query for information that is static in nature. If it’s static, it should be treated as such, and be hard-coded. Note that this tip would have a huge im-pact if we hadn’t already taken care of caching from the start.

Compress JavaScript and CSS

Use a CSS compressor to remove white space and comments. Try this one at Arantius, or the one at CSS Drive.

Use a JavaScript obfuscator to remove white space and comments, and shorten method and variable names. Or minify your code with jsMin. The space saved is a bit less than with obfuscation, but it could lead to fewer debugging problems down the road.

Place JavaScript at the Bottom of the Page

While a script is downloading, it will block downloading of other page components, even if those components are on different servers. Moving scripts to the bottom of the page alleviates this problem, but obviously not every script can or should be moved to the page bottom.

Additional Security

This is not an optimization technique. In fact, using this technique will hurt performance on your server (not for everyone; just for you when you are using your administrative panel). However, if you are beginning to receive high traffic, it might be a wise idea to harden the security on your WordPress installation.
The Admin SSL plug-in for WordPress will secure admin and login pages via SSL. You will need access to your own or a shared SSL certificate. Installation and usage instructions can be found on the developer’s site.

Use eAccelerator

“eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compil-ing is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.”

Tune your MySQL Database

MySQL performance tuning is a bit of a mystical art, and conflicting advice is common. Use these settings at your own risk, and only use them on a capable machine:

• connect_timeout = 5
• join_buffer_size = 1M
• key_buffer_size=64M
• max_allowed_packet = 16M
• max_connect_errors = 20
• max_connections = 500
• max_heap_table_size = 128M
• myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M
• read_buffer_size = 1M
• read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M
• query_cache_limit = 8M
• query_cache_size =128M
• query_cache_type = 1
• sort_buffer_size = 16M
• table_cache = 512
• thread_cache_size = 256
• tmp_table_size = 64M
• wait_timeout = 14400

Tune Apache

IBM’s developerWorks is always a great source of information, including this article on Apache tuning.

Conclusion

Preparing for an expected traffic spike or responding to a traffic spike is a great problem to have, and you’re in good company. I hope these tips get you our or keep you from getting into a jam. If you have any additional tips, please post in the comments. I’m all ears.

Part 3 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Optimizing Server Performance, Part 2

Part 2 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This is part 2 in a series of posts covering server performance optimization. You should try to follow these tips in order; i.e. start at the top of post one and work you way through each post. If you’re coming here from anywhere other than Part 1 of this post, head there first before continuing on.

Most of the tips in this section could be classified as incremental improvements. Taken by themselves, they each have a small impact on overall performance; whereas the previous chapter’s tips all have rather significant effects.

Use Feedburner

Your RSS feeds are a silent killer that could quietly be eating 20 to 40 percent of your bandwidth. RSS readers automatically pull the latest posts from your site and aggregate them for your subscribers. And they do this often and many times, inefficiently.

You can use a service like Feedburner to handle this traffic for you. A word of warning for established sites: you’ll need to redirect your existing subscribers (preferably, automatically and seamlessly) to your new feeds.

If you don’t want to entrust your RSS feed to a third party, another option is to serve your feeds from another server or hosting account.

Profile your Pages

If you use a profiler to look at what is required to be downloaded to run each of your blog pages, you might be surprised. You’ll see a mixture of scripts, stylesheets, images, and maybe Flash in the page. Yahoo! determined that 80 percent of the end-user response time is spent downloading these front-end components.

If you’re a Firefox user, download the Firebug extension and examine each of your blog pages. This is a great way to examine the effect of your plug-ins, images, styles, scripts, ads, and anything else you might be serving to the public.

If you don’t use Firefox, you can get a lite profile by using a web-based profiler.

Trim the fat!

Any static file can be offloaded to another server. Aside from images (mentioned above), you can also offload JavaScript, CSS, Flash, and other static files. Amazon S3, Steady Offload, and even another hosting account or server are all options.

YSlow

Yahoo! also has a Firefox extension called YSlow. Its analysis of your page is based on 13 strategies that they use to optimize their pages for download. To use it you must first have Firebug installed. Read more about it on Yahoo’s Developer Network.

Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

Reducing the number of HTTP requests required to render a page reduces server load.

Use Image Maps

Combine multiple, contiguous images into one image, and use an image map to link it. The file size will be the same, but you eliminate separate requests for each image. This is not a feasible strategy in all situations, but it should work for some.

Use CSS Sprites

You can combine all of the images in your page into a single image and then use CSS properties to display the desired image segment. Dave Shea has an article on A List Apart and there’s a good sprite generator from Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville (authors of High Perform-ance Web Site Techniques).

Combine Files

If you use more than one stylesheet or more than one script, consider combining like types together. The weight of the page won’t change, but you’ll reduce the number of requests required to build the page.

Use External Files

To allow for caching, your CSS and JavaScript should be stored in external files, and linked / imported into the page being downloaded to allow for caching.

Optimize Images

Most bloggers don’t use image editing tools to resize or polish their images. They should. By using a high-quality web graphics program like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks (formerly Macromedia), you can ensure that you’re using the appropriate file format (e.g. jpeg’s for photos, gif’s for line art), and that your images are optimized for web viewing.

I often see JPEG’s decrease in size from 40 KB to 20 KB with a negligible impact on image quality.

Turn off or Slow Down Comments

If your blog posts are receiving a large number of comments, you can do one of two things to temporarily ease the load on your server:

Temporarily turn off comments

Find which of your posts is receiving heavy comment traffic, and disable commenting on it until traffic has died down a bit.

1. Open the WordPress administrative panel
   Go to Manage | Posts
   Deselect the “Allow comments” checkbox for each high traffic post

After a few hours or days, turn them back on again.

Update the Cache Less Frequently

Every time a new comment is posted, WP-Cache will try to update the static version of the page. Tell it not to. Comments might appear stale throughout the day, but it’s a better alternative than a server crash.

1. Open the wp-content | plugins | wp-cache plugin folder.
2. Open wp-cache-phase2.php for editing
3. Comment the line: add_action(’comment_post’, ‘wp_cache_get_postid_from_comment’, 0);

Pages will now not be regenerated every time a new comment is entered. After a few hours or days, uncomment the line. Thanks to Simple Thoughts blog for this tip.

Monitor your Site

This is not really an optimization tip, but monitoring your server will at least tell you when you’re in trouble. Think of it as a first line of defense or an early warning system. You know the call from the host will be coming!

I use iWeb for dedicated servers, and they have a free monitoring tool that’s simple to setup. Create an account, add an address to monitor, and then specify ports to watch and query intervals. Common ports include 80 (web), 8080 (Tomcat), 3306 (MySQL), and 110 (mail).

That’s it for part 2 of this series. Tune in tomorrow for the third and final installment.

Part 2 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Optimizing Server Performance, Part 1

Part 1 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

I recently compiled a list of tips for people interested in easy ways to optimize server performance. The tips were directed at WordPress users, but many carry over to traditional web applications as well. After all, a blog is a specific kind of web site, so performance improvement tips for a blog will also improve the performance of a web site. That said, you will certainly get more value out of this book if you’re running WordPress and / or a MySQL database server. There are quite a few tips, so I’ve broken this post into multiple parts (yes, another one of those!).

My goal with this series of posts is to give you some fast and easy ways to prepare for traffic spikes. Of course, a crash due to a traffic spike is a good problem to have, but it would be better still if we could avoid it altogether. So to get you started quickly, try to follow these tips in order; i.e. start at the top of post one and work you way through each post. The tips near the top will give you the most bang for your buck, according to my determination of the trade-offs among tip priority, tip complexity, and time required for implementation. And keep tuning until you feel you’ve done enough to ensure that your server is able to handle the traffic. As we move lower down in this list, we’ll reach a point of diminishing returns. Each additional tweak could take more and more time for less and less improvement.

These posts contain the tips that I’ve picked up over the past several years. Some are from experimentation. Some were learned during consulting engagements. More are from administrators who have kindly shared their experiences with others. Many are from RTFM (“delving into the product documentation”). I’m not going to provide an overly deep explanation for each tip. You’re busy. You’ve got a site to administer.

I hope you find these tips useful.

Knowing When to Upgrade

Although it might be a hard decision to make, we must each make a determination about the viability of our current hardware and network. Not all servers, networks, or hosting accounts are created equally.

Server: your server must be physically able to handle high traffic loads. This means an adequate processor, plenty of RAM, and the often over-looked network card.

Network: hosts will have network limiters on their servers because they must parcel out their limited bandwidth to many servers at the data center.

Hosting account: your hosting account will have stated provisions for bandwidth. Larger hosts are usually much more generous with bandwidth. Some hosts will also make bursting provisions, which permit periodic spikes in traffic that are not maintained over long periods.

Upgrade Path

So if you’re using a shared hosting account (good ones are Lunar Pages and BlueHost) and your host is forgiving, you might need to be moved to a newer, more powerful server. You might also be forced to upgrade to a VPS plan. I am not a fan of entry-level VPS plans, so if you’re forced to go this route, don’t choose the least expensive plan and hope to maintain the response times you have with a shared account. A good VPS provider is Spry. Another option is to try moving to a host that uses grid service or cloud hosting, like Mosso or Media Temple.

If you’re using a VPS plan, you might need to consider upgrading to a more expensive plan that gives you a larger share of the processor and RAM. Or at least negotiate for an increased burst rate. If you’ve outgrown VPS entirely, you’ll need to move to a dedicated server. Good providers are iWeb and Liquid Web.

If you’re already using a dedicated server, you might need to look into upgrading your network card, adding RAM, using more and multi-core processors, or upgrading your hard drives. Or, you might need to add additional servers and configure a load-balancing solution. Or move MySQL to a server or servers on its / their own.

Hard decisions, especially when each step up the ladder involves increasing amounts of money.

Enough with this, let’s get started with the tips!

Install WP-Cache

WP-Cache is a WordPress plug-in that can have a dramatic impact on the performance of your blog. By dramatic, I mean anywhere from a 1,000 to 10,000 percent performance improvement, reducing response times by a few tenths of a second in many cases.

By default, all pages requested from WordPress are built dynamically; with WP-Cache, when a visitor requests a page or post, a stored, static version of the requested page is presented instead.

1. Download the WP-Cache plug-in.
2. Upload and extract it in your plug-ins folder.
3. Activate it in your WordPress administrative panel.
4. In Options | Reading, make sure that gzip compression is not selected.
5. Open the Options | WP-Cache subtab, and it will attempt to configure itself.

Deactivate Plug-ins

It is possible to use too many plug-ins. Each plug-in requires additional server resources and processing time, and some require the use of additional software.

In all situations, a good practice is to only use plug-ins that you need to help you administer your blog, or that enhance the experience of your reader. In high-traffic situations, you need to be ruthless about trimming the fat.

One of WordPress’s nice features is being able to quickly activate and deactivate plug-ins. Go through your list and see if any plug-ins could be removed temporarily while you meet a spike in traffic.

Use Your Visitors’ Browser Caches

First-time visitors to your page need to download all of the page components (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, images, etc.) before the page can be viewed, and this can require a fair amount of bandwidth.

But you can use the “Expires” or “Cache-Control” headers to make sure that their browsers cache those components. This won’t help with the first page request, but all additional page requests will avoid downloading those same resources again.

There are quite a few considerations to look at here, but many can be avoided if we just keep things simple. It won’t be optimal, but it will give you the most bang for your buck.

1. Go to Presentation | Theme Editor in your WordPress administrative panel.
2. Click the “Header” link on the right.
3. At the very top (this must come before any other output), enter:

   ?php

       Header("Cache-Control: max-age=172800, must-revalidate");

       $strExpires = "Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + 172800) . " GMT";

       Header($strExpires);

   ?>

You can also set an expiration date far into the future, but you run the risk that the user never sees the content that you’ve updated unless the file name changes. Setting expiration to two days (172,800 seconds) is a good tradeoff to get you past any traffic surges. Adjust as necessary.

Optimize your Database

The larger your database, the more advantageous this tip will be.

1. Open phpMyAdmin
2. Open your WordPress database (not information_schema)
3. Perform a backup just in case
   1. Click the “Export” tab
   2. check the “Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW” checkbox;
   3. check the “Complete inserts” checkbox;
   4. check the “Save as File” checkbox;
   5. Click the “Go” button and download your backup
4. Optimize your tables
   1. Click the “Structure” tab
   2. Click the “Check all” link below the table list to select all tables
   3. In the “With selected” drop-down box, select the Optimize tables option.

Serve your Images from Somewhere Else

This tip is often a tough sell, because it does require more time than the others to implement; however, its effect can be large.

Images eat a lot of your bandwidth, especially in blogs, and result in additional requests to your server. If you find that you use images in your posts, consider serving them from another server.

A user’s browser can only open two resources from one address at any one time. Offload your images, and your viewers’ browsers can open four simultaneous connections.
So your server is using less bandwidth, is being hit with fewer requests for resources, and your viewer’s browser is receiving twice as much content simultaneously. Not bad.
A service I would wholeheartedly recommend is Amazon S3; to a lesser extent, Steady Offload and Flickr.

Amazon opens up their server farms for several uses, one being their S3 storage service. You can access Amazon’s rock solid reliability for a very small price: $0.15 per GB per month for storage, and $0.20 per GB of bandwidth.

Assuming your average blog page contains 100 KB worth of images, you currently have 100 posts in your blog, and you post at a rate of 100 posts per year, your image storage cost is literally less than $0.01 per year. Your bandwidth costs would work out to $2 per 100,000 visits.

Steady Offload is an interesting service that mirrors your static content on their site. It’s effortless to set up, and you only pay for bandwidth you use. For high-traffic situations, I still would prefer Amazon’s reliability.

Flickr is a great option if you have a personal or non-commercial blog. They have restrictions against professional and corporate use, which can limit its usefulness for some. Also, it’s an image-sharing site, which might be a concern. On one hand, your images get more traffic, on the other hand, your images could be “involuntarily shared” with others.

I’d recommend that you stay away from ImageShack and PhotoBucket, although use of both is popular. ImageShack’s bandwidth per hour limit makes it useless during traffic spikes and both ImageShack and PhotoBucket are frequently blocked by corporate firewalls, and it’s never a good idea to alienate portions of your audience.

Don’t Touch your MyISAM Tables!

This is not a to-do tip, but rather a not-to-do tip. It had to be mentioned, as it’s a very common source of questions with folks who are just digging into MySQL. Many people contend that converting your MySQL MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables will have a large impact on performance, and this is true in certain situations.

InnoDB tables feature row-level locking, meaning that when a row in a table is being edited, only that row must be locked. In MyISAM tables, the entire table must be locked to edit a row.

In blogs, the only time you would require table locking is when content is being added, e.g. a comment or a blog post. As readers outnumber commenters and posters by an overwhelming majority, using InnoDB tables for a WordPress blog would actually hurt per-formance, not improve it.

If you were considering it, don’t do it!

That’s it for today. Check back in tomorrow for part 2 of this post.

Part 1 of 3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Dash Express: Next Generation GPS Navigation

If you’re a fan of GPS navigation systems, this is the most compelling reason to upgrade that I’ve yet seen; if you’ve been on the fence about whether to try one on, this just might push you over the edge.

Dash Express is a navigation system with built-in WiFi, better routing capabilities, traffic data, and a boatload of minor feature improvements, combined with an online control panel to expand your reach outside of the car.

The old way to navigate: at home, find the address of where you want to visit, write it down on a sticky pad, and head out to your car. Punch in that address and off you go. If they’re closed, you’re out of luck. Hit a bad patch of traffic, too bad.

Dash Express navigation: hop in your car, search Yahoo! Local for a destination, and get routed. Scan ahead for any traffic backups and reroute as needed. Change your mind as needed. Alert your friends (who are also Dash users) of where you’re heading to, or get updates in your unit of locations sent to you by your friends. Or rewind to the beginning. Find your destination address on your home PC, right-click it in your web browser, then select “Send 2 Car.” When you fire up Dash, the address will be waiting for you.

Dash is to standard GPS navigation systems what Google Maps was to MapQuest. One of things I always thought was “broken” in my nav system is the routing capabilities. To reroute, I’d have to pull up the turn by turn directions, and delete some of the waypoints, hoping I deleted the correct ones to force a reroute. Dash displays multiple routes and lets you choose from them. The UI has some significant improvements as well — at a glance it just looks more organized and intuitive.

Dash isn’t cheap at $399, but it sure is pretty! And maybe you can make up for some of that cost with one of Dash’s built-in features: find the cheapest gas prioces in town, and get routed there. Plus, if it ever gets stolen, you can remotely disable it so the thieves can’t enjoy your new toy.

Find it at Amazon

Choosing a Blog Platform

Never has it been easier to setup and maintain a blog, and a large part of the reason is the blogging platform. The blogging platform includes the blogging software itself, along with the hardware and infrastructure required to power the software.

The two main categories of platforms are hosted (often referred to as “services”) and self-hosted (often refereed to as “standalone”).

Hosted Blogs (Blog Services)

Hosted platforms refer to services whereby a service provider grants you access to their hardware, network connection, and software, and you create a blogging account to use on that platform. This would be very similar to signing up for an account at a site like Facebook or MySpace. As far as you’re concerned, there’s nothing more than a web page where you enter and view your information. Everything that goes on behind the scenes is con-trolled by someone else, and you have no stake other than being a user of the service.

Within the hosted blog space, you have a few subcategories of service, as well. There are pure blog plays—your account is used to create a blog, and the end result that gets traffic is a blog and a blog only.

There are also social networking services that build blogging into their platforms. MySpace has a very rudimentary blogging system, though I don’t believe that it meets the accepted requirements of a blog. Then there are services that fall somewhere in between, like Xanga and Vox, which offer a mix of media and social networking.

Some pure play examples include:

• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• Blogger
• Blog.com
• Wordpress.com (not to be used with the software available from Wordpress.org)

Advantages of Hosted Platforms

• Inexpensive: many are free; others (like TypePad) are offered with multiple price points
• Simple to setup: just create an account and get to blogging
• Page rank: search engines might give more favorable weightings to hosted blogs, but note that this, if it is true, would only hold true for low-traffic blogs
• Automatic updates: you don’t have to worry about keep-ing hosted software updated and patched

Disadvantages of Hosted Platforms

• Inflexible: there are fewer configuration options with hosted platforms. This often results in applying workarounds or “hacks,” which make moving off of the platform cumber-some.
• Fewer design choices: you typically only get to select from a limited number of average designs, and you often can’t make updates to the standard designs
• Generic URL: some hosted platforms will allow you to use your own URL, but the process can be complex; others don’t offer the option at all
• Less control: you are at the mercy of the platform
• No commercial sites: some platforms will not let you serve ads on their platforms

Self-hosted Blogs (Standalones)

Self-hosted platforms consist of a web hosting account you establish with a data center, and the blogging software you install on the data center’s server.

Some self-hosted solutions include:

• WordPress (not to be confused with the hosted accounts at WordPress.com)
• MovableType (the self-hosted version of TypePad)
• SubText
• typo
• Apache Roller

Advantages of Self-hosted Blogs

• Design flexibility: you have full control over design and lay-out
• Great software: the best software exists on self-hosted plat-forms
• Custom URL: custom URL’s are ubiquitous on self-hosted platforms
• Adaptability: your blog can change as your needs change

Disadvantages of Self-hosted Blogs

• Difficult setup: setup can sometimes be difficult
• Cost: while the blogging software is free, the hosting platform will cost you money
• Hosting issues: unless you choose a good host, you might have to suffer from downtime or poor support.
• Upgrades: you will need to keep your software patched

Blogs are really specialized versions of content management systems (CMS), which are systems used to manage the computer files, images, media and content of a Web site. CMS’s generally support workflow, which is a process for moving content from creation, through approval, to publishing with automated routing and notifications. CMS’s usually support a large number of authors and editors (sometimes collaboratively) in a distributed environment.

Blogs are simplified versions of CMS’s, though they retain many of the same characteristics, and I do know of some people who use WordPress in place of a full-blown CMS.

Popular CMS’s include:

• Textpattern
• Drupal
• Joomla

Which Platform is Best?

It’s a personal decision. The majority of my blogs are self-hosted. I prefer the flexibility and design options available to me in self-hosted software. Self-hosted solutions are also much more professional. Blog readers can tell a difference.

Often, whichever blog platform you start on, you finish on. As  your blog gets larger and more backlinks are created, you start to become handcuffed to the platform. This blog, for example, was hosted on Typepad until two weeks ago. Not because I preferred Typepad, but because it started as a quick and dirty personal blog that continued to grow. That’s one reason I always recommend that peopled start blogging on a flexible platform–you always have room to grow.

In February 2007, I conducted a usability study with several readers, placing the same content on two different blogs, one hosted, and one self-hosted. Both were setup to take full advantage of the underlying platform, meaning I made the blogs look and behave as best as I could with the tools I had available. Universally, the self-hosted blog was perceived to be higher value, and the content was considered to be more credible.

Note that this was a small study, and usability tests are not what I would consider scientific by nature, but the anecdotal evidence is worth considering.

For my money, I will always go self-hosted. Your mileage may vary. If you just want to try this blogging thing out, try one of the hosted services. But if plan to maintain a professional blog, I think you’ll find yourself upgrading quickly.

I’ve used six different blogging services, hosted and self-hosted, and I’ve dug around the API’s of several. WordPress is hands-down the winner.

• WordPress has an extensive theme directory. Themes are used to change the look and feel of your blog. You don’t need to know how to design or code a thing.
• Thousands of themes are available around the web, and if you want a premium theme, you can find quite a few of them. Premium themes are great for sites that you want to monetize, or where you want to convey a professional presence.
• WordPress has an extensive plug-in directory. Plug-ins enable you to add interesting functionality to your blog. How about a map of your recent readers? Adding a contact form to your about page? Showcas-ing affiliate products? Fighting spam? Improving your search engine rankings? Mobilizing your site? If you can think it, a plug-in is probably around to do it.
• WordPress offers complete administrative control over your blog. There are very few things that you can’t do with your WordPress blog if you’re self-hosting.
• WordPress has excellent user management, using a role-based security model that supports multiple levels of access. For example, authors can write articles, editors can publish those articles after approval, adminis-trators can change the design of the blog.
• WordPress fights spam. A comment spam plug-in installs with Word-Press by default. Say goodbye to that annoying Blog Blaster spam.
• WordPress has an active and enthusiastic contributing developer community. This means that software updates are frequent, bugs are fixed regularly, the software is mature, and requested features are actually added to the product by people who care about and use the product. The WordPress community is the reason why WordPress is such a powerful and easy-to-use product. It is a real gem.
• WordPress has an easy-to-use page editor. With pages, you can really blur the lines between what is a web site and what is a blog. Pages allow you to store static content (i.e. content that isn’t regularly updated). Pages are especially common for people who use WordPress as a content management system. For a lite version of WordPress-as-CMS, check out the Thirty Days to Blog Traffic site.
• There are a large number of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reasons for choosing WordPress, but a discussion of them is outside the scope of this book, so I’ll just say that WordPress has paid atten-tion to how to help search engines find your blog.
• There are also plenty of SEO and traffic-related plug-ins available for WordPress.
• It’s free! There are other free blogging packages out there, but none offer the same combination of power and simplicity that WordPress offers.

Here’s an interesting exercise: Google “moving to WordPress.” People are moving for a reason!

In a nutshell, if you’re blogging, you need to be using WordPress. It’s that simple. WordPress has built a fanatical community and support base for a reason: they’re the best. If you find yourself on another platform like Blogger or TypePad and you want to move to WordPress, I’ve detailed the migration process step-by-step.

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