Website Caching for n00bs
I finally installed a caching plugin for this site, because I know that I’m so awesome that any day now, millions of beautiful women will be clamoring to visit my website at the same time. Some things you are just sure of.
While I wait for that day, it makes sense to have a caching plugin anyway. Let’s count the reasons:
- It’s super easy, so time investment costs almost nothing,
- I’m on shared hosting, so every saved bit counts,
- Caching makes everything faster even when traffic is low, and
- I never know when I may actually write something useful, and thousands of denziens from the across the Internet will come and bring my poor little Dreamhost server to its knees.
So what is caching anyway?
Playing with Asynchronous PHP Processing
A subject that has intrigued me lately is this topic of asynchronous PHP processing. The idea is you have a web application that includes a task which takes a long time, like, say processing video files or sending mass emails. Your users should be able to click a button, get a notification that their job is waiting to be processed, and then go about their business.
I’ve run across all sorts of really cool queuing technologies, all of which have PHP libraries. So creating and managing job queues was no problem for me. My confusion was how to setup a worker script to process those queues. Read more
Gone is Gone: The Case Against “Delete”
I love, love, love getting rid of crap. Maybe that’s why I like to read Unclutterer, or think that the 100 Things Challenge is such a great idea. In real-life, I’m a minimalist, but when it comes to programming web apps, I’ve become a digital pack-rat.
I don’t care if my database grows into a giant data-monster, ready to ravage my server’s hard disk and slow queries down to a crawl; I’ll deal with it. The key here is to not allow any important history of data to get lost.
Backups and Disaster Recovery Kit
It’s the perfect time to think about it. With disaster on everybody’s mind, and this being the season of resolutions, it’s time to think about your disaster recovery strategy.
Recently, a major department right here at FSU suffered catastrophic loss to their servers, with scant means of quick recovery. Their site was down literally for weeks as staff from all over the University scrambled to assist them in recreating the critical pieces. They lost of a lot of time and money.
I’m absolutely sure they’ll be super-prepared next time, but you don’t have to wait until something tragic happens to be prepared!
I am an IT Professional in Tallahassee, Florida with a degree in Information Science.