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?
CodeIgniter on the Command-Line
So, yesterday, I spent a few hours trying to create a robust command-line interface for one of my CodeIgniter applications. I learned a lot about PHP-CLI. I also came to remember why it’s a bad idea to try and fit a round peg in a square hole.
The thing is, CodeIgniter is a great little web framework. See the key word in that sentence? Yes, you can hack some CLI functionality in, but if you want to start doing fancy stuff like adding multiple levels of interactive menus and such, then its time to rethink what you’re doing.
On the other hand, there are many reasons to create a simple CLI-interface to your web application. The main use would be for running of maintenance tasks and automated CRON scripts. For this kind of task, it’s very easy to create a CLI entry-point for your app.
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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
Updated my Projects!
As a Christmas Holiday present to those of you that are using my CodeIgniter tools, CI-UserTracking and GeSHi for CI, I did something very philanthropic: I updated them and tested them on the latest version of CodeIgniter.
Oh, and I also fixed the links…
..and I put them in their very own Google Code pages, so you can peruse the source code, download from Google servers, and leave comments and tickets for yours truly.
AND.. as your Hanukkah/New Years/Participation gift, I also have added a brand new CodeIgniter project that I’m working on called CI Headstart with all kinds of helpers, libraries, and other goodies to help speed up development even more. Roll on over to the Code page to check it all out.
Now that Christmas break is upon us, and I since I work for a University that gives employees like a bazillion days off each December, I hope to clean these up even more and provide some quality documentation.
Happy Holidays from me to you,
PS >> If anybody is interested in contributing code to these projects, let me know.
I am an IT Professional in Tallahassee, Florida with a degree in Information Science.