Blog

If you are a blogger that is going for gold and you've gone the path of Drupal, you probably want to know how to deal with a "Digg Spike" which means that when your site hits the frontpage of digg.com, there is a huge traffic surge of about 10k hits in about an hour.

There's a pretty interesting tool to help deal with this problem, this tool is called "Static Caching" and it is pretty simple in concept, it takes the rendered output of a page that is dynamically generated and stores it as an HTML file, next time someone hits that page, Boost will check for a cache file and if it finds it, will serve it up and bypass the database completely.

This is useful, specially in Drupal because it can take at LEAST 90+ queries to generate a page. multiply by the amount of users at any given point and, if you're on a shared host that usually leads to a server meltdown:

Here's a rough example:
Your website requires 100 queries to fully load. If you get 5000 visitors in one hour that is a grand total of 500,000 QUERIES
That might give you an idea as to why sites implode and the server throws up all over the place sometimes, it's too busy serving to serve all the others. On top of all that you have the bootstrapping process for Drupal which is CPU and memory intensive (Running all the PHP scripts - 10mb~ of ram a strap)

You have learned from this experience and you install Boost. This module stores all rendered pages viewed by anonymous users as HTML files and uses a special .htaccess file to check for the cached file and serve it up without ever touching Drupal at ALL. This means 0 queries to the database and 0 php ran. You spend all the memory and CPU power serving up static pages which is DRAMATICALLY lower than bootstrapping Drupal, a serious improvement.

Give the Boost module a try, be nice to your server. Boost Module on Drupal.org

Did you like this post?
Follow us to get updates!

   

Our team is very small. We like it that way, it allows us to have personal connections with our clients and ourselves. Antonio and myself have been developing together for about 4 years now and I've learned a lot from it. Before we met I was mostly a designer for bands and shirt companies. My web experience was only based in some small businesses. Then as I progressed into web and more advanced theming I learned a really important lesson, don't just make the design nice but make it useful and well thought out. Usability is sometimes much more important than a pretty design, but ofcourse the golden egg is having both. The client has a responsibility to provide all functionality and content before a designer even starts a draft to assure a well thought execution of his ideas. Here are some examples of usability and breath-taking design working hand in hand....

http://www.Giraffe.net/

This site is phenomenal, this is a great example of all the functionality being preserved (menus, twitter updates, photo gallery) and still executing a design that would blow people away. Not one link seems out of place or forced and believe me that is a skill in it's own right. You immediately know what this site is about upon one glance. Nothing is confusing about the design, it's well thought out and well executed.

Grooveshark.com

This site allows even the newest users feel like a pro. Every tool is not only easily accessible but almost intuitive. It's flash interface also provides a slick presentation while operation almost like a piece of software rather than a website. You find yourself set up in seconds and that's what can determine if a client/listener will ever return. This site could not ever look this good without the programmers and designers working hand in hand.

Both sites are extremely well thought out and not just from a designers point of view but both a designer and programmer. This brings me to the main point. Always have your content or programming functionality (every button, every slider, every function) in hand before developing, it's very difficult to build or theme something when you have no idea what content is going in or what functions are being provided. If you don't know the purpose or items of importance your design will surely suffer. Designers and programmers and clients need to bring everything to the table before development starts, it is the only proper way. This seems like it would be a duh situation but most clients start development before they even start thinking about content and a developer has no choice but to run with it. Elitist designer attitudes and hands off clients cannot create well done web work. It takes two to make it out of sight.

Did you like this post?
Follow us to get updates!

   

An endless amount of conversation can spawn when you realize the magnitude of global communications, more often than not it is awe inducing to get a grasp on how many simultaneous transactions are occurring at any given second.

The growth of social media continues at a staggering rate and some argue about it's direction and lifespan, this counter can give you a very strong idea of the current pace of the web and it's most popular services.

[Via Gary's Social Media Count]

Did you like this post?
Follow us to get updates!