Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.
Steve Jobs — via Daring Fireball
Graphing the switch to Nginx
As a quick followup to my previous post detailing how to run WordPress behind a Nginx reverse proxy I thought I’d post an interesting graph retrieved from Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times of this site over the past few months:
How to speed up WordPress with Nginx
Recently I’ve wondering whether it was worth trying to improve my WordPress-based blog performance. While it wasn’t particularly terrible, waiting over 2 seconds just to load a single page isn’t exactly stunning.
I took a typical approach and installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Page loads dropped down to ~1 second. Much better, but there must be some more performance gains to be found somewhere without modifying the WordPress source code itself.
Inspired by this post by Mark Maunder I decided to see if I could shoehorn WordPress into a similar reverse proxy/persistent process mould. So far, it works brilliantly.
With the following tweaks I managed to go from 12 requests/s to over 30 requests/s on the same hardware – a single 256MB Rackspace Cloud server – whilst reducing latency from ~2 seconds to an average of only 0.4 seconds.
Introducing Spotio: A Spotify Remote
Spotio is an open-source, web-based, multi-user Spotify remote. It features support for viewing the currently playing track, skipping tracks and, most importantly, the ability to control playback.
Super Secret Preferences in Twitter for Mac without the Nanobundle
It annoyed my slightly that simple things such as hitting escape to close the new tweet window were only available to people who’d purchased the MacHeist Nanobundle. You can enable these preferences yourself with only a small amount of command line tinkering.
What I Learned from Zuckerberg’s Mistakes
I’ve been an avid reader of Jason Calacanis‘ various newsletters for some time, not least for the sheer amount of work he puts into each and every one.
In his latest newsletter he offers a suggestion as to why Facebook is perceived as either evil, clueless or just plain unlucky when it comes to releasing new products:
Facebook’s success — and mistakes — are based on its developer-driven culture, not because Zuckerberg is some evil mastermind.
The Zuckerberg Doctrine: Developers design products with significantly improved speed and functionality compared to product managers and designers, outweighing potential mistakes and drawbacks.
And in this world, speed is everything. We shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes at the cost of innovation. New Year Resolution anyone?
You can sign up for Jason’s free newsletter here.
Facebook Places launches in the UK
Well it looks like Facebook Places has just launched in the UK. Worryingly this was brought to my attention by my newsfeed showing that one of my distant friends (who shall remain nameless) has just checked-in to his house. Let’s just hope that place isn’t publicly available, though I doubt it as it’s listed as a “Local Business”. Way to go Facebook.
My Git Workflow; Introducing Flit
I’ve been a Git convert, and version control geek, for over a year now so I’ve sort of become the unofficial Git consultant at the office. If anythings breaks or something weird happens I’m usually the one called in to sort it out.
YUI Compressor TextMate Bundle
Even though the Google Closure Compiler is very useful for compressing JavaScript it has absolutely no support for CSS, something that the YUI Compressor excels at. I give you the YUI Compressor TextMate bundle, an almost direct port of the Google Closure Compiler TextMate bundle but with a different compression library.
It has support for compressing multiple JavaScript and CSS files at the same time; just select the files you want to compress and hit ⇧⌘Y.