Posted by brant : 2009-06-23 at 2:03 pm

When it comes to customizing your textarea box the two most popular choices are TinyMCE or Openwysiwyg.  I wish I could say this is a close battle between two really good options.  The truth is that there is only one viable option to choose and that is TinyMCE.

The problem with Openwysiwyg is that it addeds extra markup for no reason and does not adhere to web standards.  Just try using their demo and look at the code it creates.  It makes you want to vomit.

On the other hand, TinyMCE is more modern and adheres to webstandards.  Check out the code in this blog post, compliments of TinyMCE.

Posted by brant : 2009-06-23 at 1:23 pm

Gzip compression or (aka mod_deflate) will compress your pages and offer a smaller web page to download.  In fact, this very page you are on has gzip enabled.  Are there other benefits than just simply a smaller page to download?  I discovered unexpected benefits from enabling gzip compresssion at FantasySP and here are my results:

  1. More Pageviews.  The results were more than surprising when it came to the amount of pageviews per visit.  Previously my pageviews per visit was a decent 5.00 - 6.00 for a monthly average.  This shot up to 12.00 after gzip compression was enabled, along with a few other optimizations.  These days, average page size can be around 500k for each site.  If you half that to 250k, then you certainly have a leg up on the competition.

    Bottom line: If you enable gzip compression, pageviews per visit will go up.
  2. Bandwith Usuage.  This one is fairly straightforward, decreasing average pageload size will decrease bandwidth used.  Looking at my daily numbers, it went from roughly 1.75 - 2.00 gb to 850mb to 1gb.  Average pagesize, is around 200k or lower. (not including advertisements because they don't effect my bandwith totals on the server). 

    To put this into perspective, my compeition has an average pageload size of 800k to 900k.  That's right, nearly 1 meg on initial load to the site.  It's no wonder I have happy visitors who are willing to come back to my site.

    Bottom line: It saves you money on your bandwith bill.
  3. Googlebot.  As you may already know, your website is crawled constantly by webbots such as Googlebot, Yahoo!'s slurp, and Bing Bot.  Plus many many more.  By enabling gzip compression you obviously lessen the amount of bandwith served, but what you also do is allow bots to crawl your pages faster than before.  The faster they crawl your site, the more pages per day they can index.  Below you will see the huge decrease in bytes downloaded per day.

    Googlebot Bytes Downloaded Per Day

I also want to inform people that there are many ways to optimize your server to decrease bandwith.  I highly suggest you minify your css and javascript prior to compression.  Use PageSpeed along with Firebug to help guide you through this process. It automatically gives you minified code and even optimizes your images.  So get optimizing!

My final point is about server load.  You might be thinking that my server might be suffering a huge hit in performance due to enabling gzip.  The truth is that the performance hit is basically negligible.  With 45,000 to 50,000 pageviews per day, server load is around .20 to .35 during peak times.  Apache is at .00701% CPU load currently.

For my next blog post I will demonstrate how to enable gzip compression in Apache, how to test it, and how to config your .htaccess file.

Posted by brant : 2009-05-21 at 6:04 pm

Did you know that Bit.ly can be used in very powerful ways to combat spam? Bit.ly tracks where links come from, this includes tracing where visits come from on Twitter and which names are posting them.

Here is an example: http://bit.ly/info/y5Kuq.

  1. Notice how it is a link to an AmateurMatch landing area where people are to sign up so the spammer can get money?
  2. Click on the Referrer’s tab. It is a list of every single name the spammer is using on Twitter.

I do hope that Bit.ly and Twitter work together to stop spam.

Posted by brant : 2009-05-10 at 8:15 pm

Does Firefox keep deleting your cookies each time you close the browser, even though you specify to KEEP all cookies?  This problem just happened to me and it took a little bit of digging to come up with an answer. 

The solution was discovered at Firefox's site , but if you'd like to skip the technical talk then simply delete your cookies.sqlite file. Make sure Firefox is closed, then do a quick find to locate the file. 

Now rejoice because cookies work once again! :)

Posted by brant : 2009-05-06 at 7:02 pm

It has happened, Twitter has officially switched their default URL shortening services over to a worthy company called Bit.ly.  My previous blog posts said how much TinyURL sucks and I am extremely happy that Twitter appears to be a very smart group of people on top of their game.

Next up, get more servers so Twitter isn't so damn lagged all the time.

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