Jeremy Chase

After a lot of hemming and hawing about everything from the domain name, to the content, to the design, here it is: TechOutburst

Basically it is a blog about things in my life that are tech related, and didn’t really fit into this blog. Mostly I didn’t want my random dog pictures intermingled with things about websites. So for those of you interested in that kind of stuff head over. Otherwise, stick around here for dog pics.

Jeremy

I decided to integrate tumblr into my blog because it is just really cool. Essentially it is another blog, but it also aggregates all my other online activities. So if I put a video on Vimeo it’ll show up on the Tumblr feed. If I Tweet, it’ll end up there. If I update this blog, it’ll go onto my tumblr page. Get the idea yet?

I hope you enjoy it. Link to Jeremy Chase’s Tumblr page!

The last few days I spent my blogging time playing with Drupal and xcache. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) which is similar to the backend of any newspaper style website. I had been fooling around with e107 for awhile, but Drupal is just more proven for scalability reasons. It has taken a few hours of stumbling around to get the hang of it, but my test site does ’stuff’ now.

I also was playing with the general performance of my blog using xcache along with lighttpd. It took quite a while to get xcache to work properly because I had a misconfiguration (I had slow-cgi enabled in addition to fast-cgi). After resolving that, having opcode cache really sped things up. Without using WP-Cache or xcache the site served about 3.5 pages/second. With xcache (and no WP-Cache) it was up to 11 pages/second.

That is well and good, but xcache + WP-Cache brings it up to unholy amounts. It turns out my previous testing was flawed because Slicehost limits bandwidth to 10mbit from the node. I was saturating that and the network was capping my result. If the network wasn’t an issue this hardware/software setup would be able serve this little blog at roughly 6,000KB/s (according to apachebench running on localhost). If a page averages 100KB, that is 60 pages/second. Given the 10mbit cap it can only serve about 10 pages/second.

I dabble in HTML and CSS. I am by far not a pro, but hey, I can style some div’s. Until recently I have just edited my CSS and reloaded the page to see how it looked. Not only is this slow, it is also really hard to understand. I never had a clue where my div’s were, or what margin was affecting what.

Enter Firebug, which is a plugin for Firefox. Firebug happily sits in my Firefox tray until I “inspect” an element. When you hit the magic key combo “cmd-shift-c” the cursor highlights the div or element in the browser. Then when clicking can see the HTML, and all the CSS that affects that element. So for example if I wanted to change the color of some text I could “inspect” it and see the CSS that controls it. Not only that, it’ll show all the CSS that is ignored because it is overridden by a div closer to it!

Holy cow; this makes tweaking a million times faster. Did I mention yet that you can change the CSS on the fly to see how things look? Yes, you can. If you want to see what 30px text looks like you can simply change the value; BAM, the text displays at 30px. If you can’t figure out what div is bumping something out of the way you can just inspect that area, and you’ll find the culprit faster than fast. Then you can change the width, height, margin, or whatever you please.

Firebug rules.

Jeremy Chase