http://noticiaspt.nunoprospero.com

Aproveitando vários minutos livres ao longo de algumas semanas, fiz esta pequena brincadeira com cURL, PHP, MySQL, mod_rewrite e RSS/XML, aproveitando o esqueleto de um site que tive anteriormente, inspirado no Twitter. Toda a tecnologia utilizada é open source, as capas são fornecidas pelos excelentes web services do SAPO e os conteúdos vêm dos sites dos próprios jornais. O objectivo principal é fundir as capas dos jornais e revistas com os conteúdos noticiosos das mesmas. Esta é a versão inicial, para lançamento e de acordo com a disponibilidade, vou adicionando mais features.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) which aims to enhance website performance and speed and providing security. It became famous for hosting the LulzSec services, the hacker group that attacked Sony network.

My main interest in a CDN solution is caching resources, since I was having too much accesses to the database to retrieve static data chunks and images, for some sites I manage.

I’ve been testing Cloudflare for the last 3 months, using the standard free plan for dealing with traffic from/to a Hostmonster server. The setup is easy if you are keen on managing DNS entries, but the changes are not immediate so I recommend setting up in a low balance period, if possible, to avoid losing traffic. After the initial setup, Cloudflare has a lot of web management tools with “one click installation” so it’s a great opportunity to try tools for free – for instances, Pingdom. Cloudflare allows the user to turn Cloudflare service on/off in realtime, so it’s real useful to use the “Development mode” when you want to force the Cloudflare to request the resource instead of sending the cached version. Its also possible to reset manually the Cloudflare cache.

Results:

Pingdom – Uptime: in 90 days, only one downtime max 5 minutes.

Pingdom – Response time: 19 ms is quite good. The pike in the graph refers to a development period, I guess. However, I’m not aware of such an interruption.

Webmasters Tools – Site Performance (beta): this is the most strangest information when using Cloudflare, since the site performance has not changed. This beta feature seems to report random data regardless the traffic, the server availability, etc.

Cloudflare reporting:

• 50,9% requests are saved by Cloudflare
• 58% saved bandwith
• CF Analytic stats (October): 1,6% requests were considered treats; 4,1% requests were from web bots

Adsense: no problems were identified that could be correlated to CF. Ok, to be honest, the average CPC has been slowly falling this year (some cents) however is due to the economical context (at least for Portuguese advertisers…) so the Adsense behavior doesn’t seem to be affected by Cloudflare.

Drawbacks:

• Only allows one CF account per domain. This means that all subdomains will be aggregated in one account.
• Some plugins have issues – e.g. Google Analytics. CF allows the user to define a default GA profile. In each request, CF checks if the GA tags are well placed – if the tracking codes are missing, CF injects the GA code with the default profile. However, for two times, CF has injected the default code in *all pages* in several subdomains, mixing up my GA account.
• It’s not an issue, but a feature, the user must reconfigure all the current connections to the web server and replace the domain name by something like direct.<servername> to access the server directly without passing through CF. Some old scripts will not function until you edit them…
• Error messages – in some cases, the site users will be confronted with CF messages that can be very confusing for them – “The site is offline”, “Unavailable”, captcha, etc. I still haven’t understand when each one appears and if I can change the behavior.
• Harder to diagnose DNS / hosting / site problems

Conclusion:

Despite all these drawbacks, mostly common to all CDNs, Cloudflare is a perfect choice for mid sized websites. It’s a free solution with lots of features available (the paid version has more analytics and 3rd party webapps).

The only price you really pay in these platforms is giving the CDN the knowledge about your site – since they intercept your traffic, they have even more information than Google Analytics, for instances.

I’ve also signed-up for the Google Page Speed Service, the Google CDN still in beta (or alpha).

Há certas áreas de expertise que não podem ser reguladas pelo palpite. Ponto. No limite, basta pensar na Medicina – “hum… oh cirurgião, eu não cortaria essa artéria. Tente ali aquela, estou cá com um feeling… ah, ups… piiiiiii”

1. Start -> Run -> regedit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Microsoft -> Internet Explorer
3. Create key: View Source Editor (under Internet Explorer)
4. Create subkey: Editor Name
5. Change the data value for the default string to the path of the new editor. Example, for Notepad++.exe: c:\Program Files\Notepad2\notepad++.exe
6. Reset IE

Since this method changes the registry, I don’t take any responsability in these steps… backup the registry before touching it.

Do you get an “Application has failed to satrt because LIBMYSQL.dll was not found” error?

Easy, copy the libmysql.dll file from mysql folder to the sphinx/bin folder. This little trick can save you looooots of time.

Depois de bater muitas vezes com a cabeça ao testar um site utilizando o IE 8, descobri o mantra:

Quando se testa ao vivo (sem ser localhost), é utilizado o motor IE8.
Quando se teste localmente, localhost, o IE usa o motor de renderização em modo compatibilidade (IE7…) => barraca!

Por isso, se o site funciona bem no computador, mas ao submeter/sincronizar os ficheiros dá resultados diferentes (sobretudo a nível de CSS…), basta forçar que o IE use consistentemente o motor – forçar o modo IE7, testar e depois fazer o mesmo com o IE8 sem compatibilidade. Menos uma dor de cabeça ;)

There is a comparison site called Blind Search where you can submit a query to Google, Bing and Yahoo but you won’t be able to see which results belong to each company. Then, you’ll vote which one was the best engine.

I’ve had a few surprises… :)

One of the best ways to test your site for the IE market (let’s say, 80% of your visitors) is to install Multiple_IE. This program contains the dlls necessary to run old versions of IE in order to allow testing from IE 4.0 to the newest one. Give it a try!