Random thoughts on business and technology http://www.jasoncbyrne.com en-us 60 http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/100 A lot of posts on the interent take knowing the ins-and-outs of whatever Linux distribution for granted. For those of us who are developers/programmers first, database adminsitrators second, and system administrators third it may not be so obvious! So that can be very frustrating for me when Googling for answers. So I found what I need to do to get this going and wanted to post it, both for any others but also for me later. It was actually way easier than I thought once I actually found... Jason Byrne Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:16:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/06/04/configuring-php-and-lighttpd-on-ubuntu http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/99 After reading about the IndexedDB stuff (here, here and here) that is coming and looking at its code, I wanted to abstract my local database access a bit more. And I decided to make it more closely match what they are doing. That way when that launches then I can easily just update this object to pull from that new local storage. Right now I am developing for the Mobile Safari platform, so I am not very concerned about other browsers that don't support this local SQLite engine. First the... Jason Byrne Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:44:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/06/01/html-5-local-database-wrapper-object http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/98 At MileSplit, we use a lot of different domains. Each subdomain means something to us and this structure is an integral part of the application. Further with our new API, we want to direct everything to the API's own domain. Browser security rules often get in the way though when you try do AJAX calls from one domain to another. We can easily get around this with GET requests with JSON-P techniques, which technically sidestep AJAX altogether. However, we run into a wall when it comes to... Jason Byrne Fri, 28 May 2010 23:56:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/05/28/cross-domain-ajax-posting http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/97 #jqueryblogpost code { display: block; border: solid 1px #cdcdcd; padding: 10px; } We are in the middle of a huge upgrade project over at MileSplit: rewriting significant portions of code, some redesign, rolling out some new features and initiatives, and migrating from colo servers to the cloud. As one part of that major project, I am trying to make the pages load more quickly. As always is the case, ads are one of the major culprits for slowing down page load. And because of the... Jason Byrne Wed, 19 May 2010 13:18:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/05/19/jquery-ad-frame-plugin http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/95 On MileSplit we make extensive use of subdomains. They regionalize our content or otherwise determine exactly what we're after. Additionally, we are starting to make more extensive use of caching servers to store our static content--including javascript files. These also have their own domains. Cross domain AJAX calls were becoming a real problem for me. I thought about doing some overly complex stuff like dynamically creating hidden iframes with sub-iframes, but I with my current major... Jason Byrne Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:18:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/04/27/simple-cross-domain-ajax-with-json-p http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/94 With a sample size of 1,724,087 visits and over 17,428,039 page views over the last 30 days we have a large enough base for these numbers to actually mean something. While we perhaps have a slightly larger concentration of the younger demographic than most sites, this should be a pretty good idea of the picture of the larger internet in general. About 97% of our traffic is US based (with the Canadian traffic starting to build slightly), so this is not an international picture but rather a... Jason Byrne Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:13:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/04/26/april-2010-traffic-stats-mobile-revolution-is-here http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/92 I am currently in the midst of a major redesign, so I am using this opportunity create it using the most semantic and standards based code as feasibly possible. One of the things I wanted to do is layout some of my content into columns. Now I don't mean having content on one side and a sidebar on the other. I mean columns as in auto-following content into multiple columns. This is an extremely common practice in print. While I think that it is extremely important to implement on the web... Jason Byrne Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:13:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/04/16/attempt-to-use-css3-columns-mission-aborted http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/91 I ran into (yet another) ridiculous Internet Explorer bug tonight that made me pull my hair out for about two hours. I created a javascript object that powers an article scroller... you know one of those things that rotates through top stories on a news site with thumbnails and the larger cover story photo. Anyway... so I had it working great in Firefox and Chrome. Then I started Internet Explorer. I noticed that it was updating the image fine, but the headline and summary of the cover... Jason Byrne Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:45:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/04/15/internet-explorer-not-updating-div-content http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/90 With all of this talk about NoSQL (which while I think it definitely has its use cases, but believe is quite overblown), I thought I'd mention my own recent experience with overcoming weaknesses of the traditional relational database. SPHINX! Sphinx is dubbed as a full-text search application. It of course does that very very well, but it is so much more than that! The full-text search first drew me to it. We had gotten sufficiently large where MyISAM just was not cutting it for us... Jason Byrne Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:02:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/04/09/sphinx-is-my-anti-sql http://www.jasoncbyrne.com/posts/89 This article is a sort of series I'm writing with my experiences of learning the EC2 cloud while learning Sphinx search. The more I learn about Sphinx and use it, the more impressed I am. And also the more possibilities that I see. I believe this is going to solve A LOT of problems for us. Initially the reason for going to Sphinx was because MyISAM tables were not doing it for us anymore and we need to convert to InnoDB, which of course does not support fulltext searches. Being pretty... Jason Byrne Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:45:00 -0400 http://jasoncbyrne.com/posts/2010/03/21/index-like-an-egyptian-getting-sphinx-running