Author Archives: Nuno Morgadinho

12 Steps to Reinforce Your On-Line Presence

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Need to re-force your presence on-line?

  • Have a central location and link from as many sites as you can to yours.
  • Have a nice central location.
  • Work on cool projects.
  • Share with your viewers interesting content that they cannot get elsewhere.
  • Build your central location in a way that people can interact.
  • Use SEO; Use consulting

Twelve steps:

  • Provide good content should always be the key. Like gskinner and dougmccane you need a language/technology and you need to focus on that. Sorry but you can’t really be good on something if you’re always trying out different things.
  • Work on cool projects that you love. With people you love. Make things people want.
  • Start by solving your own problems.
  • Port your blog to a nice blogging engine and make it look nice.
  • Talk with a consultant to get your SEO skills up to date.
  • Have a “badge” for people to put on their sites and link to mine. This might be complicated, what would your badge be and why would be people link to you? Well people will link to you if you provide good and fresh content, that’s for sure, you probably don’t need the badge.
  • Make things that bring your local community together for a greater cause.
  • Talk with interesting people about interesting stuff and publish your conclusions.
  • Now is the time to bring out all your energy, all your passions, the best you want to do with the world. The time is now.
  • Test and benchmark cool and interesting stuff.
  • Document: Sounds boring ? Maybe, but you’ll be doing everybody a favour, not least yourself. Forcing yourself to explain things crystalises your own understanding.
  • There is an enormous need for testing guys. Help open-source projects by testing their code. Publish the results.
  • How can people interact with you? Twitter, comments on my blog. What other ways are out there? Friendfeed, Facebook, etc. explore those new mechanisms but in the end don’t forget about the basics. Maybe a mailing list or a google group works.
  • People like exclusive content: Organize something
  • Comment on other people’s blog. Please normally follow the links.

And you’re right, that was more than 12 steps :-)

Posted in Web

Life Timeline

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Using AOL’s CircaVie, which has recently shut down, you could make a timeline of your partners life from birth until now including all the “love-dovey” stuff you did together in between.

Capzles offers a similar service.

Timeline

Timeline

Now something that would do this automatically from Flickr would be awesome. And it could use geotagging as well.

Nginx and Memcached

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“If web architectures, performance, or scalability are topics you would like to keep on top of (who doesn’t!), then chances are, you’ve heard of Nginx (”engine x”). Originally developed by Igor Sysoev for rambler.ru (second largest Russian web-site), it is a high-performance HTTP server / reverse proxy known for its stability, performance, and ease of use. The great track record, a lot of great modules, and an active development community have rightfully earned it a steady uptick of users, and most recently, a notable mention in the Netcraft report.”

http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main

“Memcached, the darling of every web-developer, is capable of turning almost any application into a speed-demon. Benchmarking one of my own Rails applications resulted in ~850 req/s on commodity, non-optimized hardware – more than enough in the case of this application. However, what if we took Mongrel out of the equation? Nginx, by default, comes prepackaged with the Memcached module, which allows us to bypass the Mongrel servers and talk to Memcached directly. Same hardware, and a quick test later: ~3,550 req/s, or almost a 400% improvement! Not bad for a five minute tweak!”

“The only snag in our scheme for easy performance gains comes with the fact that more often than not, our application servers contain additional caching policies (read invalidations / authentication), and MIME type logic. The former, as recently documented by Tobias Lütke and Geoffrey Grosenbach, if properly thought through can be solved with some clever URL rewriting policies and automatic TTL timeouts. When implemented correctly, we could simply set the memcached key to be the full request URL, allowing us to completely bypass our app. servers.”

from http://www.igvita.com/2008/02/11/nginx-and-memcached-a-400-boost/