Blogs

In my continued efforts to make the site run faster, I’ve set my sights on query caching on MySQL. I think query caching is turned on by default when you install MySQL. At least for me, I didn’t have to do anything. I notice it’s been working because whenever I run a query a second time, it’s always significantly faster.

As a fan of both Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, I’ve been following news about “The Tonight Show” saga. For the record, I’m with Team Coco, but I’m not going to let that cloud my analysis. Lately, I’ve stumbled upon a series of misleading and biased articles by TVByTheNumbers.com regarding “The Tonight Show” ratings.

HTC's Sense UI runs on top of Windows Mobile 6.5 on the HD2, providing a better UI and convenient shortcuts to Windows Mobile apps. It's finger-friendly and hides most of WM 6.5's software and interface flaws. Sense UI is a slick and mostly well thought-out interface, but it has a few shortcomings of its own. On the home tab, the first screen you see when you power up the phone, the quick links to your favorite apps are limited to nine; the calendar contains only one entry; and there's no task list. Co0kie's Home Tab (CHT) fills these voids.

Stories about Chatroulette's spiraling traffic caused by guys showing their joystick every 10 seconds brought back memories of another site brought down by the same bodily member.

About a month ago, if you want access to your Dropbox files from your Windows Mobile phone, your only option is Ruttensoft's CloudFiles. Now, they have a competitor - Droppedboxx. It's not as fully featured as CloudFiles, but it gets the job done, especially if all you want to do is ftp between your phone and your Dropbox account.

The only feature I miss from CloudFiles is the internal text editor, but I can live without it. Price wise, the official releases for Cloud Files and Droppedboxx are $6.99 and $2.99 respectively.

I just installed Read It Later and Screengrab for Firefox and Firebug Lite for Chrome. All three add-ons/extensions are really helpful in my day-to-day management of Wopular.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

As you could probably tell by my latest entries, I've been spending the last couple weeks finding different ways to monetize the site. Wopular has about 400k-500k unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. That's a decent amount of users. It's about time I stopped coding new features and started earning. There's a certain challenge with monetizing an aggregation site, but I'm not gonna talk in depth about it here. I'll save that for another article. Mainly, it's that the average user only views a couple pages, compare to several with the average content site.

In my attempt to diversify revenue on Wopular, I'm throwing in another kind of ads -- in-text advertising. These are ads you see when you hover over keywords that are double-underlined. They're great because you can use them along with display advertising, thus providing an additional source of revenue without cannibalizing your existing ad inventory. Currently, the two most popular in-text advertising networks are Kontera and Infolinks.

Dropbox has became an indispensable web development tool for me. It lets you share and sync files across multiple computers - your desktop, laptop, and netbook. It also keeps a history of your edits, like google docs. I use it as a poor man's svn to keep track of my edits to pages on Wopular, in addition to syncing design comps, and to-do lists. Since I already use my HD2 to pick stores to feature on the site, I thought wouldn't it be nice if I could also do some coding with it.