Note From The Editor, Coding | featured news

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.

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.

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.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I've started working for BookTeller.com, a website that offers animated children's books with voice-over narration for a monthly subscription fee. It's a great educational tool for parents and teachers to teach kids how to read.

FireFox 3.6 is officially released today. After 3.5's browser freezing problems which caused me to downgrade to 3.0, I was kinda reluctant to upgrade. I did it anyway, and to my surprise, it was as advertised.

A new tracking code from Google Analytics was released recently. GA is a free web traffic reporting tool that let's you track how many users are viewing your website. The new code snippet uses an asynchronous process, meaning your site would load up without having to wait for the tracking code to finish executing.