php 5

I moved from static HTML pages to web applications and back to static HTML files. There’s a lot to be said for the simplicity and portability of a bunch of files. Static site generators like Jekyll are increasingly popular; I’ve built a simple publisher that I use extensively. Web apps give you something else, though, that are still useful on a static site. Access control. I’ve been resorting to htpasswd to protect static files, and it’s far from optimal. I don’t want to know or manage users’ passwords. I don’t want them to remember a new ID. I just want to allow specific people to log in via their Google Accounts. (OpenID is too confusing, and most people use Google anyway.) ...

Yesterday, I wrote about node.js being fast. Here are some numbers. I ran Apache Benchmark on the simplest Hello World program possible, testing 10,000 requests with 100 concurrent connections (ab -n 10000 -c 100). These are on my Dell E5400, with lots of application running, so take them with a pinch of salt. PHP5 on Apache 2.2.6 <?php echo “Hello world” ?> 1,550/sec Base case. But this isn’t too bad Tornado/Python See Tornadoweb example 1,900/sec Over 20% faster Static HTML on Apache 2.2.6 Hello world 2,250/sec Another 20% faster Static HTML on nginx 0.9.0 Hello world 2,400/sec 6% faster node.js 0.4.1 See nodejs.org example 2,500/sec Faster than a static file on nginx! I was definitely NOT expecting this result… but it looks like serving a static file with node.js could be faster than nginx. This might explain why Markup.io is exposing node.js directly, without an nginx or varnish proxy. ...

I’ve been going around setting up open source software a fair bit recently. To minimise the pain of explaining it, I’m putting together a short videos that explain the process. Here’s the first, on XAMPP, which is a starting point for most open source applications. It bundles Apache (web server), MySQL (database), Perl and PHP. To install it, search and download “XAMPP for Windows”, and press enter for every question. Then install your application under C:\xampp\htdocs. That’s it. ...

With all the discussion around URL shorteners, Diggbar, blocking it, and the rev=canonical proposal, I decided to implement a URL shortening service on this blog with the least effort possible. This probably won’t impact you just yet, but when tools become more popular and sophisticated, it would hopefully eliminate the need for tinyurl, bit.ly, etc. Since the blog runs on WordPress, every post has an ID. The short URL for any post will simply be http://www.s-anand.net/the_ID. For example, http://s-anand.net/17 is a link to post on Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude D420. At 21 characters, it’s roughly the same size as most URL shorteners could make it. ...

One of the reasons I moved to WordPress was the ability to write posts offline, for which I use Windows Live Writer most of the time. The beauty of this is that I can preview the post exactly as it will appear on my site. Nothing else that I know is as WYSIWYG, and it’s very useful to be able to type knowing exactly where each word will be. The only hitch is: if you write your own WordPress theme, Live Writer probably won’t be able to detect your theme — unless you’re an expert theme writer. ...