This work by Stephane KATTOOR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Category: Web
This is nothing new, but just in case you missed it, Yahoo! published a fairly detailed report about how to speed up your website response times : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site.
Many of the tips are common sense, some are somehow unexpected, and some I didn’t know like the HTTP/1.1 header ETAG. Let’s see what that’s about.
If you need to simulate a load on an Apache server (or any web server actually), you can use Apache Bench, which is included in the standard Apache HTTPd distribution. This tool will launch connections to your webserver as instructed to simulate multiple users and will help you to tune your Apache settings.
You can find the synopsis at the Apache website. Most common options are :
- -n : number of requests to perform
- -c : number of concurrent requests
Other options allow you to control precisely the request to send, proxy settings, user authentication, cookies and much more.
Question to readers : Which HTTP load tester do YOU use ? TIA for sharing !
ReviewMe aims at connecting advertisers and publishers (including bloggers) so that publishers will get paid to write reviews on their site about a product or a website.
As obvious as this is, it is designed so that bloggers will get money from the time they spend on their blogs and advertisers will get better quality advertisement. But if you are not interested by the financial aspect, you might still be interested in using ReviewMe to find the best blogs about the subjects you like.
read this entry »
I accessed my “Google Personnalized Homepage” today morning only to discover that the page logo now displays iGoogle instead of the classic and usual Google… I was wondering what it was, as the logo is not clickable with a link to an explanation as I hoped it would be …
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Tan Tan Noodles’s wordpress reports plugin has just been updated as announced on the plugin’s homepage :
Bug Fixes: WordPress Reports (0.81) : tan tan noodles – msg free since 2005
A bug fix release for the WordPress Reports plugin is now available for download.
If you are using WordPress+Google Analytics+FeedBurner then this plugin is a must : it will let you get the main reports of both statistics tools directly from you WordPress admin interface. read this entry »
WordPress is a great blogging platform, which will let you easily publish your blog. Now, considering the amount of time you’ll probably spend writing contents, you might want to get money from it (all work deserves money, right ? 
).
I’ll show you how to do this easily, by using the advertisement program of Google : AdSense.
read this entry »
A little follow up on yesterday article about scripting Twitter with cURL: the solution was working, but somehow inconvenient. Not practical to have to go and fetch the user id every time you want to send a direct message !
This time, I scripted Twitter direct message with Perl and LWP (libwww-perl), for a much more convenient solution. I designed it to be used like a sort of universal paging service.
Twitter already provides an API but it is currently very limited. It will let you fairly easily change your status, but won’t let you send a direct message.
Comes in cURL. cURL is a very versatile command line utility which is designed to script web pages interactions. As a little demo, I’ll show you how to use it to easily overcome the shortcomings of Twitter’s API.
If you don’t know yet about Twitter, you might want to have a look at my previous article about it.
One of its neat features is the (previously written about) ability to send direct messages to your friends.
This feature will let you easily send free SMS from your computer to any of your friends. read this entry »
The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users » Slacker Manager
If you just want to send a note directly to someone, you can get them via the direct messages web interface.
Damn ! I’m a twitter user myself, but how could I have overlooked that “direct message” feature ? Now you can think of twitter as a unified messaging interface. If the personne you’re sending a message didn’t configure anything then the message will wait to be read on the website. If she configured IM and cell phone, then she’ll get it on the IM when online, on the cell phone when not. Pretty cool !
The rest of the quoted article is worth to be read !
