Thursday, February 4, 2010
Link To Full Story: High Scalability
Lots of cool stuff happening this week...
- Voldemort gets rebalancing. It's one thing to shard data to scale, it's a completely different level of functionality to manage those shards intelligently. Voldemort has stepped up by adding advanced rebalancing functionality: Dynamic addition of new nodes to the cluster; Deletion of nodes from cluster; Load balancing of data inside a cluster.
- Microsoft Finally Opens Azure for Business. Out of the blue Microsoft opens up their platform as a service service. Good to have more competition and we'll keep an eye out for experience reports.
- New details on LinkedIn architecture by Greg Linden. LinkedIn appears to only use caching minimally, preferring to spend their efforts and machine resources on making sure they can recompute computations quickly than on hiding poor performance behind caching layers.
- The end of SQL and relational databases? by David Intersimone. For new projects, I believe, we have genuine non-relational alternatives on the table (pun intended).
- HipHop for PHP: Move Fast. When you make millions of widgets saving pennies per widget quickly adds up to real money. Facebook released HipHop, a PHP compiler, aimed at shaving off cycle of CPU and bytes of memory in production of their social widgets.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Link To Full Story: developers.facebook.com
One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.
Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.
HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Link To Full Story: www.readwriteweb.com
Update: Facebook officially announced the project, titled HipHop, this morning and confirmed that it would be released as open source this evening. Facebook will be hosting a talk at 7:30 PST with PHP developers to get into the specifics. The talk will be streamed live on Ustream. Developers are encouraged to comment on RWW's open thread discussing the implications of the PHP runtime rewrite.
Richard Crowley, an engineer at OpenDNS who is familiar with the project, told us that David Recordon, an engineer at Facebook, invited him to come to Facebook's headquarters Tuesday morning but wouldn't give a reason. Crowley mused to us that it was likely his PHP skills and personal connections that got him through the doors and clued us in on what he thinks will be going on behind them.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Link To Full Story: www.codediesel.com
Google Analytics has become a important part of any web sites traffic analysis strategy. And with the release of the Analytics API people have been able to create custom reports and mashups for their organizations. Although no standard library is available from Google for PHP, some small and easy interfaces are available out there. In this post we will see how to access Google Analytics data using PHP using the GAPI library.
Installing the GAPI class
The following code uses the GAPI - Google Analytics API PHP Interface to help us access the Analytics data. So before proceeding you need to download the class file from the GAPI home.
Link To Full Story: papermashup.com
As the title describes we’re going to look at making cross domain ajax requests using JSONP I’m also going to show you how to get data from a MySQL database and encode it into a JSON string which can be parsed using JavaScript. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and essentially its a method which allows us to execute cross domain ajax requests without too much fuss. This post really follows on from my article about scraping content from a page but also allows you to send and receive GET variables through the JSON request.
What we’re going to build
To give this tutorial a valid example we’re going to display a selection of product in a gallery as seen in the image below, click here to see the demo page.
Link To Full Story: woorkup.com
When developing any new WordPress theme, I really do try and integrate as much of the functionality I want to accomplish without the use of third party plugins. Don’t get me wrong, I think plugins are great, and WordPress would not be the same without them. For me, it’s more the challenge of seeing if I can figure it out on my own. In one of my more recent themes, I wanted to integrate a Flickr gallery and found that it was actually pretty easy to do by parsing the Flickr RSS feed using the fetch_feed() function already built into WordPress (for a practical reference guide to WordPress download Antonio Lupetti’s WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet).
Link To Full Story: www.wpbeginner.com
A while back we shared how you can control your WordPress RSS Footer with a use of a famous plugin called RSS Footer by Joost. While the plugin is great, but it is very limited. You can only add text to the footer, and it is always the same text displayed on each post’s footer. What if you want to display different text for each post in your RSS post? What if you want specific posts to have a different title in RSS Feeds? What if you want to display a specific custom field in your RSS Feeds? Well this is why we present you this article which will show you how to add any type of content in your WordPress RSS Feeds. This hack will put you in control of your WordPress RSS Feeds and you can manipulate it in anyway you want.
Note: This hack is not for beginners. Only users who feel comfortable with editing functions.php file and have some knowledge of php should try this. Beginner users should either use the plugin mentioned in the article above, or consult professionals like us to do it for you.
1. Add a Custom Field to your WordPress RSS Footer
In this first example, we will show you how you can use custom field to display specific text/object in your WordPress RSS Feed. This trick will allow you to show different text, advertisement, image, or anything else for each post. First open your functions.php and paste the following codes in the php tags:
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Link To Full Story: Webmonkey
From the weekend desk, two items announced late Friday afternoon we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you about.
First, Google is officially dropping support for IE6. Come March 1st, the company is also going to start phasing out support for other older browsers from Apple, Mozilla and Google itself, but IE6 is the one everyone’s most happy to see gone. The notoriously buggy browser is still supported by some institutions and large organizations. The new minimum browser requirements in Google Apps will be Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.
Second, Mozilla has launched Firefox for mobiles running Nokia’s Maemo operating system. This is the first official 1.0 version of Mobile Firefox, and the first mobile browser ever to support add-ons. We took it for a test drive when it was still in beta and found it to be quite slick.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Link To Full Story: www.webmonkey.com
It’s official, your Firefox syncing prayers have been answered — Weave 1.0 has arrived.
Weave is a free add-on for Firefox that syncs your data — bookmarks, browsing history, open tabs, Personas and stored passwords — across multiple PCs running Firefox and supported mobile devices. Weave is currently an add-on available through Mozilla Labs, but look for Weave to become a part of Firefox itself later this year.
Link To Full Story: www.seomoz.org
The
launch of
Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we've ever had before. In that same vein, today we're announcing our new and improved
SEOmoz Free API.
Any
registered (it's free) SEOmoz member can visit our
API Portal and get an
API key that gives you access to:
- Data for any URL in our index including
- Domain and Page Authority
- mozRank
- total link count
- external, followed link count
- The first 500 links to any page, sub domain or domain
- Filtering on those links: 301s, Follows, External, etc.
- The first 3 domains linking to any page, sub domain or domain
- The first 3 anchor text terms or phrases in links to any page, sub domain or domain