Sara Smith Interviewd Matt Mullenweg who you might know from Wordpress. When I was working for 451 Press we were getting so much traffic that the servers couldn’t handle the load. Wordpress, like any database driven site, can put quite a strain on a server. The majority of that being from mysql queries. The bad part of these kinds of site is that the pages rarely update. Pages like the front page update a few times a day, as do the category pages, but they don’t change that often. Actual posts and pages only update whenever an author edits them, which is not that often. Part of the http header response is whether or not a page can or should be cached. Wordpress specifically tells the browser NOT to cache any pages generated by WP. Squid, setup as a revers proxy or caching server can let you cache a tremendous amount of pages with very little overhead relieving the load on your web server.

The problem is Squid obeys Wordpress’ request to “not cache” those pages. The end result is that Squid will cache images, css, etc. but not the pages themselves. While this is a still a big improvement as static files get served from cache freeing up your web server to churn out more Wordpress pages it could still be better.

One thing we did to help reduce the amount of mysql queries was use WP-Cache. Matt mentions in the interview that Wordpress 2.4, which is due out pretty soon, will have the new version of WP-Cache built into the core. It’ll be disabled by default but you’ll be able to turn it on if you like. This is a big step forward in making WP more cache friendly. Add this to Squid with a dash of memcached and opcode caching and you could serve many, many, many times more pages than you were able to previously. This is the magic formula to surviving a Digg or slashdot or just a very popular site that gets lots of traffic. You might first be inclined to setup several web servers and do some load balancing or something like that but caching is cheaper and pretty easy to setup. If your site is still getting more traffic than your cache can handle then you can load balance your cache servers!

I’m just happy to see Wordpress addressing something like this. As more sites use WP and become popular they are going to need this. It’s no longer just a need of large blog networks.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, 2.4, Cache, WP-Cache, Squid

John Chow says “there is no secret formula” and it’s something I believe to the very core of my being. I used to think there was some “magic” out there for just about everything. You go around reading up on anything looking for the key to it and you’ll find people trying to sell you their secret sauce. While there are certainly specific tips to doing anything worth doing the formula is always the same. John mentions diet as an example and I can testify to that. I’ve done a lot of research on losing weight and getting healthy, mainly so I knew what I was doing. I was never under the delusion that there was a magic formula to help me lose weight I was just looking for great exercise, healthy food choices and just educating myself on nutrition and health. Almost all the resources I went to were trying to sell “weight loss secrets”. There aren’t any.

The secret to succeeding at anything is putting in the hours and dedicating yourself to the process. For web sites that means create a good site, work at getting traffic and maximizing your ad space. That’s where the specifics do come in and you can learn from other people or experiment on your own. But the basic formula never changes. Of course you’ll hear people selling the get rich schemes and 99% of the time they’ll sell you an ebook on how to sell ebooks to people. If your not prepared to work for it then don’t bother trying.

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Caroline left a comment suggesting a site called Maatiam for shopping on line. The catch is Maatiam donates a portion of the purchases to charity and you get to pick the charity. As I’ve been doing this Internet thing a long time now I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a scam before I passed it along and did some digging. I couldn’t find anything negative about the project and people only had good things to say. It looks like Maatiam has been around at least 2 years and the best part of the idea is:

• You don’t pay any extra. You get to shop a top stores that you know and love like Amazon, Buy.com, Target, etc. and you get the same prices you normally would.
• You get to pick the charity! Maatiam has over 800,000 charities to choose from so you should be able to find one that works for you.

The way this works is pretty slick. The reason you don’t have to pay extra is that Maatiam has signed up to the affiliate programs for all these retailers and gets paid a commission on everything people buy. Maatiam donates approximately 7% of the sales to the charity of your choice keeping only about 3% for costs and overhead.

While this is slightly off topic here I think it’s a great cause and a great example of how to use the Internet and the affiliate marketing concept to do something that can have an impact on real peoples lives. I’m about to start doing the online portion of my Christmas shopping and I plan on using Maatiam.

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As I think about what project to do next my mind is always drawn back to doing an affiliate site. I know I won’t be ready in time for Cyber Monday this year but I’ve seen a lot of people getting ready for it. For those who don’t know, Cyber Monday is one of the biggest online shopping days of the Christmas shopping season. It’s the Monday following Black Friday, the big sale day after Thanksgiving.

I know what I’d be doing if I had my site up already.

• Make sure all my sites were up, responding and all affiliate links were working!
• Make sure popular items this season were featured promenantly
• List special deals such as coupons, free shipping, bonus items etc.
• Email my “list” to make sure they know about the sales and link to specific hot deals
• Offer shopping tips for getting the items you want for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Update frequently to keep them coming back.

And I’m sure there are tons of other great tips. Do you have an affiliate site of any kind? What are you doing to get ready?

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If I haven’t mentioned it before I really like the new design I did for Chrispian.com. It’s not fancy, it’s not going to win any design awards but it I like it. It’s wider, cleaner and has more room for me to do the kinds of things I want to do. It’s not Bulletproof yet and I still need to streamline the CSS / Wordpress theme but it’s a big step in the right direction. I designed it with the idea that I could use it for my other sites as well and it lends itself to different colors and other bits that’ll make it look different despite being pretty much the same. So I decided to give Twitter Hacks a shot using the new design and overall I’m pretty pleased with it. Now to figure out what to do next!

Technorati Tags: Twitter Hacks, Wordpress, Redesign

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