A Primer on Responsive Web Design

Ben Callahan from Sparkbox shared some good links on responsive web design recently, one of them being this introduction to the subject from A List Apart. One of the things that struck me from the article was that “[mobile] browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.” Another link to Smashing Magazine was a […]

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Performance Improvements for Dedicated WordPress Servers

Mark Maunder benchmarked several performance tuning measures with a WordPress installation on a VPS server to show which are most effective. The biggest improvements were from installing PHP-APC, setting up Nginx to proxy concurrent connections for Apache, and using MySQL’s query cache.

Patent Trolling

NPR has a really good article on the absurd state of patents in the U.S. ” ‘We’re at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every behavior that’s happening on the Internet or our mobile phones today,’ says Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist. ‘[T]he average Silicon Valley start-up or […]

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Passing Multi-Dimensional Arrays from WordPress to JavaScript

On its own wp_localize_script() can’t handle multi-dimensional arrays, but you can get around that by encoding the child arrays in JSON. That doesn’t handle HTML content very well, though, so another way to do it is to use the l10n_print_after parameter. That’s kind of ugly, but it seems like the best way available right now. It […]

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Tweaking Apache Settings for VPSs

Apache’s default settings assume it’s running under a dedicated box with at least 2GB of RAM, so they don’t perform very well in a VPS that may only have 500MB. I recently made some tweaks to several VPS’s that reduced memory usage by 300-400MB without degrading performance. Apache Performance Tuning is a good article that […]

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Creating an OpenVZ Template From an Existing VPS

I recently setup a VPS on a new OpenVZ node and wanted to use it as a template for future VPS’s created on that node.  The instructions in the wiki are actually overkill for this situation; here’s all I had to do: vzctl stop [vps id] Create /tmp/vz-template-exclude.txt and add these lines to it: .bash_history […]

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