End Your If

Category: Optimization

  • Simplifying the buzz word “Responsive Design”

    Every so often there is a new buzz word in the web development/design industry.  A few years ago it was HTML5 and CSS3.  Now it seems to be “responsive design”.  And of course this makes a lot of sense.  With more and more Internet users accessing the content on their laptop or desktop PC, tablets, and mobile phones, websites need to be able to be ready to serve up the content in an appropriate fashion.

    In this article, I want to take a step back and help simplify this process because by stopping and thinking just a little bit, it doesn’t need to be complicated.  In fact it’s quite simple.

    At the time of writing this article, my blog is only about 50% responsive, I am planning a new design soon that will take it to the next level.

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  • Node.js Versus Nginx: Bare Bones Test

    This is a quick follow up to yesterday’s post on Node.js Versus Apache2: Bare Bones Test where I performed a straight HTML test of Node.js tutorial versus Apache.  With my recent switch to Nginx, I thought it prudent to perform this exact same test swapping out Apache for Nginx.  The results are much more interesting to yesterday’s since there is no total destruction (sorry for the spoiler if you didn’t read yesterday’s article).

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  • Node.js Versus Apache2: Bare Bones Test

    I’ve written a few recent articles on Node.js, mostly to familiarize myself with the effort involved in creating basic applications with it.  I have yet to use it in production, mostly because I’m just not sure how ready I am to use it on a large project…

    I have been quite curious with performance compared to the standard tools that I’ve used forever and ever.  In the following article, I’m going to do some basic comparisons between Node and Apache2 performance.

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  • PHP: Single Quotes versus Double Quotes

    I always enjoy doing interviews and asking potential candidates what the difference between single quotes and double quotes are in PHP.  Most people have the basic understanding that single quotes are not interpreted by the compiler whereas double quotes are processed while the page is being executed.  The follow up question is typically which one they prefer; this answer is always 50/50.  I have always been a fan of single quotes thinking them to be faster…

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  • Upgrading my Blog – The Final Saga!

    Several of my recent posts have been discussing my recent move to Amazon EC2 and updating, first to a LEMP stack, and then to a LEPP stack, which all provided great speed increases.  However, can you really be satisfied with a slightly faster loading WordPress blog, especially when my CPU was dying regularly with 100% usage?  I certainly couldn’t, especially when YSlow was giving me such a bad rating that I had really no control over…

    Firstly, a big shout out must go to Nesbot.com; he was so kind to share his custom blog code that he built using SlimPHP.  Of course I had to add a few features myself – including my fancy Twitter slider – and an importer from my WordPress blog into this new blog structure.

    If you look at the screenshot to the right, you can see  exactly when I switched two other sites to use this code on the 22nd of September!

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