1,

ancient_browser “msie 6.0″;

Whether quotes, like on the nginx site, capitalized or not, or unquoted as it is here:

http://gist.github.com/228769

(linked to from the main site), the instruction: if ($ancient_browser) is true for the google bot. If you want your site crawled this ain’t so good. In fact, horrible.

2.

As mentioned before try_files appears to do nothing at all. Instead one can use if -f filename. This generates an error for each try in the error.log.

3.

When performing a break at the end of a rewrite or in an if (…) { break; } what this does is send the process back to the top of the configuration file again, this time with the new modified $filename_uri ($request_uri is not changed by rewrites, tho you can assign it a new value, if I remember correctly)

4.

Our backend is an apache on a different ip. We needed to use:

resolver: xx.xx.xx.xx

and the x ip worked whether we used the ip of the backend, or ips found in /etc/resolv.conf. Nginx did seem to need this instruction regardless.

5.

For speed (and in our case to make things work) we added several lines like:

location = /robots.txt {
location = /favicon.ico {
and for the top level sitemap.

which are called quite frquently and the ‘=’ comparison is reported by nginx to be the fastest and first omparisions made when a url is received.

Finally figured out that the issue here is that there is no abstraction of the concept of ‘variable’ to include both variables and aliases. So everything depends on context and which command is being used - which creates redundant functionality and unpredictability.

Same for location etc.

This lack of ability to use and apply abstract concepts and constructs leads to a ton of ’special cases’ and ’special purpose’ one-off code. Very little is generalizable. And this seems to be OK and the way many people [I would call them junior] think - for example the recommended code to remove a leading www. from urls happens to remove ALL sub domains as well. I.E. special purpose but not narrowly defined. Oh boy.

No versions associated with the documentation, so you never know that ‘try_files’ does not work, for example, until you try it. Wasting some time.

Oh and what happened to plugins? This compiling in modules at compile time seems a bit … unwieldy. And no, it can’t be for speed… so… yes, generic plugin APIs are HARD [it is the ONLY thing that Eclipse got right (the code, the SWT, GED, it all sucks) and boy did they get it RIGHT. So it is not only hard, it can make a product very successful as well].

The pluses here, though, are pretty good error reporting [way better than Varnish so far] even though the error log appears to be missing a lot of debug information [I must be doing something wrong, where ‘notice’ and ‘debug’ have the same output]. I also presume that the reliability at its primary job of serving up data to clients is pretty high, based on its reputation.

Anyway, based on the popularity of all these newish web servers Mattters has changed the Apache channel to the Web Server Channel and we will add more links and support for Nginx and Varnish, Lighttpd etc over time

Using somewhat heuristically based algorithms, one can classify blog posts and tweets, and in particular, tweeps, into several common categories for the purpose of assigning a relevance and usefulness level to a poster of information, in particular to other people outside their inner circle.

1. Chit chat: communicating with friends

2. Promotion: most of the posts are links to a particular product or blog

3. News disseminator: many links to stories found in many places on the net

4. Observer: observations and comments about what is happening

Some people have posts/tweets that fall into multiple of these categories, and often they will is some large part mimic the others in their inner circle.

One can’t help but observe that the number of followers / readers (aka success) typically is inversely related to the number of the category on this list. (i.e. observers / pundits get most of the traffic and interest on average)

This success function is easy to see with, say, Justin Bieber’s tweeps where just a few popular tweeps post observations and comments - but who are also the most popular tweeps.

The Tweeps for Wine are more balanced, many chatting a little, but mostly observing and disseminating news. The High-end Audio tweeps, however, are mostly promotional, with just a little news dissemination thrown in.

Typically, most sites default to a relatively flat hierarchy of programming languages. You know Java, C++, JavaScript, Ruby, Flash etc.

For example dzone and stackoverflow are mostly like this.

Another hardly ever used classification scheme would be to organize things by software platform:

Weblogic, JBoss, Linux, Windows, Firefox, Chrome, etc.

No one does that ASFIK

Another is by target hardware platform location:

desktop, smart phone, serverside, medical equipment, kiosk

No one does this either ASFIK

Another is to organize things by domain:

medical, space, business, entertainment

No one does this either ASFIK. Lame ain’t we.

Finally, one can organize by information assumptions type:

tips, Q&A, engineering, craft, quick&easy

and in general the sites themselves are implicitly organized (separated) into this scheme.

Software is one of the most prevalent topics on the internet, lots of data points here :-)

Understanding charts helps you to make better trades - whether you are day trading, long term stock trading, long term investing, or buying on home.

At its core, charts are a graphical visualization of human behavior.

Like, for example, humans visiting a website.

I am forgetting some of the terminology after 10 years (yay!) but can still read a chart: Bollinger bands, day, weekly and month trendlines, gaps and filling gaps, retrenchments… All of this knowledge can be applied to your website statistics.

Not sure if this helps with SEO necessarily. More likely it tells you when to make a major push on your online marketing campaign because, for example, your highs and lows are converging to a single value and your traffic is going to gap down or up real-soon-now. And you would most likely want it to go UP!

And, finally, an idea for all you website/twitter analytics start-ups… try using some of the well known stock chart visualization techniques (Yahoo Finance is a really great site for examples). A great differentiator… and useful too :-)

And we thought THAT was bad. Ha!

Now we have Apple, with its (yes, it is theirs, who else would want it?) horrifically antique Objective-C giving us yet another hurdle with the iPhone SDK. OK, so write twice run everywhere, right? We just have to delay every release, reduce overall functionality, and release that Objective-C is for baby apps, and not try anything that is real and substantial with it if we want our sanity to survive until 2112 (when we all die anyway, right? :-))

Then we have Google’s Android and Android development and Java (better than Objective-C, by a million miles of gray hair, yes indeed, but still growing a little moldy on the vine) but at least they allow cross compiling (unlike Apple).

Now we have the iPad.

So the write once, write twice, uh write four times, run a lot of places paradigm is kaput.

Small developers just do not have the resources to develop for four platforms. So they will have to pick one. Let’s see…. the internet? Kind of crowded with 100M’s of competitors. The smart phone? Like the CD ROM apps before it, all the baby apps have been done to death - the next gen smart phone apps will have to have a substantial back end that provides some kind of interesting functionality (i.e. not Foursquare).

So that leaves the iPad. So all the small developers have to develop for it because they at least have a chance [and it is cool and fun, too, which doesn’t hurt :-)]. And large developers have the resources to throw money at everything. But how about the little guy who has already started developing for platform X - what do they do? They can’t afford to add support for yet another platform. They bite their fingernails.

It’d be fun. But 1.0 of Apple products look so anemic in the rear-view mirror.

But, waiting for 2.0 (3.0?) takes so much patience. *Argh!*

Reading all about the iPad on theiPad News channel.

The iPad is underrated. The iPad is overrated.

It is probably both - like most things. :-)

and I do not even want to THINK about whether they are going to try to lock us into some kind of Objective C nonsense for the iPad.

Why do we always have to rely on Google (a monopoly) to bail us out of stupid and aggravating monopolistic tendencies of the old school monopolies.

The Padroid?

We had several requirements, many of which are not common:

* We needed 40, 50 or more buttons on a page.
* We needed each button to retweet a story whose url and title was not the url or title of the current page

We looked at TweetMeme’s button:

TweetMeme Retweet Button

and Topsy’s button:

Topsy Retweet Button

at the time, I do not think TweetMeme allowed us to set the title of the retweet, preferring instead to fetch the title from the url we specified (which was sloooow)

They both ended up being kind of slow for us. We had 40 or 50 to add to each page which was taking 2 or 3 seconds.

Then we found another approach on John Resig’s blog

Easy Retweet Button

This approach was much faster, and allowed us to have much more control over the bitly-ification and the fetching of the current ‘number of retweets’ to display.

Oh, and of course we have John Resig’s blog on the Mattters JavaScript News Channel :-)

It is an attempt to provide full real-time coverage of all sorts of topics like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Beer, and other good things like that as well as things like gadgets.