One of the funny observations as a web developer: It’s amazing how many people consider caching bad by definition. If you know what you’re doing, caching is an amazingly powerful tool, which can provide cheap and efficient scaling to those who know how to use it.

Know when it’s okay to cache

If thousands of people see the same non-personal frontpage of your website - do you then do the 20+ database queries to build a fresh one for each visitor or do you just refresh a cacheable version from time to time?

Many online sites such as news-sites and other content providers often have a “tip a friend” option. With this you can mail a friend and tell them about an interesting piece of content you’ve found. The Idea seems quite simple, and everyone should have the tip-option, wright? - no, wrong. While it may offer a convenience for some, it has several backsides.

First if you - or your email provider - has implemented anti-spam techniques such as SPF-records, the “tipping mail” will not be sent through the authorized list of mail-servers and thus have a larger likelihood of being labeled as spam. Your mail be sent, but you don’t know if it will arrive in your friends mailbox.

If you’re a developer and use mysql, I’m sure you’re aware that it’s a database and it quite good at storing data, but one of the neat things about Mysql (and most other databases) is also their ability to provide meta-data on the contents of the database.

Most people know how to use the meta-data queries in the commandline, but if you want you can also use them in your (php/perl/some-other- ) language. Here is a quick guide to some of them.

Backups seem to be a constant pain for just about everyone. It’s something we know we should do, but somehow never get around to actually doing. Since switching to Wordpress on this site, things have been different though.

One of my many installed wordpress Plugins is the Wordpress Backup plugin. It runs once a day and makes a complete backup of my wordpress database (with all these precious posts) and sends it in a mail to my Gmail-account.

Do you have a website? If so please go to the place you store the access logs, and check how much disk space they use. Having a website a few yours old, you’re probably looking at gigabytes, and what exactly is the value of that?

Sure keeping track of traffic levels is sort of interesting, but sometimes you need to balance the value provided by the space/resources required, and I’ve been slowly changing the way I use the access logs on this site.