Speed is a Good Thing ™ when it comes to your site loading. Generally speaking, if people can’t start interacting with your site quickly, meaning within a few seconds of when they first get there, your engagement numbers are going to plummet. The folks over at Google are keenly aware of this and have therefore introduced a new protocol called SPDY which is designed to make the initial load time of modern web pages faster. It’s already in use at places such as GMail and Twitter, so this is not just a theoretical endeavor. My friends over at Automattic sponsored an initial implementation of SPDY for the Nginx web server, and I’ll explain how to use this cool new tech on your own sites.
A Close One
I’m happy that Obama won the election. I don’t think he’s by any means perfect, but I definitely don’t want a commander in chief who believes he’s going to get his own planet after he dies. That said, my happiness about Obama’s reelection is tempered by the fact that the popular vote was almost dead even. As a country, we really are very divided about who we are and where we want to go in the future. It’s going to take a lot of work to achieve the kind of unity we’ll need to make any truly substantive forward progress.
so i put the blog back online
I took the site down for a while as I wasn’t ever posting anything. But now that posting things hasn’t been an option, of course I want to post things. So I’ve put it back up. My interest was in no small part because I’m looking to figure out a pretty idealized hosting setup for a single VPS WordPress installation again. To that end, I’m using a nice modern version of PHP, and I’m running a build of Nginx that has the SPDY patch applied and the Naxsi firewall module added. I’ll be playing around with these over the next few days, if anything interesting comes up I’ll (hopefully) post it here.