Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 15th through April 17th:

• Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step – Compress text files with gzip to reduce file size/bandwidth, the incremental cpu cost is usually low relative to the performance gain from lower network cost. Friendfeed uses nginx in front of main web servers for this.
• Jabbify – Free Comet web service and browser client for simple chat and streaming status applications.
• TinEye Image Search Engine – Idée Inc. – The Visual Search Company – Finds references to images online, starting with an original image. Attempts to use image analysis to be independent of scaling, cropping, and other common manipulations.
• All That Twitters Isn’t Gold: A Popular Web Application in Search of a Business Plan – Knowledge@Wharton – Business school take on Twitter and high growth, non-revenue consumer web startups.
• Almost Viral: A Hybrid Acquisition Strategy – "By being almost viral you can grow very cheaply, control your rate of growth and demographics, and get enough traffic to conduct meaningful experiments. Need to grow more slowly? Just decrease your daily ad spend. Need statistically significant results more quickly? Increase your daily ad spend. With a viral coefficient of 0.9 you’ve dealt with your acquisition risk. Rather than going fully viral and dealing with the operational difficulties, it might be worth your time to deal with other market risks: retention, engagement, and monetization. "

These are my links for February 25th through February 26th:

• Urbantastic – Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits – More on making use of more capable clients. "In most frameworks, dynamic data and static HTML templates are first combined on the server and then sent to the client. However, now that Javascript is usable, performing the combination on the client side is a very attractive alternative."
• John Resig – Talk: Performance Improvements in Browsers – Video and slides from Feb 2009 presentation at Google on trends in Javascript performance, web applications, making use of higher performance, stateful browser clients.
• The Bayeux Protocol – specification for publish-subscribe on comet/HTTP
• Introduction to Bayeux Protocol (HTTP Publish-Subscribe) – Overview of publish-subscribe with bayeux and comet.
• Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way – Axon Flux – A Ruby on Rails Blog – Practical notes on scalable web development from a Rails perspective, much of this is generally applicable.
• Rate limiting with memcached – Using memcached to maintain state to limit API and other network interactions by IP address, user ID, etc. This is the method used to implement API rate limits at Twitter.