Web development is a very common hobby. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Whether it is or not, I’m a web developer. As such, I spend a fair amount of my spare time reading about web development, watching videos about web development and for sure doing web development. As I set out to install my development tools on my new computer I thought I would chronicle the process. If you’re interested in setting up your own web development platform using mostly open source tools then read on and check out my approach.
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SmugMug Photo Sharing and Video Sharing is a private and long term profitable Premium only commercial web site. Don MacAskill, the CEO of SmugMug, gave the keynote speech at a MySQL conference. Don posted the video of his speech on his blog. He is talking about the Percona builds of MySQL which is what I’m planning to deploy so I was eager to watch his presentation. It is a great summary of the architecture of SmugMug and the problems they are working to solve around MySQL. If you have an interest in web solution architectures you should absolutely check it out.
Today I watched the video of Steve Huffman who is a co-founder of reddit.com. You can catch the video here if you are interested in Steve’s perspective on “Lessons learned while at reddit.com.” He mentions several interesting technologies, but the one that got my attention was RabbitMQ. This could be because I named the first web engine I ever built Rabbit, but it’s more likely because I liked the idea of a message queue to speed up processing user requests. If you are building sites for scalability and performance you should look into messaging as a viable strategy to reduce user wait time.
WordPress is a great blogging platform, but out of the box there are many neat things that it does not do. Enter WordPress Plugins to close the functionality gap and make for happy users. This list is a revisiting of my favorite WordPress plugins. All of those listed are ones that I take advantage of on my blog. Here is the short and sweet list.
- Akismet – A spam blocker that traps comment spam and traceback spam before it gets published to your blog.
- Bad Behavior – A link spam blocker. I run both Bad Behavior and Akismet because I despise link spam bots.
- Browser Detection – This plugin was created by me to do simple browser detection. The code was mainly taken from the web, but I have been unsuccessful thus far at finding the original author or site so I could provide proper credit.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin updates major search engines to new entries on your blog. If you are ready to get serious about SEO this is the tool to start with.
- Graceful Pull-Quotes – Pull Quotes are a great way to add professional polish to your blog. This plugin is super easy to use to get your pull-quotes going.
- SexyBookmarks – My newest plugin addition. Sexy Bookmarks allows you to easily add Social Bookmarking Icons to each post.
- WP-Syntax – Powerful syntax highlighting using GeSHi.
Although that’s all the plugins I use, there are hundreds of useful plugins available for you to try. If you are still interested in other great plugins you should read the blog post 20 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Every Website by Amber Weinberg. This is a pretty good list to give you an idea of the amazing variety of plugins available for WordPress
Enjoy
I’m not an active Python developer at the moment, but I have been searching far and wide on the web for ORM solutions that might interest me. One Python based ORM which struck me as really interesting is SQLAlchemy. If you are interested in trying an ORM tool and you read the description on SQLAlchemy’s home page you would swear you had died and gone to ORM heaven! If this solution actually accomplishes what it claims then it could be a very interesting choice. I did not find a PHP port so I’ll have to keep looking for another PHP ORM that I’m interested in trying. Sigh.
