Time will tell if the public embraces this new innovative look, but one thing’s for certain, this definitely reflects the spirit of that company.

Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages

(via Jay)

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I’ve known about high performance servers like lighttpd that have been around for a while, and the new up-and-comer Nginx. I tried them out and they are amazing at serving-up content (PHP, Perl, mono, Rails) but their proxy abilities are still in their infancy. For example, Nginx when acting as a proxy has a Memcached Module which can check Memcached for an object, before going back to the origin/upstream server. However, you have to load your cached items into Memcached yourself, so it’s very useful yet. (Sidenote: the Nginx project is very impressive and I’m definitely going to watch them over the next year). Squid is the obvious choice when it comes to “proxy” and “caching”, but the other projects seem to perform much better under stress; not to mention, Squid configuration for a reverse-proxy is horrible.

After a lot of messing around in /etc config files, I stumbled on Varnish. Varnish isn’t a proxy product or a server like the others. It was built from-the-ground-up to be an HTTP accelerator, and it shows. Configuration is very straight-forward if you’ve used a CDN before, and it can do a lot of URL rewriting, managing cookies, edge-server includes (ESI), backend health polling, and support for inline C. The docs leave a lot to be desired, but you can’t have everything

I got Varnish running on a Fedora virtual machine in Amazon EC2 with ./configure && make && make install. Then you just have to set-up a configuration via /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl and launch the daemon.

On ScribbleLive, we use an ASP.NET session (stored in Memcached, with SQL 2005 failover) to keep track of your login. But until you login, we don’t use the session for anything. So my caching strategy is this: cache everything (images, stylesheets, etc) including ASPX files without any Set-Cookie headers until you login, then don’t cache ASPX files. Logging in is done via an HTTP POST, so I just told Varnish to not cache POSTs, and strip all cookies from cached responses unless an “ASP.NET_SessionId” cookie was sent in the request.

Here’s the configuration file I’m using which seems to work great. It remains to be seen if I actually roll this out into Production sometime soon, but using it myself in our Staging environment, it gives a massive improvement in page loads and origin offload, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someday soon when you visit ScribbleLive, you’ll be going through Varnish

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I was happy to find that in .NET, a web application can access the processes running on the host server. I whipped up this little bit of C# (which will be on an ASPX page) to check for the processes, and report if they are “UP” or “DOWN”. Pingdom will then check for the word “DOWN” on a request to the page and let me know if it finds one.

Here are the using statements that you have to have for this code to run:

using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;

Then here’s the bulk of it:

Collection<string> RunningProcesses = new Collection<string>();
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program1" );
RunningProcesses.Add( "Program2" );

Response.ContentType = "text/plain";

foreach ( Process proc in Process.GetProcesses() )
{
    if ( RunningProcesses.Contains( proc.ProcessName ) )
    {
        Response.Write( proc.ProcessName + ": UP" + System.Environment.NewLine );
        RunningProcesses.Remove( proc.ProcessName );
    }
}

foreach ( string s in RunningProcesses )
{
    Response.Write( s + ": DOWN" + System.Environment.NewLine );
}

When I have a bit more time, I’m going to add a call to Process.Start(…) to restart and processes that have gone down. You know, at some point this code will probably make me unnecessary

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I have a copy of the theme files which I may post if they don’t come back soon, but for all those people already running the Brightness Theme, there are some issues if you upgrade your site to Wordpress 2.7. I’ve written this patch to fix the problems and get you up and running. There were just some minor problems with the setting screens and the “news sections” on the home page. Just drag these files into your /wp-content/themes/Brightness Theme/ directory and it should fix everything.

I hope those theme-ers at DailyWP.com come back some day; they did good work

UPDATE 12/26: I’ve gotten a few requests for the full theme, so I’ve included it below with the patch applied.

DOWNLOAD PATCH
DOWNLOAD FULL THEME

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Finally, by a painful process of elimination, it turned out to be a block of code like this in the ASPX file. At render, it was deciding whether to include a custom UserControl. While the code executed properly, the only hint of a problem was iistrace showing “IISISAPI: ISAPI_END – IIS ends processing an ISAPI Request” taking a long time.

<% if( IsSomething ) { %>

    <%@ Register src="~/Sidebar.ascx" tagname="SiteSidebar" tagprefix="MySite" %>
    <MySite:SiteSidebar runat="server" />

<% } %>

If you want to save yourself hours of grief, don’t do this I wonder if this is the problem with a certain video player

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If you’re thinking about starting an e-commerce store, the first thing I would do is estimate how many visits to your site would convert to a sale. Say 1 in 10,000 visitors decide to buy something, especially if you’re selling products that are available elsewhere. To generate that one sale, did you have to spend $5,000 ($0.50/Google Adword) in advertising dollars? How many hours of your/employee work did it take on top of that?

As you see, an e-commerce store without a proper strategy will just end-up soaking up time, money, etc. that could be better spent growing a non-e-commerce website into a destination which will be easy to monetize later. My advice is always, if you don’t have a fully-flushed out strategy for making money online, DON’T!

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[WebMethod]
public Post[] GetPostsSince( int ThreadId, DateTime Since )
{ ... }

But sometimes the array actually has objects of the type Comment, that is a derived class of Post. When I tried tried it out, it threw this exception:

System.InvalidOperationException: There was an error generating the XML document. —> System.InvalidOperationException: The type Comment was not expected. Use the XmlInclude or SoapInclude attribute to specify types that are not known statically.

The problem is that the Serializer doesn’t know about the Comment class until runtime, and it throws a tantrum. Luckily, the fix is just to put a directive in there to make sure it knows that the Comment class may be used.

In my case, I just added the XmlInclude directive right about my Post class declaration like this:

[Serializable()]
[XmlInclude( typeof( Comment ) )]
public class Post
{ ... }

And that did the trick! I hope this is helpful for someone else

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Here’s a tool that makes it a little easier to find a domain hack that works. But a good way to start might be to look at the domain extensions that are available (below) and work backwards. Like I said, .COM has about 21M registered domain names, but there’s some new ones that have less than one hundred registrations. For example, letsdi.sh is available or wobb.ly.

I give each of these domains about a year until the squatters completely corrupt them too, so get out there and register! Good luck!

(Domain Counts provided by Domain Worldwide.com)

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It kinda reminds me of a website I built in university called @Pad. It pulled the latest course news off websites by looking for dates in the format “##/##/#### ##:##”. It then grabbed whatever was the to the right of it. I might do the same for ScribbleLive one day to scrape in liveblogs from regular websites. Ya know, if I have a day to kill

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But with native support for Windows Server 2003 boxes from Amazon, now we’re talking. The cost per hour is a few cents more than the Linux distributions (to cover licensing fees I guess) but definitely doable. And with the new ElasticFox firefox extension, there’s no more mucking around on the command line to create and deploy instances.

Let this screenshot be a hint of the things to come

UPDATE: I just got the official mailing from Amazon talking about the launch of Windows servers. It also had a cool little look at their 2009 feature roll-out:

• Load balancing – Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto-scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Cloud monitoring – Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

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Today, I’d like to profile BlueHaze, a concert community site that spun out of CTV’s MTV Canada group. Founded by Mark Shedletsky in December 2006 while he worked at MTV Canada as the Head of Marketing & Brand Partnerships, BlueHaze has recent been reviewed by TechCrunch and has 6 employees.

I think it’s great that CTV, who owns two online music properties — MuchMusic and MTV Canada — is cool with a little competition from their former employees. In fact, a few of their employees are actually avid users of the site: Ryan Trotman the Director, MuchMusic & MTV Digital (CTV Music & Youth Services) at MuchMusic & MTV, and Mark Swierszcz the Senior Producer at MuchMusic and formerly MTV.

All the best to BlueHaze. Their traffic is certainly taking off

Or you can just set-up your own video site in 10 steps on Debian, but it’s really your option. Wow, broadband video is commonplace now

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Don’t get me wrong, Flash is definitely the way to go for video on the web right now. It’s cross-platform and YouTube helped establish it as the defacto standard. Of course, they didn’t have much choice since there wasn’t really anything out there to compete except a few clunky Java-applet implementations and old-school embedding Windows Media or Quicktime on a page (which never really worked right). But why wouldn’t they go with Silverlight and help with the adoption rate?

Oh well, thanks MSNBC. You’re just leaving the door open for us to be the first major media company to rollout a Silverlight player. And if you think we’re stupid to roll out Silverlight when all the people with it installed in their browser could probably fit in a Yaris, I ask you: do you want to reencode 20,000 videos from Windows Media? I thought so

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Positive aspects of the player

the 4 last episodes of “Heroes” and “Survivor” online

everything is Flash Video so it actually runs on my Mac

RSS feeds of almost everything

one pre-roll ad before every clip (8 min segment) is reasonable

Negative aspects of the player

shows like “House” and “Prison Break” just have recaps online

buggy (see screenshot below – it froze that way)

no full screen (just 2X)

Flash animation effects just make it hard to navigate

I’ve seen way worse players, so I guess that makes it okay. It can deliver video at a reasonable quality, so all they really need is some more content. They have some high-profile U.S. shows I wouldn’t mind catching up on if I’m too lazy to download the torrents. But I still don’t think a TV station has nailed the episodes-on-the-web experience. Hopefully we’ll have some better offerings from the other big broadcasters in the next few months

Thanks for laying down the gauntlet, Global. I’ll see you soon

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Basically, there are three main areas inside Facebook that your application can play with:

1. Facebook Canvas pages which let you embed your content on a page inside Facebook accessible from the left-navigation
2. A Profile Box which sits on your profile page and is visible by all your friends
3. Your news feed which appears on your profile page, and is visible by your friends on their home page

You can build a Facebook Application using just Canvas pages without ever touching the API. All you need are basic HTML skills and a server. Using the API requires some programming knowledge and the handling (and storing) of a session key on your side.

Before we get into each of these areas, let’s look at how to display content in them. Facebook has produced their own markup language called FBML. As you can see in their docs, it’s basically just HTML but without the HTML, HEAD, or BODY tags, no javascript, and a bunch of tags that have special functions in Facebook. For example, <fb:share-button class=”url” href=”http://www.keebler.net”/> displays a share button that will share my blog’s URL. Some areas only allow a subset of FBML (i.e. the news feed), but in general, anything you can do in HTML, you can probably do in FBML. It even has some “Ajax” functions that allow you to load in pieces of FBML dynamically.

Now let’s look at each of the main areas:

Facebook Canvas Pages

Using canvas pages, you can embed pretty-much any functionality you want into Facebook. When you set-up an application, Facebook will ask you for your canvas page URL. The name is a little misleading because it’s actually asking you for a directory on your server where you will serve up pages for Facebook. Just give it something like http://www.yoursite.com/facebook/ and put a default page in that directory (e.g. index.html). When you go to your canvas page within Facebook via something like http://apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APPLICATION (which is accessible from the left-navigation) Facebook will request the page from your server and serve it up within the Facebook interface i.e. with their top-navigation and left-navigation. You can run whatever type of code you want on your side to generate the page (i.e. PHP, ASP, HTML), as long as it serves up as FBML.

Now here’s the really cool part: you can use relative links from your root canvas page (e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APPLICATION which inside Facebook is http://www.yoursite.com/facebook/) and Facebook will display those too. For example, if you have an about page on your web-server at http://www.yoursite.com/facebook/about.html, you can put an anchor <a href=”about.html”>About</a> in any FBML and Facebook will serve it up at http://apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APPLICATION/about.html. The same goes for images, forms…anything!

Using these techniques, you can build out very complex applications directly within the Facebook interface but within the context of a Facebook account with all it’s social data (like friends)!

Profile Box

The profile box is a great way to show something unique to the user whose page it’s sitting on, and advertise your application to their friends (hopefully they’ll see the “Add” button at the top-left of the box and add it to their own Facebook account). If you want to just display something basic across all your users, you can set the “Default FBML” field in your application settings. To put personalized content into the profile box, you have to use the full Facebook API using a client library. You will use the facebook.profile.setFBML function’s “markup” parameter to pass in the FBML you want to display inside the box.

News Feed

The news feed works very much like the Profile Box but you are only allowed to use a subset of the FBML. Using the Facebook API, you call the facebook.feed.publishActionOfUser function setting the “title” and “body” parameters. A news feed item will be added to the user’s profile page, and also be visible on their friends’ home pages subject to some constraints. You can only add about 5 news feed items per user per day, after which they will no longer appear until the next day. You probably want your title to look something like this: <fb:userlink uid=”12345″ shownetwork=”false” ifcantsee=”Your friend” /> just did something in <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”>your application</a>!

I’m really just scratching the surface of what you can build into the Facebook platform. You are only limited by the functionality you can build on your side since Facebook is only displaying what you pass it. Translation: we’re going to see some cool stuff! I’m sure the applications we’ve seen so far are nothing compared to what people will build in the months to come. I, for one, welcome our new Facebook overlords

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