Tag: tips Posts

How To Make Your Website Or Blog Faster

 Journal

There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work. Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do some MySQL database queries, and then finally output the HTML page. Depending on the hosting service, this may take a long time. With a cache, the final HTML page is simply written to disk (or memory if a memory cache is being used) so that when that […]

WordPress Viper Cache Alpha

 Journal

I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it: It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is on the host machine, and how bloated the WordPress code-base is. The second item is a little more subtle. If you request a page from a website using WP-Cache and it registers as a cache hit, basically WP-Cache reads a file […]

How To Make A Better WordPress – Entry #1: Sitemaps

 Journal

I’ve decided to do a multipart series on how to take your WordPress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box WordPress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog. The first topic I’d like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don’t, here’s a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called “Bots” that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google’s little guy is called “GoogleBot”, and identifies itself by a unique User-Agent header in all HTTP requests (if you have some kind of data analytics program, you might see GoogleBot show up from time to time). Whenever a search engine encounters a hyperlink, it checks to see if it’s in its database, and if […]

The Digital Camera Histogram

Photography

One of the main advantages of digital photography over film photography, at least in my mind, is the ability to view the histogram shortly after taking the shot. While viewing the image on the LCD is obviously an advantage as well, it’s difficult to tell if the shot actually turned out based on a small image on a 2-3″ LCD. An example histogram from Luminous Landscape A histogram shows you how many pixels in the image (shown on the vertical axis) are at each intensity level (0-255 typically, shown on the horizontal axis). If the histogram is bunched to the left, that typically means the image contains mostly low intensity values, and is probably underexposed. If the histogram contains a tail that runs off the right-hand side, that typically means there are pixels in the image that are overexposed. You can typically recover information from the shadows, but it is […]

Photographing a Wedding

 Journal

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the other day I had a chance to photography my first wedding. All in all, it was a pretty rewarding experience. The day started at around 11am for me and Hesty. We suited up, did some last minute charging of equipment, and then got in touch with the groom. Normally the photographer heads over to the where the bride is getting ready for some photos, but Kim’s aunt wanted to do those ones, so I was relieved of that duty. We met Mike and the groomsmen down at the Holiday Inn in Langley to get ready. In true Chilliwack style, Mike, instead of hopping in the shower and putting his tux on, convinced everyone to head across the street to get a few beers. So, we started the day in the Shark Club, drinking beer with some old friends. After the groomsmen […]

From Digital Back to Film

Photography

Tonight I did something that I’ve been thinking of doing for a few weeks now — I picked up a film SLR body so that I could once again shoot film. And to even write that statement down now seems a bit weird, since I left the world of film years ago, thinking I would never ever shoot a roll of film again in my life. However, a lot of friends of mine who are into photography have started dabbling once again in the forbidden art, and it has caused me to take it seriously once again. I have no idea if it will last long with me, but it’s definitely cool enough to keep me entertained for a few months I think. I met a guy down near London drugs today after work and paid him $150 for his film SLR body. This is basically one of the last […]

HDR Photography

Photography

So there’s this buzz amongst photographers about this new technique called HDR (high dynamic range). The basic idea is that a camera isn’t capable of capturing nearly as much dynamic range as what our eyes can capture.? With HDR, you take multiple shots of the same scene using a digital camera on a tripod, and create a new photograph using the information from all the shots. That new image contains a much larger dynamic range than would be possible using any one shot. Here are some cool examples from flickr. I bought a new tripod and a remote shutter release for my 20D this weekend, so I might try to do a few of these this week.