First off, I love Nginx—It is by far, the best web-server I have ever used. I came across a bug recently which really caused me to scratch my head. It took me a couple days just to isolate the issue and then I couldn’t find anyone who wrote about it—so that’s what I’m doing here. The problem: On one particular javascript file I could never download the whole thing. This file was the concatenated version of about 8 files totaling near a megabyte. Turning on gzip compression helped significantly: 1mb turned into just over 250k. One caveat though, was that [...]

Joomla is a great platform for building web sites and RSForm is a great plugin for Joomla to handle form submissions—but with a recent project we found that RSForms was having some serious trouble with only a moderate amount of data (2,000 submissions). I tried to find the source of the problem and always got to the JOIN statement where it would routinely take 10+ seconds to run one query—add in multiple queries and filters and it would take over a minute just to get 500 or so records from MySQL. I almost gave up hope of finding a solution [...]

A basic example of how to use cufon for font replacement.

Really interesting video. It gives some great statistics about the world we’re living in. See also: http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/