Articles

A Study of Pricing and Billing Models for the Web

Business - September 13, 2010

Asking people for payment for work is a touchy subject for everyone involved.  We've had the luxury of experimenting a little bit over our first couple of years, and here's what we learned.

Cache Miss Storm

Development - September 10, 2010

I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything would go back to normal. What was interesting is Same query was taking large portion of slots in PROCESSLIST. I do not just mean query with same fingerprint but literally the same query with same constants.

The difference that expert Quality Assurance makes

Development - July 06, 2010

When we first started out, we listed the thorough quality assurance review as an optional piece of our estimates.  We had this incredibly naive idea that if we gave people the option to save a little money up front that they'd fully understand if there was anything that needed to be tuned up, post-launch.  We learned our lesson...hard.

Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace

Development - June 10, 2010

So you're running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it?

The Wonders of SSH Tunneling

Development - May 11, 2010

Have you ever been working on a website and needed direct access to the database, but couldn't get access without using something like phpMyAdmin?  SSH tunneling can solve this common problem and a whole lot more.

Should my domain name include a "www"?

Development - May 06, 2010

In the age of Twitter and Web 2.0, we've started to see a lot of websites drop the standard www from their domain names.  This could simply be a product of people following trends or just trying to be a little different, but the real question is "What are the drawbacks?"

Brightball.com scores higher on YSlow than Yahoo!

Development - November 18, 2009

We're a bit obsessed with performance optimization around here.  It's an itch that can never be fully satisfied because there's always something more that can be done.  Brightball.com is powered by our web application development platform, The Intersect (we're also fans of NBC's Chuck).  The Intersect is the same system we use as the basis for all of our client's projects and we decided to put it to the test at the hands of Yahoo! YSlow.

Search Engine Optimization Begins with Quality Pages

SEO - October 20, 2009

Most people think about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) solely as an exercise to increase the amount of external links to their pages. I call this the Link Equity strategy where the goal is to accumulate and hold on to as many external links over time as possible. The logic behind this is simple: the more links to a page, the better it ranks; and while Link Equity certainly is a very important piece of an SEO campaign, it alone is not enough. It must be balanced with a consistent effort to create and maintain SEO quality pages.

13 Easy Steps to On-Site SEO and How To Implement Them

SEO - October 18, 2009

Developing a strong website that’s easy for the search engines to catalog and index is all about following a few simple steps. Site structure can be your best friend when it comes to getting high search engine rankings and once you have established that perfect site structure your website can continue to grow and adapt with the search engines.

Process Oriented Innovation

Project Management - October 01, 2009

Implementing new technology is not an end in itself. Rather it should be though of as an ingredient in what I call the Process-Oriented Innovation Cycle, where the goal is to improve the overall efficiency of a company through continuous process and workflow improvements. I have successfully used this approach for many years to deliver innovation that targets ineffective processes and workflows, and then utilizes technology tools to support all required changes. The illustration to the right shows how the four phases of the cycle feed into each other. Here is a is a brief description of each phase: