Beef Tips and Noodles
Feb 4
Last night I cooked a delicious meal: Beef Tips and Noodles. It was so good, I have to write about it!
Why your site is slow
Jan 30
As a web developer I want my projects to accomplish 2 things. I want to exceed the expectations of my client and provide the user with a good experience. A lot of developers get into the mindset of "if it works, I'm done". They don't take the opportunity to make sure the users are going to have a good experience. I don't blame them. It's tedious to test compatibility and boring to make sure your error catching gracefully handles issues that may arise. But, ironically, a slow load time can quickly ruin a users website experience. I break load-time into 2 categories: real and perceived. Real load-time is the actual time it takes all elements and scripting to be 100% loaded and ready. Perceived load-time is the wait-time a user experiences before they can start using a site. A "fast" site optimizes for the former, while exploiting the latter. So, here are 3 things techniques I use to affect page load-time without affecting my coding.
As processing power has increased, data caching has jumped to the forefront and user-demand for immediate response has grown, developers seem to have moved away from batch processing. But in a lot of situations, this can be a better approach than real-time processing.
When I first started writing Coldfusion applications I was very naive about data and architecture. I can admit it. I did not use components and I wrote (and often re-wrote) queries in-line when needed. As my development matured and I began to more fully understand SQL Server as an independent platform I recognized my failures.
Let Bartlet Be Bartlet
Jan 14
My friends know I am a huge fan of the tv show The West Wing, hence the title of this post. As I was writing my post on using stored procedures, this one slapped me in the head and began forcing its way out. Too often developers think their language of choice is the end-all be-all of the development world. As a result they force it to do every necessary function when sometimes other tools, already readily available, can provide not only a better method, but can lead to exponential performance gains.
A post in a troubleshooting forum on Linked In got me thinking about query optimization. The original poster asked about identifying and solving deadlock situations. Many great responses preceded mine, but it got me thinking about how I troubleshoot these problems. So I thought I would write it up over a series of posts.
Just got back from seeing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wanted to see it when it opened, but was a little busy with the holidays.
It has been a while since I have been excited about development. I hope that today signifies a change in that. I spent most of the day doing some freebie work for one of my clients. You see, I downloaded the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit for IIS 7 today.
A while back I wrote a very quick photo gallery system for a client. Through a management console, they upload a photo and the server, utilizing CF8's CFIMAGE tag resizes the image to a web-safe size. Today I received an email from the client saying "It tells me every time that the photos I am trying to add are too big". I knew I wasn't checking the file size and there was no way the client was trying to upload a photo of over 100MB (server-defined post data limit). So I got to debugging.
New Years Resolutions
Dec 29
It is that time of year. That time where, while still bloated from over-indulging on Christmas feasts, we reflect on how we have lived our lives and resolve to make changes in the coming year.
