Splunk is an enterprise-grade software tool for collecting and analyzing log files and other data. They have a free version which is great for personal projects or smaller websites. In this blog post I explain how to use Splunk on standard Apache logs to explore your data, and an example of a misbehaving bot that I identified and was able to block.
For a side project I’m working on, I want to support several different “read it later” type applications. Looking for apps that have both mobile support and APIs, it looks like the most popular options are Instapaper, Read It Later, and Readability. All of these accomplish a similar task: bookmark a web page for later reading, and formatting it for easier reading. Mobile support is usually included, either for reading articles bookmarked earlier, or marking new ones to read on a desktop at a later time. Here’s a quick summary of each service: Instapaper Free service with an optional subscription…
I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, in particular their monthly online magazine. The magazine are downloadable in PDF, .mobi, and .epub formats, and browsable online in HTML format. Browsing through the latest couple of issues, I noticed a distinct slowness as some of the images were downloaded. This is usually a hint that a high resolution image is being referenced, but being “cropped” down to a smaller size with the height/width attributes in the HTML. For example, see this story about Ruby Bundler and look at the red ribbon image. The source image is 693×693 but…
After my team launched a new site design and blog system for the [Yahoo! Developer Network][ydn], I decided to review the performance of this site to see where it could be improved. In summary, after removing one performance-hogging widget (Lijit search widget) and following recommendations from YSlow and Page Speed, the site should be running much faster now.
Just ready a story relating to Yahoo on All Things Digital today and noticed they do a really nice job of explaining their use of tracking cookies. I’m impressed with the visual treatment and the fact that they’re very upfront with this information. Of course you’ll only see this message once (or whenever you clear all your browser cookies), but it’s a big improvement over most sites.