Andrew Powell

I've been having some issues with my hosting provider.  I thought about naming names, but I'll pass on that, for now.  I finally got fed up with the issues that I was having, so I decided to look for alternates:

I came across the folks at Slicehost.  After some asking around and doing research on my own, I figured that I'd give them a shot.  It sure is a heck of a deal.  At less than 1/2 the cost of the VPS I had at the other provider, I got the same power and flexibility that I had with the other provider.  The only difference is that I had to do all the DB and ColdFusion setup myself. 

No big deal, I can handle that.  I had to get back into linux a bit, but that was like riding a bike.  I didn't even cheat and use webmin!  

So, now I'm hosted at Slicehost and we'll see how this goes....

Today we launched the new set of Universal Mind websites:

www.universalmind.com

and

blog.universalmind.com

 

Adam has gone into a great deal about the technical specifics of the new www.universalmind.com, so I will go into the technical specifics of blog.universalmind.com, since I wrote it (skin by Nahuel and Laura).

Previously, the UM Blog Aggregator had been an experiment in combining Hibernate and ColdFusion with Mach-II.  This, over time, proved to be a bit unstable, to say the least.  About a month ago, I took on the initiative to re-write the entire aggregator using Java.  Under the hood, we're still using Hibernate, but we're also using Spring and SpringMVC to manage the transactions and Hibernate sessions a bit better.  One thing you'll probably not notice, but is the coolest to me, is that the post search is now powered by Hibernate Search.  What does this mean?  Well, every time a new post is aggregated and persisted, Hibernate transparently indexes the object and makes it searchable.   It's powerful stuff.  

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the site and please give us some feedback.

I updated my bookshelf page the other day.  I added 10 more books which, as an RIA developer and consultant, I find very useful.  Click through and take a look, then buy from Amazon, or your favorite book store.

 

My Bookshelf

I get asked a lot:  "What is the best book for learning 'x'?".  Well, I decided that I would post my own bookshelf, a listing of all the books I personally own (tech related).  You can browse through the listing, and, if you like, purchase the book from Amazon.

My Bookshelf

Ok, so maybe the title was a bit misleading. One side effect of having CF generate your XML files for Spry datasets is that every time a dataset is loaded or re-loaded, you're making a call to CF. This call to CF is eating up a processing thread, of which there are a limited number. On a high-traffic site, with a lot good number of Spry regions (in one case, dynamic drop downs), you can see ColdFusion's load actually increase b/c it is doing more work "behind the scenes" to build and deliver the XML files to the browser.

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One of the fastest ways to speed up your web application is to enable content expiration on your web server. You do not want to do this for your CFM pages, but your CSS, images, JS files, and any other assets that do not change on a regular basis are all candidates for content expiration. When you set content expiration, the client will not even check for a new version of the file on the server until that asset's expiration date has passed. A good expiration period to use is 1 day. This will make all assets download the first time they are pulled, then not again for 24 hours.

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