At Zodiac Media we are big fans of NGINX and Apache2. Personally I swing more towards NGINX, as the configuration is super simple and very transparent. Like all web servers, it needs to be tuned to get the best possible performance out of it. NGINX was designed to deal with the C10k problem, this refers to the optimization connections so that they can handle client connections in the range of ten thousand (and over) simultaneously.
This can be fairly complicated if you are not used to using the command line. If this is not the case, then get in touch, this is our bread and butter. These configuration settings should allow you to get every bit of performance out of your NGINX setup.
Following the beta release announcement of the Ionic 2 Framework a week and half ago (at the time of writing). Our interest in the framework was reignited, so we finally bit the bullet to see how easy the conversion of one of our existing projects to a hybrid app would be. Surprisingly easy it turns out! We did however run into a few minor hiccups along the way - no one said development was going to be easy! We'll expand upon our experience in this blog post.
There was much excitement in the Zodiac Media office for the release of Drupal 8. We have put our hand to a fair few large scale Drupal 7 sites and were excited to see how the inclusion of Symfony and it’s core components would progress the CMS. Here is a rundown of our initial migration to Drupal 8 and our findings from it.
Earlier this month BBC correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones published an interesting article about Twitter's recent fortunes. At the time Twitter's share price had fallen around 25% over the course of several days. This share price drop was triggered by the publication of Twitter's Q1 2015 results which included a cut in Twitter's 2015 revenue forecasts. The silver lining to this cloud was that Twitter's user growth had picked up. According to Twitter's results it gained an extra 14 million 'monthly active users' in the first quarter of 2015 bringing the total year on year gain to a staggering 47 million users. That's a lot of new users. It's not far off the entire population of England joining Twitter in one year.
If you own a website then you need to be aware of some upcoming changes to the way Google orders results for searches made on mobiles. From April 21st, Google will begin globally rolling out their mobile-friendly update. Boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile searches. Searchers will be able to more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.
It's time for the long overdue final installment of our Capistrano 3 tutorial series. To recap the preceding parts have been:
- Part 1
- Secure SSH key based website deployment from Subversion using Capistrano 3
- Part 2
- Using Capistrano 3 for deploying PHP and other none Rails based websites
This installment will provide a more 'real world' example of using Capistrano to deploy a Drupal website. This allows us to illustrate how you might tailor a Capistrano deploy script to your own website.
I once had an interesting conversation in the pub with an old colleague about future technology predictions that will come true in our lifetime (about 2080 I hope!). There were some interesting ideas put forward such as:
- In our lifetime food won't be grown naturally any more but will be engineered in laboratories.
- In our lifetime computers will be able to write their own computer programs and they will be more effective than human written programs.
- In our lifetime nobody on the planet will have to go to work anymore as all jobs will be automated.
There are glimmers of the first of the above coming true after a lab grown burger made the news last year.
One of our clients is an online motorcycle clothing and accessories business called Mototo.com. Mototo.com is powered by Magento, the popular open source ecommerce solution. We've found Magento to be great to work with. It provides a huge amount of functionality 'out of the box' and allows you to build an enterprise level ecommerce solution relatively quickly and therefore cheaply.
A piece of bespoke functionality we created for Mototo.com was a dynamic 'Bestsellers' page.
Welcome to part two in our three part Capistrano 3 tutorial series. If you worked your way through part one then you should be all set to write your first Capistrano deploy script. The deploy script we'll create will be a "bare bones" script which simply moves files from an SVN tag to a folder on your Staging server.
Compared to part one this tutorial instalment is a walk in the park. Enjoy!
Welcome to Part 1 of my Capistrano 3 tutorial series. This post covers installing Capistrano and getting to the point where we can create our first Capistrano deploy scripts.
This will be a techie and complex post as the subject matter is not trivial. I am assuming that you have basic familiarity with Linux and the command line. It will definitely be worth persevering through this tutorial series though as once complete your deployment process will be far easier. This is the hardest part of the tutorial series, it does get easier!
And with that...let's begin.
