“It occurs to me that the tools we have available each do a large variety of things, and that there’s no good reason for these functions to be bound together into one application. For example, Maciej’s recent article on why not to have a public of Wordpress (and more details) shows that serving the website and editing it can be very separate pieces. The original ancient Blogger software also used to push a copy up to your site via FTP.”

via joshua.schachter.org

Great ideas.

via fakesteve.net

After reading of Jeff Atwood’s data loss issues this past week I started thinking about the web servers I look after.  The servers are all backed up by the hosting provider – SiteHost – and I have a lot of faith in those backups (I work there, but I have also needed to restore some data in the past and it was flawless), but that didnt stop me from thinking it would be a good idea to start doing backups that I control.
I considered getting another VPS hosted in a separate data-centre and copying data over at frequent intervals (and I might do that at some stage so the traffic can be kept within NZ), but I already had an Amazon S3 account and use it for automated backups of the SVN repositories hosted with Storehouse.  So I wrote a little cli app (written in PHP) that tarballs, gzips, and copies the compressed folders up to S3.  The config file allows you to specify as many folders as you want and say whether you want them to be backed up daily, weekly, or monthly (these intervals can easily be changed and added to).

For detailed usage, keep reading.

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After removing all the extra HTTP requests you possibly can from your waterfall, it’s time to make sure that those that are left are as small as they can be. Not only this makes your pages load faster, but it also helps you save on the bandwidth bill. Your weapons for fighting overweight component include: compression and minification of text-based files such as scripts and styles, recompression of some downloadable files, and zero-body components. (A follow-up post will talk about optimizing images.)

via phpied.com