Dan Grossman | PHP

Reduce Load By Storing Sessions in Memory

June 1, 2007

Another quick tip for reducing server load: keep your sessions in memory instead of on disk. For a dynamic, high traffic site, like a very active message board, your disk is already busy handling all the database work. Take some load off it by moving session storage to memory.

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Handling UTF-8 in JavaScript, PHP, and Non-UTF8 Databases

May 25, 2007

Dealing with characters outside the ASCII range on the web is tough. It’s tough in other environments too, but particularly for web applications since text needs to move through so many places without being mangled — from user input, through JavaScript, into and out of PHP and string manipulation functions, into and out of [...]

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Dedicated Server Setup Checklist

March 18, 2007

You’ve outgrown shared hosting and decided to start renting a server of your own. Since you’re still on a tight budget, you want an unmanaged server, where full responsibility for configuring and managing the server is yours. These are the steps I go through every time I set up a new server for web [...]

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My Software Failures

March 8, 2007

“The Daily WTF” has been on my daily reading list for a long time, and I do read it every day. Last week the site changed its name to “Worse Than Failure” and kicked off with an interesting post by Alex on the new name and how it applies to all the programmers that [...]

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Microsoft Interviews: I Won an Xbox 360!

January 16, 2007

I finally had the last of this round of interviews — my first attempt to find a coop job for April through September to finish the work experience requirement of my degree at Drexel. I met with two really nice people from Microsoft in the morning. First, a recruiter for the IT department that [...]

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Stumbling Across the Web #2

January 14, 2007

Where the Hell is Matt?
Another YouTube viral marketing video. Did you notice the Stride gum logo appear several times? Would you have noticed it if I didn’t mention it?

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Stumbling Across the Web #1

January 7, 2007

I often run across websites that provide something useful or interesting; a small tutorial, some inspiration, a useful tool. Not everything warrants a permanent listing in my links, nor do I want to clutter my already unorganized browser bookmarks, so I’ll share them here each week. Maybe you’ll find some of these sites useful [...]

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Simple File-Based PHP Caching

January 3, 2007

Sometimes dynamic elements of a page can slow down page loading or use too many resources for re-running the code every page load to be practical. The sidebar of this site touches four databases to pull up the stats it shows, and the counter I just added to the header gets its count from [...]

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Google AdWords vs. Yahoo! Search Marketing vs. MSN AdCenter

December 31, 2006

The end of the year is the perfect time to stop and take a “big picture” look at just how much I’ve spent on search advertising, what that money has bought me, and what changes I should make in the new year. While I purchase advertising for my websites from many search engines, ad [...]

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W3Counter 4.0: AJAX in Symfony is a Breeze

December 27, 2006

I’ve gotta say, reproducing the AJAX effects from W3Counter within symfony was much easier than expected. It took only a few minutes to master and the code practically wrote itself.