I find it extremely important to document the things I learn on my coding journey. It has saved my (coding) life many times before. I do such documentations in form of websites which allows me to refer to my notes from any device in the world.
One of those sites is my iOS Dev Diary.
It’s on a spare domain I had lying around that wasn’t doing anything, and when I started adding notes to to the site in 2011 I hadn’t intended it to be a public facing project: I would usually add links to my other sites, add social widgets and make sure the site looks nice so that it makes for a pleasant reading experience.
I dispensed with all that for my iOS notes. I didn’t event pay attention to the traffic it was getting – because seriously: who would read scattered notes and ultra geeky code snippets without a context?
Turns out I was in for a surprise.
One day I tried some CSS tweaks and installed Jetpack so that I could easily apply additional CSS styles without the need for a Child Theme. Jetpack also counts the daily visitor traffic which was about 20 users per day when I installed it in March 2013, not including my own visits.
You can imagine my surprise when I saw that the traffic was steadily increasing to a point that impacted the server the site was hosted on. Today I’m getting nearly 700 hits per day on that site (!), a little less less at weekends, accounting for a whopping 15k visitors per month.
Luckily I’m in charge of the server that’s hosting my iOS Dev Diary, so I could use it as a test case for high traffic, and to see how different servers would cope with the load: I tried moving the site to a small Amazon AWS instance running Plesk on CentOS – which promptly crumbled under the load. I increased the power of that instance gradually and found that only a C3 Extra Large instance would hold out – not really an option considering its $300 per month price tag.
Other dedicated servers are more cost efficient, and currently the site is hosted on a dedicated machine at Strato which copes very well. The test provided me with valuable insights on many levels, but at the same time it poses a problem: I still need a place for my notes, and I’m happy for others to use them too. But without locking the site down to “private” I’m still stuck with a lot of traffic and therefore quite a bit of hungry infrastructure overhead.
Unless I find a way to subsidise the cost – which leads me to another exciting adventure: turning my iOS Dev Diary into a paid Membership Site.
Thanks to a couple of WordPress plugins I can partially protect content and ask visitors to join the site for a small fee.
Access is granted instantly after the system processes the payment. The membership protection is live since the beginning of the month and meant quite a bit of work and restructuring for Julia and me. Let me tell you more about the project.
A few days ago I was sitting together with my Mum in her hotel room and explained how she can upload all her photo treasures past and present to Flickr. A while ago she bought iPhoto for her iPad as a convenient solution that did not require a laptop (which she doesn’t like).
On Speak Like a Pirate Day 2013, the 18th of September, Apple decided to release their latest and (apparently greatest) operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices: iOS 7.
A few months ago I bought a new Bluetooth headset to replace my trusty old Voyager Pro+. It was still working but people at the other end were complaining that my voice would cut out regularly even though I could hear them fine.
I’ve gotten over the culture shock of the ZBRush Interface. It grows on you after a while. Or so I keep telling myself.
Back in 2013 I was trying out the then-new Photoshop CC for 30 days. I wasn’t sure if the upgrade was for me or if I should stick with my trusty copy of Photoshop CS5 (which by the way I own and can use forever and a day, without a monthly license fee… but that’s another matter).
You can’t buy any of the Adobe Creative Suite products anymore. From now on you can only “license” any of Adobe’s products for a monthly or annual fee. This includes Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver and all the other CS products we know and love. That’s old news.
Confusion, headaches, frustration, anger, hopelessness, sadness, depression and resentment. Those words probably best describe my first two days with this new software.
Don’t panic, this post is not in French, it’s merely an homage to my man Fred Lebain whose collection of Holga images has always inspired me.
We have a total of 6 Kindles in our household, that’s between two people. I know this sounds excessive, but believe me every single one of them has their specific purpose.
Every major software company has a collection of internal tools to help them develop their software. These are either off-the-shelf apps like Photoshop, or they are so specialised that they have to be custom written in-house by a team of specialists, often by a dedicated department.
For the last week and a half I’ve been having fun researching and coding the search function in iOS Table Views.
