Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for April 4th, 2004
Don’t use client side includes!
Builder.com’s Using Client Side Includes instead of Server Side Includes makes the case for replacing server-side techniques for including common page components with alternatives powered by Javascript. My advice: stay well clear. While Javascript includes may reduce the load on your server slightly and may even increase page loading times due to additional client-side caching, the cons far outweigh the pros:
- Javascript is a serious accessibility red flag: to meet accessibility requirements your content needs to be accessible for users and devices which lack Javascript support.
- Search engines can’t see content that is added with Javascript. If you hide your links in Javascript search engine spiders will be unable to even crawl your site.
- Javascript is cached aggressively by many browsers. This may help performance, but it means that changes you make to your includes may not show up unless visitors force-refresh their browsers. You can’t expect them to do that very often, if ever.
- The performance hit of enabling SSIs is usually greatly over-stated. Modern web servers are usually hugely powerful machines. Many sites dynamically generate every page using technologies such as PHP or Perl, which carry far higher overheads than simple SSIs.
If your host doesn’t support some form …
Mishoo on fighting IE bugs
Mishoo is an interesting guy. He’s the principle developer behind HTMLArea, a popular textarea replacing rich text editing widget. He’s also the author of my favourite DHTML Calendar, and his site carries a bunch of other scripts and shows off some seriously impressive DHTML wizardry. He frequently writes about cross-browser DHTML development, and his most recent article on CSS-Based Separators demonstrates some neat ways of working around bugs in Internet Explorer 5 and 6.
cDotText
All you .text users out there might be interested to check out cDotText, a DNN 2.0 (DotNetNuke) module that integrates blogging into the portal software.
Automatic setup of blogs with their own subdomains (myblog.mysite.com), as well as other neat features (like aggregator feeds) means writing your own weblogs.asp.net is just a click away! :)
Tune Your Linux Server
Tuning your Linux server can mean many things to many people. A portion of tuning is about security, insuring the configurations of the ftp, mail, ssh and web servers are properly setup to enable access and interaction with your server while tightening the belt for those who may be browsing through for potential back doors.
However, an important part of tuning is also making sure only the necessary services are running on your server to maximize the memory, processor and disk space you have available.
In an upcoming column I discuss Webmin (http://www.webmin.com), which is the premier open source graphical user interface for Linux server administration (and Solaris and numerous Unix-flavors). It is also an excellent tool for tuning Linux servers as it provides root access to bootup and shutdown configuration scripts as well as all of the critical web environment servers used.
For example, if you manage a dedicated server for your web hosting customers, a look via Webmin at the Bootup items (those that are slated for startup on each boot of the system) may reveal several unecessary services running. You can disable CUPS (for *nix printing), NFS and Samba, as well as any application servers you are …
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