PolarLava::Blog

If you run/code a PHP based sites, you owe it to yourself to check out jpcache.  I've been using it here at PolarLava for at least the past year and a half.  This bad boy will GZip compress your pages before they are sent to the browser, which cuts down on your bandwidth as well as speeds up your page loads.  Additionally you can tell it to cache a page for a specified period of time.  This makes those DB generated "static" pages into true static pages, thus making them much faster.  And you have your choice of either storing your cached pages in flat files or a MySQL database, which is what I do.

Another alternative if you are distributing code but don't need caching, is my GZipContent class.  It provides the benefit from GZipping compressing the output, but doesn't do any caching.  If you are interested in this, just drop me a line.

Although it's not released as of this writing, GZContent will be part of PolarBlog beginning in V1.4.0.  Although this blog actually doesn't nor will it be using that, as my whole site runs under jpcache.  ;)

01/04/2005
A few weeks back I spent some time hacking on jpcache to implement a feature that I wanted, but it lacked.  That being the ability to flush individual pages.  I had added the ability to flush all pages, permanently cached pages or just expirable pages some time ago.  But you still couldn't flush individual pages.  Previously I had sent this basic flushing change to Jean-Pierre, the developer of this application for possible inclusion in a  future release.  Like all of us, he's busy and has not put out a new release in quite some time.  Anyhow, I've pushed this modification a bit further now and have the ability to flush individually cached pages.  Generally this is far more useful than flushing groups of pages, although sometimes that is useful too.  I forwarded this latest change to Jean-Pierre who wrote me back to let me know that some form of this will make it into the next release of jpcache which he hopes to start on soon.  Yeah!

Okay, I've been lurking around it for a while, but I finally signed up at del.icio.us have started my own bookmark collection.  I can see this becoming really addictive, but also very useful.

I used to collect lots of bookmarks, but they were always a hassle to manage.  Thus several years ago I basically stopped book marking things and would just search for whatever I needed.  Google obviously has made this easier, but often you can't find your way back to that exact link you found previously.  You know the one…the one you didn't bother to save or bookmark!  ;)

The biggest reason I like this is that it will allow me to easily "share" my bookmarks between work, home and wherever I may happen to be.  I can always access this list.  This is also the same reason that I switched to using a web mail interface exclusively a few years back.  Unless you are always in one place —very unlikely for most people these days, you need to be able to access your information globally.

Today marks the second anniversary of the PolarLava Blog. And here is the now infamous first post.  Being a generally pointless post, here's a generally pointless link to last year's posting about this momentous event.

You try to do something good and what do you get?  In some cases, maybe death when you could still be saved!  DOH!

I'm now running what will be PolarBlog V1.3.0 on this, my live blog.  If you notice anything odd, let me know.  There are a few bug fixes and enhancements in this release, but the biggie for this release is internationalization (I18N).  With this release —barring any unknown problems, PolarBlog should now support languages other than U.S. English.  I've been working with a German developer on implementing this and he may also be beta testing this as well in the coming days.  If you are fluent in something other than English, translators are need.

Looking ahead to V1.4, if you have features you would like to see added please let me know.  At this time I know of two feature that will be in V1.4:

• Topic Icon Sizing - Right now all icons are locked at 32x32.  This was a carryover from PWL.  I may add scaleable sizing to the Topic Edit section, but that may be more trouble than it is worth.  At the very least the 32x32 lockdown will be removed.  That's a trivial change.
• Output Compression - I will be add the ability to gzip compress your PolarBlog output.  This creates a minor load increase on the web server, but it cuts your bandwidth useage greatly.