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Examine the web fortunes of Dragons Den businesses. Study site performance under heavy traffic & learn resilience tips.

Slain by Dragons

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den↗ series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic. ...

Compile NGINX with ngx_pagespeed on CentOS 7. Automate setup with init script. Configure NGINX for ngx_pagespeed to enhance performance.

NGINX & ngx_pagespeed on CentOS 7

I wanted to have a quick play with Googles Pagespeed module, as I use NGINX and not Apache I needed to compile NGINX from source to enable the ngx_pagespeed module. The following assumes you are have a clean CentOS 7 installation. First off you need to install the packages which enable you to compile NGINX with ngx_pagespeed from source. NGINX & ngx_pagespeed on CentOS 7 1/8 yum install -y gcc-c++ pcre-dev pcre-devel zlib-devel make unzip openssl-devel Now create a NGINX user and make so the user doesn’t have a shell. ...

Curated a list of compelling reads from Pocket, covering topics from Google Docs reverse engineering to AWS scalability and Docker in production.

Reading list

As mentioned in a previous post I tend to send most articles I am interested in reading to Pocket↗ so I can read them when I have time. Here is a selection of the most interesting “stuff” I have bookmarked over the last month or so …. How I Reverse Engineered Google DocsTo Play Back Any Document’s Keystrokes↗ A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability↗ AWS Best Practices — Enterprise Perspective↗ A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS↗ Distributed systems for fun and profit↗ Post Mortem: The One Where We Accidentally DDOSed Ourselves↗ Docker in Production — What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300 Million Containers↗ SimCity That I Used to Know↗

Reading List

At least once a day I skim through a large number of blogs in my Feedly↗ feed using Reeder 2↗ , when I see something which catches my eye I send it over to Pocket↗ so it is sync’ed to all of my devices. Here are some of the posts I have saved for further reading …. Docker / PaaS PaaS for Realists↗ Why is Docker the new craze in virtualization and cloud computing?↗ Containers Aren’t the Extinction Event for Operating Systems↗ Cloud, Scale and DevOps There’s No Konami Code for Operations↗ 10 Things You Should Know About AWS↗ The Easy Way Of Building A Growing Startup Architecture Using HAProxy, PHP, Redis And MySQL To Handle 1 Billion Requests A Week↗ 99.99% uptime on a 9-to-5 schedule↗ What it takes to run Stack Overflow↗ How Facebook Moved 20 Billion Instagram Photos Without You Noticing↗ CloudFlare’s Matthew Prince: Building A Better Internet↗ It’s Called Jekyll, and It Works↗

Unlock the secrets of Google's HTTPS ranking signal and SNI! Learn how to secure your site for maximum visibility.

Google promotes HTTPS everywhere

Google announced earlier this week that they are going to use HTTPS as a ranking signal↗ : We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web. We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging. For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. ...