All this in our own backyard.

So if you’re going, be sure to say “Hi”. If you can’t make it I’ll be twittering (#collabtech08) and perhaps sharing stuff on Evernote, WiFi permitting.

Tags: CASE, technology, conference, collaboration, cleveland

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• We have a lot of talented folks in this town. Why are they not speaking to each other?
• The Cleveland Web Standards Association is a Good Thing. Go. Attend. Support.
• Cleveland Day of .NET and the Worthiness of Rails.
• The pitfalls of freelancing.
• General frustration with the tech-lag at agencies in town. Anyone just discovering that RSS is a Good Idea really needs to get out more.
• Never let marketers drive design or development decisions.
• Cleveland Web Association lunches were discussed. Snarky blog post to follow.
• Oregon Trail
• The keys to a good presentation.

I’d like to thank the following folks for coming out to share their experiences (and some fine, fine boneless wings):

• Bridget Stewart
• Brad Dielman
• Brad Colbow
• Kris Johnson
• Adam Hutcheson
• Joe Fiorini

We have some big plans coming up…a Barcamp over the summer (probably in cooperation with the CWSA), more gathers, and hosting some panel discussions. If you’d like to be in the loop, please subscribe to the Refresh Cleveland mailing list.

And, as promised, here is the the excellent presentation video I brought up at dinner. Watch to the end. It’s worth it:

Here are the presentation slides, for the curious.

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Winking Lizard 14018 Detroit Ave. Lakewood, OH 44107-4522 Phone: 216.226.6693

View on Upcoming.com.

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Jeff Atwood has written a terrific article about the perils of using WordPress without caching.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.

Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.

Read the full article if you have Wordpress blog — even if you’re not technically inclined. You’ll thank yourself later.

Caching is the smart way to handle any generated content. When you cache your content, a plugin or service will take the HTML generated by your blog and save it to a flat file. It’s just like taking a snapshot. The cached file will expire after a time, so that your content will remain fresh. It takes many less CPU cycles to serve flat file than to generate them from the database every time. This has the added benefit of speeding up your blog’s display time as well.

Consider your RSS feeds. While RSS is a great thing, every time someone hits your feed you are generating content from the database and serving it out to the world. Poorly behaved RSS readers will this your feed as often as every five minutes. For a worst case scenario, take the file size of your feed when generated, multiply it by the number of subscribers you have, and multiply that by 12. That’s how much bandwidth you could be using per hour for the feed alone. If you have a great number of items in your feed or are very popular you’ll eventually get a shutdown notice from your host or the site will simply shut down on it’s own, displaying a lovely error message to your audience.

To avoid downtime, use WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache to implement a quick caching solution. For an additional layer of protection, try using Feedburner for your feeds. It caches your feed for 30 minutes on their server, so you reduce the load on your server considerably. You’ll see your blog begin to behave, and you’ll get those creepy hosting admins off your case.

Advanced Users: For those of you who have full control of your servers, look at using memcached to handle the caching for the server. Less wear and tear on the disk, performs better for larger-scale projects than simple file caching. Check out Ryan’s post on how to implement WordPress with memcached.

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I attended Notacon 2008 this weekend. I’d like to tell you about it.

I learned a lot. See…I’m not much of a hacker. I’ve never played with Ham Radio for my own wifi, I’ve never attended a demoparty, and I know just enough about networking to get by. Notacon was an educational experience, one of the sort I don’t get often in day-to-day life. I don’t have much occasion to reflect on the necessity of editing information, but thank goodness Jason Scott does. I have not mulled over the current state of election technologies, but Smoke and Phreak had. Bruce Potter taught me more about the challenges of router monitoring than I’d learn in a year of working at my desk.

I attended Notacon the first year it ran and I felt like a stranger in a stranger land. I felt the same way this year. This is not the staff’s fault in any way, mind you. When I go to a developer convention, I know I’m going to have a lot in common with the folks there. This is a world where I’m a babe in the woods. Believe it or not, this is a very good thing. I have a lot to learn, and thankfully, the staff and speakers this year had a lot to teach.

This is not a “web development” conference, but web developers should attend it. Notacon will introduce you to new concepts and new ways of looking at problems. It will remind you of the complexity of the systems that you take for granted every day. It may even rekindle an interest, as it did with my friend Sean, who is unpacking his old sampling and mixing equipment as we speak.

Looking at the Notacon media archive, it seems like it gets more eclectic each year. Admittedly I’d love to see a web development track develop in the coming years. But even if one did not, I’d definitely go back, and I’d encourage friends to go with me. Too often there’s a wall between the folks who handle the nuts and bolts of servers/networking and those who upload their work to those servers/networks. Next year…instead of worrying about what “Web 3.0″ might hold, step back and dig into what Notacon is offering. You won’t be sorry.

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