Tim Hilliard

After much blood, sweat and tears from the team at Moodia, we have relaunched our new website aimed at capitalising on the emergence of Conversion Rate Optimisation in the rapidly changing environment of websites.

Moodia website

The new site presents a striking yet clean interface with a focus on usability and in particular the navigation. Although not live yet, the Moodia site will also include a blog which will be a place where our intelligent team of optimisers can share their wealth of knowledge. If you are looking to get better results out of your website, head on over to Moodia and see what website optimisation can do for you.

I don’t know how many times my friends have said they lost their work and they had no way of going back. This may sound harsh but I have no sympathy for them. They should have used a repository.

It is very easy to set up a local repository using subversion. Subversion allows you to check in your changes and have a way of rolling back. For those that are working collaboratively and would like to extend themselves, they can look into using subversion as an apache extension. This is quite a bit more tricky but much more rewarding. An easier way of setting up the extension would be to use svnadmin, a web based administration console for you subversion server.

Collaboratively subversion allows teams of developers to work on the same project concurrently without having to worry about merging code. 

So now you know about subversion you have no excuse to lose your work ever again!

So how do I create another user for MySQL that has administrator privileges using the MySQL AB GUI Administration Tool?

I had wondered how we were supposed to do this with the GUI tool until recently. Of course you can create another user using the command line and then apply the following query to the user.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ‘user’@'host’ IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD ‘[password]‘ WITH GRANT OPTION”

But not everyone likes to use the command line. To do this with the GUI tool all we need to do is go to Tools->Options and then make sure that “Show Global Privileges” option is checked.

MySQL GUI Global Rights

Now when you select a user there should be another tab appear called “Global Privileges” that will allow you to apply global rights to a user thus allowing you to create another administrator.

PHP acceleration is a method of boosting your server performance by around 2-10 times without the need to make any changes to your code. When we write PHP code, it is written in what can commonly by described as pseudo-code, a way of representing what we want our program to do in english. Of course there lays a problem in this, a computer doesn’t know english. This is where a compiler comes in. In our case this is the PHP compiler which translates our english pseudo-code into machine readable byte-code. Now compiling PHP is not a lengthy process at all but none the less it does take up time and resources from our server. When we add hundreds of simultaneous page requests into the mix the load really starts to build up. Luckily we have a way to fix this problem through PHP acceleration. What this does is cache the compiled byte-code from a PHP script. Once a script is cached, the next time someone goes to access the same script they get to skip the compiling stage as this has already been performed by a previous access to the script and stored in memory. Voila we are able to increase our server performance by up to 10 times.

Ok time for a case study. You may remember back to the project where I first go my hands dirty with Drupal. Well on this project I was also put in charge of finding suitable hosting. When it came time to switch the server to live things started out well. Unfortunately over the next fews hours the load kept gradually building until around 4 hours passed at which time the server crashed. I immediately jumped on the case of hosting support who promptly suggested adding APC (Alternate PHP Cache) onto the server. This was swiftly done and less than half an hour later the server was live again. Over the next 72 hours we closely monitored the server load. The load from now on has only ever reached around an eighth of that shown when the server crashed.

So there are several options when it comes to choosing a PHP accelerator. Some of these include APC, Zend and XCache. For more information I recommend starting with the wiki entries for php accelerators. Looking to the future it has been announced that PHP version 6 will include APC php acceleration by default.

So if you are looking for an easy way to boost performance I would definitely recommend looking into php acceleration.