Archive for the ‘Under the Hood’ Category

Sphinx Search: MySQL Fulltext Search Engine Replacement

Monday, July 21st, 2008

For PatronusCharm 1.0.0 and 1.0.1, we've used the MySQL fulltext search engine. That's a mouthful, right? MySQL is the database software PatronusCharm utilizes to store all of the data used in PatronusCharm. It stores users, stories, news articles, FAQ items, everything. As you well know, a search engine is needed ...

XML Syndication

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Syndication XML Syndication is a means of distributing content to other websites and users in a quick and easy format. It can be used to syndicate summaries of content, all content, updates, anything the creator needs to be passed out in a simple to use format. These are commonly known as ...

SSL and DLP: Little Known Secret

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Sniffing I'm not sure about all of you, but I hate using public WiFi access points. Why? They're quite insecure. You might ask yourself, "What does he mean by that?" Public WiFi access points are a hotspot (pun intended) for people looking to prey on others through packet sniffing. As you ...

Current development: Memcache, Tagging

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

I, as a developer, have an insatiable urge to optimize, simplify, and speed up my code. There are developers out there that would have no qualms running a query like this every time somebody hit their site. [sql]SELECT (SELECT COUNT(userid) FROM users) AS users, (SELECT COUNT(id) FROM reviews) AS reviews, (SELECT COUNT(chapterid) FROM chapters) ...