10.05.13

Make ShareThis “Chicklets” Look All the Same

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 3:36 am by Liv

I’ve written before on my blog about ShareThis — I do love their WordPress plugin and their analytics provide some interesting insights into my blog traffic. There is however a niggly little thing which has been bugging me for a while — and it’s all to do with the way their “chicklets” look. (If you’re not familiar with the ShareThis lingo, chicklets are those bubbles with numbers in them which show you how many times a certain piece of content has been shared per channel — e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.)

If you are like me, always in a rush to produce the content rather than customize it (in other words, don’t want to spend too much time setting up your blog and want to dedicate most of the time to actually writing “stuff”), then you probably took the same steps to install the ShareThis plugin, accepted the defaults and then enable it. Trouble is if you do that, the chicklets by default don’t have a uniform/standard look, and you probably spotted different colors and styles being used — which gives the content a bit of a messy and disorganized look.

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08.01.13

CDN — The Basics — Part 2

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 4:07 pm by Liv

In the previous post, “CDN — The Basics — Part 1″, we got as far as looking at the situation where a load ballancer is employed in front of a set of identical web servers, and the DNS is handled externally by a dedicated DNS server, potentially in a different cloud/region/data center. As it has been the case so far with this topic, we’ll look at how this structure can be improved and look at incremental changes that can be made to increase reliability (and as such uptime). We will get to the CDN bit too eventually, don’t worry

In the last showcased diagram in the previous post in these series, we have looked at scaling the web app horizontally by adding more servers and have a load ballancer in front of them. This allows us to scale nearly infinitely the web application by adding more webservers. However, since all requests have to go through the load ballancer, this creates a bottleneck — as much as a single point of failure. (Neither of those are desirable, needless to point out!) So to overcome that, there are multiple ways of dealing with this — but each one of these methods relies on the same idea: add more load ballancers in the setup!

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03.01.13

CDN — The Basics — Part 1

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 5:40 pm by Liv

I wish I could put a “1 out of N” at the end of this post title, however, I have no ideas how far this will go unfortunately; I do however realise that the more I go into details about this subject the more there is to be said about it. And what I have realized even more recently is that while the general principle is known about a CDN (“it makes your website download faster”?!?!?!) all these details that can shave off easily miliseconds off your CDN setup are not known or are not understood. As such, this post wants to be the first in a tutorial about CDN (Content Delivery Networks) and about various components around them that often get forgotten when planning and setting up a CDN.

It has to be said from the beginning that I am not the definitive authority in this! Part of the reason why I envisage this to be an ongoing tutorial is that I’m pretty sure that I will keep finding out more and more about this subject in time — and as I do learn more I’ll publish more here. It is also worth mentioning that because of this, there are chances I will be missing out certain aspects too — and if you are aware of these, I would so love to hear about these! (Mainly so I can improve on my knowledge in this area, but rest assured that I will publish those facts on the blog too.) So drop me a line and let me know if I missed anything.

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14.11.12

(Disappointing) Review of My Blog’s Traffic

Posted in News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:09 pm by Liv

A while back I’ve boasted on this very blog about the amount of traffic it has reached — based on stats that I have pulled up from the Wassup WordPress Plugin. I have decided recently to have a closer look at the traffic — any blogger who’s taking himself seriously checks now and then on his audience! — and part of this I have decided to look in the server access logs myself and see how much they tally up with Wassup, as well as looking for a trustworthy 3rd party to quantify some figures for me too on this so I can have 3 reference points in this comparison.

For the purpose of this exercise, I have decided to use QuantCast as my 3rd party provider of analytics — they are a well established name and provide interesting analytics not just on page views, visits etc but on unique users, audience breakdown and so on.

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25.09.12

8,000+ Page Views a Month!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:53 am by Liv

Back in February/2012, I’ve hit 3,000+ page views a month — big milestone for a small blog like this, I’m sure you’ll all agree! It appears traffic has been on the way up though, as my latest look at the Wassup stats reveals over 8,000 page views for the last month! And that is, as per usual, taking the spiders, the spammers and all that noise out of the game:

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