I enabled the Hyper Cache plugin for WordPress last week. I hadn’t had a problem with the performance of my blog but being the geek that I am tweaking every ounce of speed out if it is always on the menu.
I recently enabled LDAPS authentication for our Drupal site so users can log in with their Active Directory credentials. It wasn’t the most straightforward setup (both from a Drupal standpoint and a networking standpoint, since our website is hosted off-campus) so I wanted to write up documentation for internal reference purposes and a blog post about my LDAP hurdles as they relate to Drupal for anyone else running into the same problems.
Someone checking out my last entry about CDN performance helpfully let me know that my site was displaying horribly in Opera. I’d checked in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome and hadn’t noticed a problem and just assumed I was pretty safe in other browsers since I wasn’t doing anything especially amazing.
I’ve been playing with both the Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace Cloud Files CDNs over the past week with the eventual aim of offloading all the static files that make up this site (all like 4 of them) to a CDN, mainly for the fun of it.
Having used Amazon’s S3 storage service for quite a while now they were my first choice, but I didn’t want to totally discount the Rackspace offering - they’ve done some seriously cool things in a very short period of time and I swear by their Cloud Servers.
From casually playing around there have only been minor differences. First of all Cloud Files doesn’t seem to support “folders”, so you end up with a much flatter storage pool. For my 4 files that’s really only an issue for my OCD, but Amazon does support hierarchical directory structures, so that’s something to keep in mind.
Otherwise I found Amazon’s system only slightly more annoying in the way you ‘deploy’ an S3 bucket to the CloudFront CDN. It seemed to take slightly longer and emphasize the idea that there were two distinct systems and products being used, whereas Cloud Files seems much more unified - click a check box and you’ve got a CDN URL.
So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.
I’ve updated the Habari to WordPress migration script from my last post. As special thanks to someone who pointed out that comments weren’t being associated with the right posts, they were totally off because I forgot to translate the old Habari post ID to the new Wordpress ID… Whoops.