Analyzing and Improving Conversion

Conversion is one of those core metrics that every business depends on and strives to improve. Improving your conversion rate (while maintaining a consistent traffic level) is the single most important goal any business should have. Not only will your sales increase without addi...

Ranking Social Media

In business it’s common to use sales as a metric to determine success. Songs, albums, books and movies are all ranked on “best seller” charts. While this isn’t a perfect metric, it is largely useful due to the innate control built within. There is friction to a sale in th...

My Own Private Blogathon

Someone once said a goal is a dream until you write it down … in your blog and tell the world about it. In an effort to focus on blogging a bit more frequently I have decided to start a blogathon beginning today. I will write a post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for th...

Using Nginx as a Load Balancer

Nginx is a relatively new web server that has a light footprint and relatively easy configuration. The following configuration demonstrates how to properly use nginx as a load balancer in front of two web servers. pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http {...

Featured in CIO Magazine!

I don’t know what could be more shocking that opening this month’s edition of CIO magazine and discovering that my blog, this very blog that you are currently reading is one of two blogs featured this month. I am humbled and honored to be mentioned and included with such grea...

Choosing a Hosting Partner

No question about it, choosing a good hosting partner is one of the most important decisions a CTO / CIO can make, especially in a .com company. I recently had to choose a hosting partner for the new portero.com. Since the space changes so rapidly the last provider you used m...

Social Media Recognition

Recently I’ve been fortunate to be recognized in a few publications. I extend a warm welcome to all my new friends and followers. I look forward to engaging with you. 12 CIOs Who Love Social Media Luxury 50 Top Twitter Users CIO Twitter Dashboard 12 CIOs Who Love Social Media-...

New Facebook in Depth Review

Facebook just unveiled their biggest change yet. The http://www.new.facebook.com website is a preview of the next design of Facebook. The new design places more emphasis on friends and actions and downplays the applications. There is a lot more than just design going on. They als...

Setting up Subversion with multiple access methods

One thing that makes subversion such a powerful revision system is it’s ability to permit multiple methods of access. Https, WebDAV, SSH and svnserve. In spite of svn’s ability to support multiple access methods, doing so simultaniously can be quite challenging. Typically o...

Scaling Web Sites (LAMP) : Top Resources

Luckily it’s 2009 and there have been a bunch of successful websites that have had to deal with large scalability challenges. Many have been kind enough to share their knowledge with the world. Here is a list of the best books, articles, presentations and practices from the lik...