By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)
I know I said my next post would have to do with our new Server header that we’re sending back, but I just wanted to get this in while it’s fresh in my mind. And plus, MySQL optimization is always worth talking about! Keep reading →
By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)
So in my last post, I promised I would write up some of the work we planned to do to improve performance when we had a chance to actually implement the proposed changes. Well, we’ve done quite a bit of work in the past week. I’ll talk about some of the changes and leave some for future posts. Keep reading →
By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)
Last Thursday around 8 a.m., I received a phone call from our Online Editor informing me that the Web site was down, and politely asking if I could get it back online as soon as possible. It seems we had been linked to by the Drudge Report (to our story on Aliza Shvarts), and the deluge of hits had knocked us off the Internet. Over the course of Thursday and Friday, we were linked to (often simultaneously) by Drudge, Digg, Reddit, Gawker, Perez Hilton, Fox News, MSNBC and others. On Thursday, we received 12 times our average amount of traffic. In this post, I’ll go over some of the technical details of what happened over that two-day period, and some changes we’re implementing to make things better. Keep reading →
By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)
Dear YaleDailyNews.com subscribers,
Some of you may have erroneously received many duplicate emails from the Yale Daily News in the past few minutes. It was a result of server testing we were conducting to improve our headlines email service, and it went awry. I want to apologize for the error, and assure you that we are taking steps to prevent it from happening again. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Thank you for visiting the Yale Daily News online.
Robert Baskin
Online Director, Yale Daily News
webmaster@yaledailynews.com
By: Andrew Mangino (Editor-in-Chief)
Dear YaleDailyNews.com subscribers,
I’m pleased to announce the introduction this week of two interactive additions to YaleDailyNews.com. Even if each serves a “niche” interest, I hope one or the other sparks in you a related idea for how the Yale Daily News can continue to enhance its online presence. Keep reading →
By: Henry Corrigan-Gibbs (Director of Online Initiatives)
In class today I was sitting behind another student who appeared (to the professor, at least) to be furiously typing notes into his laptop. From my perch behind him, I could see that this kid was browsing the Yale Daily News Web site.
While I was perplexed that he bothered to drag himself out of bed for a 9 a.m. lecture that he wasn’t even going to listen to, I was ecstatic that he chose to spend his time looking at our Web site.
Competition for viewers online is fierce so once we get a reader on our site we try to do everything in our means to keep them from browsing to some other entertaining Web site. An extensive tagging system is one of the prime ways we’ve come up with to encourage people to explore the site instead of leaving after reading just one popular article. By providing links to other content that users might be interested in, the site tries to guess what interests each viewer. Keep reading →
By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)
Last summer, I interned at Yahoo as Backend Engineer for Yahoo News, which was a fantastic experience. While I was there, Yahoo released a product called YSlow, which is a plug-in for Firebug — the most useful Firefox extension ever created. It analyzes Web pages, tells you why they’re slow and how to make them faster. It has inspired many Web developers, myself included, to start thinking more seriously about client-side performance. Server-side performance — MySQL queries, PHP page generation times, etc. — is important, but client-side performance is also very significant.
Keep reading →
