Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category

Performance Testing for High Traffic Community, Forum and Publishing Sites

Content may be king, but what’s a kingdom without without it’s vassals? In other words, no matter how good your content, any problems you may have in delivering that content may drive away your visitors/consumers. That’s why, as your website grows you may, at some point, benefit from performance or Load Testing.

A performance testing service will typically offer website monitoring or network monitoring to see how your networks, apps, and databases operate under stress and watches for any problems that can monkey up the works. This type of testing can be very important for site that have a lot of concurrent users — such as social networking sites, discussion forums, e-commerce sites, auction sites, and CMS-driven publisher sites with a ton of subscribers. performance testing typically will generate virtual user groups and run them through a system under varying conditions to see if the website meets it’s performance goals and checks for traffic bottlenecks and other problems that can prevent a website from living up to it’s full potential.

If you host your site on your own webservers, you can purchase a decent load testing software program for less than what it costs to by most publishing software. And if you don’t own the servers where your website is hosted, there are plenty of private companies you can contract for a reasonable fee. Some web hosts even provide these services.

It’s the Journal, Not the Destination

I’m going to make a confession to you: I’m a writer who hasn’t kept a regular journal in years.  I think I probably stopped keeping a regular journal right around the time they started using the word “journal” as a verb as in, “Sasha has been spending her free time journaling.”  Writer or not, who the hell wants to be associated with that activity? It’s just so unmanly, ya know? But seriously, I think my regular use of the computer ultimately led to me putting down my regular daily journal. There is just something about the immediacy of the almighty keyboard that made the act of keeping a journal all but irrelevant for me. 

Which is not to say, I don’t occasionally jot things down in a notebook when I can’t otherwise access a computer.  There was a time when I tried to replace my little black notebook with a handheld device, but for me that proved more trouble than it was worth.  My sister gave me a PDA one year for my birthday and I did use it for a time, but I kept forgetting to charge the thing and everytime the battery went dead, I’d lose everything I had stored on it. 

I lost the little black notebook a few years ago and hadn’t seen it since — that is until the other day when it turned up while I was cleaning out a closet. 

It’s funny to see some of the odd bits scribbled on it’s pages.  Stupid little notes like:

“I just stepped on a Jujube —

Jujube (the candy, not to be confused with the fruit or the Ju Ju Be line of diaper bags)”

or

“Beginnings are the hardest thing about creating a novel.

It’s hard to know when a story truly begins. Does it begin with an insult or the first thoughts of revenge? Maybe it begins with a bullet or the indignity of dying on the bathroom floor of a public restroom in a pool of blood and filth.

It seems to me to be a matter of trusting one’s instincts as there isn’t a universal rule that works in every situation . . .”

How about this note about Paua Fox’s novel Desperate Characters:

“I suppose what astonishes me about DC is how it reminds me of the old Bogart film Desperate Hours.  Whereas Deparate Hours concerns a middle class family being held hostage by an escaped convict, the couple in DC are similarly held hostage, albeit of their own device.”

Here’s another notation about Sol Stein’s book, How to Grow a Novel:

“. . . a pragmatic guide to evaluating a first draft for revision, but I find his tendency to boast about his own accomplishments irritating. I lost track of how many times he mentioned his own novel “The Magician” or the fact that he’s a well-known book editor/publisher. Give it a rest, buddy!”

There’s lots of crap in this little black book (hell, there’s probably a couple a dozen ideas for new blog posts alone) — bits of stories and poems, some completed and since published and others best fed to an open garbage can, letters to friends, lists, recipies, schedules, figures (I’m terrible at math).

Reading through those old bits, I was reminded why it’s important for writers to keep a journal — not so much because it’s a direct path to creating that masterpiece, but because it’s like applying grease to the machinery of the imagination.  A way to keep all the gears moving and also remain accountable for one’s own thoughts. There’s something about the effect of pushing a pen on actual paper that beating a keyboard, for all of it’s expediancy and productivity, cannot be replicated.  Reading those bits, I kept thinking: This is me, my thoughts, as stupid and/or as brilliant as I could be at that moment in time.  No denying it.  No delete button.  No plausible deniability. Just what it is.

So, I don’t know, maybe keeping a journal isn’t quite so irrelavent after all.  Maybe I should give it a whirl once again.

The Twit Who Sat On My Face

Over at Twittip.com there’s a post that’s stirring-up a lively discussion: “The Misunderstood Uses of Twitter and Facebook: Are you a friend, follower or a fool?” The post’s author’s premise is this:

— Facebook’s main purpose centers on furthering and cultivating relationships with already established friends

— Twitter’s main purpose centers on social networking (meeting people across the world with similar interests)

This blogger further says that “when [he thinks] of Facebook and Twitter, [he thinks] of Preparation-H and toothpaste. Both are quality products. Both have their uses; but Preparation-H, like Twitter, is only needed at a certain point in life.”

On the surface, the analogy makes sense. It seems fairly obvious that Facebook and Twitter go about the business of “friend-building” differently. I think the analogy misses something important, however. It’s an apple ‘n’ oranges comparison and, while apples and oranges are both kinds of fruit, they are fruit of a different tree. But those two trees do share a common root. If you look at social networking generically as a form of communication, then the only thing separating one form from another is the speed with which one is able to communicate and process that information. On one end of the spectrum you’d have human thought and on the slowest end, you’d have a handwritten letter. It would probably look something like this:

Letter-email-blog-Facebook-Twitter-IM/chat-cellphone-conversation-thought
<<--slowest/highly organized/more intimate -------fast/less organized/less intimate-------fastest/least organized/more intimate)-->>

As such, if you are looking at “social networking” as a means for “making friends,” the whole argument becomes absurd because the very nature of the technology is that you are trading coherent organization and real intimacy for speed and efficiency of communication. Now, this is not to say you can’t make real friends online — it’s just more accurate to acknowledge that friendship building, to the extent that it does occur, is an added benefit of social networking and not the primary function of using tools like Twitter or Facebook. No, social networking is all about self-promotion: yourself, your business, your ideas, your blog, delivering your point-of-view to individuals in short bursts of information — individuals who hopefully share an interest in what you’re selling. It might actually be more accurate to call this process “information trafficking” rather than “social networking,” because meaningful person-to-person networking is still primarily face-to-face spoken communication, whereas ideas and information are still primarily distributed through written communication, psuedo-conversational mediums such as Twitter or blogs notwithstanding.

While it’s certainly nice to connect with or reconnect with an old friend and it’s nice also to make new friends, I have no illusions as to why I belong to social networking communities or the “need” for Twitter. Twitter isn’t so much a community unto itself as it is a tool to traverse the space between other communities. For example, I have accounts with both MySpace and Facebook. While I’ve found some overlap between the two sites, for the most part, my friends on MySpace don’t go on Facebook and vica versa. What I’ve discovered is that there is more overlap between Twitter and every community I am involved with than with MySpace and Facebook alone, so Twitter is like a bridge between them. And while I’ve only recently started tweeting, I do see a time when I will get much more use out of it than I do presently because the funny thing about technology is that when it ceases to be a mere tool and becomes a “lifestyle,” it trends toward becoming absolutely necessary.