For example, if you are logged out, Washington Post’s newsletter page 302 redirects you to a login page that then serves a 200. This means a Google search for newsletters for washingtonpost.com gets indexed with the text from the login page. If they were to serve a 401 “Unauthorized” on the pages that require logins, these login pages would not be indexed. Use caution with that scenario though. It might be better to handle search engines differently than normal users so the content can be indexed.

What if sometimes you need to take a feature offline (or even, godz forbid, the entire site) for maintenance/upgrades? I assume you provide some sort of messaging to the users. If that page serves a 200 status and Google happens to try to index during that time you get screwed by having all of that feature’s pages get indexed as a single page. It is better to have the offline message page return a 503 status so the search engine knows that the service is temporarily unavailable and to try again later.

It is becoming more common for sites to capture a 404 and try to do a site search, or similar processing, for a possible match. Frequently when this happens it is handled within the app code rather than having the web server deliver the default 404 page. At GameSpot.com, the programmer who first set this up forgot to serve the 404 status code and was returning a 200. This meant that when a duplicate game was deleted from the database, the links to it were still showing up on Google. Once we made sure the code returned a status of 404 they went away next time Google indexed the site.

Finally, don’t forget about the 400 status code. If you try to load phpBB’s forums with an invalid forum id it will return a 200 status code even though it is not a valid request. This is a good situation to serve a 400 Bad Request. Keep in mind that that you probably wouldn’t want to return a 400 if the forum id just doesn’t exist (e.g., http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=123456) because it might exist at some point. At the very least, return a 404.

As a side note, with HTTP/1.1 there is a new 307 status code that is very similar to how you’re used to using 302s. It will probably be a few more years before HTTP/1.1 is the default for browsers & the 307 will be truly usable.

Join the SF MySQL Meetup for our April meetup where Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talks about how they store their data in a "schema-less" system on top of MySQL. FriendFeed stores over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As the database has grown, they have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. They did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as FriendFeed grew, scaling their existing features to accommodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This talk attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

Bret Tayler is one of the founders of FriendFeed.com. Before starting FriendFeed, he was a Group Product Manager at Google, responsible for Google’s developer products. Before that, he launched Google Maps and Google Local, and before that he worked on Google’s crawling and indexing infrastructure.

• Overview
  • What is the Yahoo! Open Stack?
    • Developer Tools – YUI, Tutorials
    • YOS SDK for PHP
  • Data APIs – YQL, BOSS …
  • Social APIs – Profiles, Connections, Updates, …
  • Application Platform
    • OpenSocial Support
• How does it all work?
  • Development Workflow
• Building an open application with PHP and YOS
• Common Problems & Solutions
  • CAJA
  • OpenSocial

Before we keep going, if you don’t know what svn hooks are you can read up on them at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s02.html.  svnbook.red-bean.com is my reference site of choice whenever I need to look up a svn command.

My #1, all-time, greatest in the world, bestest favorite is a svn pre-commit hook to syntax check my PHP code.  There is nothing I hate more than a developer checking in code with syntax errors and breaking qa or stage or even, god-forbid, production.  It’s as easy as setting up the hook to run a script that calls “/path/to/php -l /path/to/file.php” and on failure reject the commit.  This way code that has syntax errors will never make it into SVN.  Now if only open-source projects like ZendFramework did something like this before releasing their code.  To be fair, the syntax errors are in their documentation not in the /library/ files but that’s still pretty dumb & annoying.

Another nice way to use a post-commit hook is to run something like PHP_CodeSniffer against the commit.  CodeSniffer is an awesome PEAR package that scans your file and flags coding standards violations.  It comes pre-packaged with sniffers for the PHPCS, PEAR, Squiz and  Zend.  Set it up to run and if it finds coding standard violations you can have the hook send out nasty little blame messages.    This isn’t something that I’d want to run on pre-commit just in case you really need to get something into production NOW.  But if I hosted an open source project, I’d consider it.

Having minified JavaScript & CSS has become the standard way of serving JS & CSS.  But who really wants to take the time to minify or combine them?  Once again, enter svn hooks.  One of the developers set this up for GameSpot and it has been working great!  Basically it checks the commits against a defined naming standard, file.src.js or file.src.css, and then runs the YUI! Compressor on it and commits in file.min.(js|css).  He also made it check a global.conf in the file’s directory so it came mash up smaller js files into a global.min.js so we serve one file instead of ten.

Of course, let’s not forget about what is probably the most common svn hook; the post-commit email hook.  I like svnmailer better than mailer.py that comes with svn by default.  I think it’s easier to configure/change and to setup rules for how you want the emails to look or where to go.

If you’re using a ticket tracking system like Bugzilla or Trac that doesn’t have its own way of peeking into svn (like JIRA can with this plugin) you can write a post-commit hook to update the ticket when something is committed.  You can see how Trac recommends you do it at http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/trac-post-commit-hook.

To help you on the way to creating your own svn hooks, tigris has a few hooks that are distributed with svn.  They can be quite helpful so you should take a look at them.

I have disagreed with Paul Harvey a lot over the years (in my own thoughts anyway), mostly about the way he reported medical stories without questioning the validity of the data or his reports on the war in Iraq & against terrorism. But even with that, I have always liked his programs. When I used to drive to work I’d try and time my commute so I could catch “The Rest of the Story” (one of my favorite programs) on KGO. I still remember his story about the penny and the Chicago newspaper advertiser who started the 99 is less than 100 trend (because people feel that $9.99 is a lot less than $10) because he wanted to sell his paper for a penny instead of a nickle. I’d even occasionally take lunch around his noon program “News & Comment.”

Being on the radio for over 60 years, even after he turned 90, Paul Harvey became a radio legend. According to his Wikipedia entry, Paul Harvey’s programs were carried on over 1,200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations and 300 newspapers. With that sort of exposure, his passing will have a profound impact and noticeable loss to a large and diverse group of people. I’m sure he will be sorely missed. An additional note of merit, Paul Harvey was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award.

As you might also know, his son, Paul Harvey Jr, has been filling in for him over the last several years as he dealt illness and the loss of his wife. It is good to hear that Paul Harvey Jr will be continuing in his father’s footsteps and keeping the programs going.

Rest in peace Paul Harvey. I, as well as a nation, mourn your passing. In the words of Paul Harvey himself, “Good day.”

P.S. If you’d like to leave his family your condolence for his family you can do so at http://abcrn.com/harvey/contact/

fail. no go on getting tidy installed on my laptop in time for the presentation. sucks to be me. #

Try to code up some examples before tonight’s meetup. I have code for how to use tidy, but nothing for why other methods fail. #

Fail: some replies are missing that were there earlier tonight. Yes they are still on the sender’s tweets page. #

Day 3: dinner == fail. calories are close (within 25 of limit) but that’s not good. I’ll do better tomorrow. #

Cooking dinner @ Denise’s grandpa’s house. It’s a spicy pork & rice dish called “black death” it’s one of my favs. #

@larrrk you look like you were sleeping at the last #sfphpmeetup http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaeltougeron/3291454358/ #

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For the main presentation David Gomel, Senior Program Manager leading SEO within CBS Interactive, will speak to us about SEO in a Web 2.0 world. The session will cover many of the important SEO issues that involve front and back-end engineers on a daily basis. Many of the decisions that tech folks make have the potential to materially impact search engine traffic. Even if you have been to a similar talk in the past, you should consider attending as we will be discussing topics that are frequently evolving. Please bring questions!

Topics will include:

• HTML fundamentals
• CSS Usage
• JavaScript/Flash/Ajax
• Graceful Degradation
• Multimedia Content
• Duplicate Content
• Redirection
• URLs
• Bot Traffic
• Robots.txt

…And More!

David Gomel is the Senior Program Manager leading SEO within CBS Interactive. He is responsible for SEO knowledge sharing and training within the company.

So if you’re in the SF area on Monday Feb 2nd, 2009, stop by the CBSi building and listen in.

Tungsten Replicator is a new open source project for database replication. It offers MySQL to Oracle replication, robust handling of master failures, extremely flexible topologies, and an extensible architecture that allows you to add your own replication features if you don’t find them there already. I’ll describe why MySQL needs more replication, show the product architecture, describe some of the problems it solves, and demonstrate the replicator in action. Finally, we’ll play “stump the chump” where you can present your replication problem and I’ll describe how our replicator handles it. Whether you have a tricky replication problem or are just curious about the subject, please join us. This is a very technical presentation that should be of interest to all true MySQL fans.

More information on Tungsten Replicator: http://www.continuent.com/community/tungsten-replicator