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January 19, 2011
AWS Rolls Out Beanstalk
Amazon is continuing on their crazed march, adding yet another impressive set of features to AWS.
Today they announced the Beta launch of “Beanstalk”, which significantly reduces the complexity of service deployment and management. Previously, an AWS user had to deal with all the capacity issues: provisioning, deployment/rollback, instantiation, load balancing and service monitoring. (Note that there are commercial solutions to this like RightScale and open source projects like OpenStack)
The initial offering is tailored to Java developers and uses Tomcat as the app server. All that is required is a .war file uploaded to Beanstalk that you then deploy. Beanstalk handles load balancing of the service and includes monitoring. Based on the post, it looks like there is some ability to control the environment (JVM settings etc) and directly login to a provisioned instance.
Of course, for the auto-scaling functionality to work properly, a site needs to be architected to work in an ‘n’ app server framework. I’d suggest testing this out before turning over the keys to Beanstalk.
Pricing for Beanstalk is attractive (free). The basic deployment looks incredibly inexpensive as well.
Posted by davehod at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2011
Book Review: Life – Keith Richards
Keith Richards, guitar player for the Rolling Stones has published his autobiography entitled “Life”. I expected the book to be vague/hazy on many aspects of the Stones and heavily ghosted to boot.
Was I surprised – this book is incredibly interesting and full of stories from Keith. Some of the things I enjoyed include:
- His stories and observations about the social upheavals of the late 60s/early 70s quite interesting. The Stones were constantly harassed by the Establishment at the time. Keith points out that the authorities were threatened by the band, which he found quite odd.
- Mick Taylor, Mick Taylor, Mick Taylor
- Long study of American blues including details about various musicians of the genre and era. Really interesting
- Making Exile on Main Street – read a lot about this when it re-released recently, but learned even more.
- Wingless Angels and Keith Richards solo (X-Pensive Winos)
As expected, lots of complaints about Mick – zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
As I read the book, I would periodically take a break and watch Stones videos on PersistentFan.com Made the book that much better :-)
Overall, great book. The best musician autobiography I’ve read in a while. Definitely queue up all the Stones discs with Mick Taylor to listen to while you read.
Posted by davehod at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2011
SEO and Sitemaps on PersistentFan.com
Bacon and I are always working on search engine optimization (SEO) for PersistentFan.com. In addition to ad buys, viral features, etc., like many sites, we have a monthly spend for acquiring traffic. Also like many sites, we constantly tweak many aspects of this spend to optimize.
Over the last few months, we added features to improve the visibility of a given topic (like Justin Bieber) by tweeting new topics from our @PersistentFan account, making it easier to share a link for a specific video (e.g. Jimmy Fallon), and Facebook/Digg sharing. Search engine crawlers are fairly latent; it can take upwards of a month to see the impact of certain changes. As we introduced various features, we began to see an uptake in both eCPM and search engine traffic/visibility. However, the progress was fairly muted overall. Before the holidays, we decided to start back at the beginning and analyze how search engines were crawling our site. I spent a lot of time doing this:
tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log
One thing that struck me almost immediately was that I saw a ton of crawlers (Tweetmeme, etc) from the @PersistentFan tweets, but didn't see a lot of folks like GoogleBot. After some analysis, we noticed the obvious - the front door of PersistentFan.com showed both the most popular topics of the last few hours, along with a scrolling list of recently viewed videos. At any given time, we were exposing about 15 or 20 topics to bots, but no more. The many thousands of topics we track for persistent fans were effectively hidden from bots because we didn't provide direct linkage or navigation to discover them. (doh!)
The solution to this was to provide a sitemap. Since our topics grow dynamically, both from user-generated searches and topic creation and various feeds that we use on PersistentFan, we needed a solution that generated a sitemap on a regular basis. I looked around but couldn't find much in the way of libraries so in the end I wrote a Java app that grabs all of the topics in our database, builds and serializes a DOM to create a sitemap on a nightly basis. Once this was complete, a simple change to our robots.txt let the crawlers of the world know where to go:
Sitemap: http://www.persistentfan.com/sitemap.xml
Within a few hours we began to see crawlers performing GETs on URLs which were not previously requested. Sitemaps, FTW!
Posted by davehod at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
January 02, 2011
RSS is Dying (Again)
Kroc Camen has a post about the impending death of RSS.
Having been a strong advocate of RSS (and also ATOM) for years (see MessageCast), I tend to read posts/rants about the soon-to-be-dead data format with some suspicion. Some posts are pure link bait (who could forget this?) While some are much more reasoned.
Kroc Carmen’s post falls into the latter category – he obviously values RSS and in his view, the lack of adoption (Mozilla claims a measly 3 - 7% utilization of the RSS “subscribe” features and is removing them from Firefox 4.0) is due simply to poor Web UI
The browser RSS button is the worst piece of UI since 2004.
I hadn’t stopped to consider this. After Firefox and IE added RSS support 5+ years ago things seemed to moving in the right direction. However, it was obvious that RSS is a geek-type thing that was never going to be adopted by the masses. Most people just don’t get what structured data feeds are all about (and of course, calling RSS “structured” is being kind)
Asa Dotzler (who btw follows 0 folks on Twitter??) has some great points in the post as well, check it out.
Posted by davehod at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)