Tag Archives: web design

Computer Wait Speed

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Maria Speaks Episode 34: Computer Wait Speed

My current computer woes remind me of something I heard long ago.

A long time ago — ten or more years, which is the middle ages in terms of the computing industry — computers were being marketed primarily on the basis of processor speed. Every time Intel or Motorola would come out with a new processor chip, members of the geeky set hurried to the stories to buy a new computer or upgrade that would bring their machines up to speed. It was then that I heard this rather curious statement:

All computers wait at the same speed.

The statement, of course, was meant to poke fun at computer users. At least that’s how I read it. Your computer could be the fastest in the world, but if you weren’t up to speed, all that extra fast processing power would be wasted. After all, each time a computer completes an instruction — whether it’s opening a dialog box, applying a font style change to some text, or matching e-mail addresses in your address book when you type into a field in a new e-mail message form — the computer faithfully waits…for you. As long as it has to. And while computer processors are getting ever faster, computer users are simply not keeping up.

Let Me Tell You About My Mom

All this reminds me of a sort of funny story. My mother, who has been using computers for nearly as long as I have, is not what you’d call a “power user.” She pretty much knows what her computer can do for her and she can usually make it do it. But she’s not the kind of person who pushes against the boundaries of what she knows very often. And when she’s working with her computer, she spends a lot of time making the computer wait while she thinks about what’s onscreen and how she needs to proceed. That isn’t a big deal — I’d say that 95% of computer users are like her. People react to what the computer does rather than anticipate what’ll come up next and have the next task prepared in their minds when the computer is ready to accept it. And all these computers are waiting at the same speed.

Anyway, for years, my Mom used dial-up Internet services. Most of us did. But as better alternatives came around and Web sites got ever more graphic-intensive, most of us updated our Internet connection technology to take advantage of cable or DSL or some other higher bandwidth connection. (I was literally the first (and only) kid on the block to get ISDN at my home. This was back in the days before cable and DSL Internet service. It cost me a fortune — heck, they had to dig a trench to lay new telephone lines to my house — but I simply could not tolerate busy signals, dropped carriers, and slow download speeds for my work. It operated at a whopping 128 Kbps and cost me $150/month. Ouchie!) My Mom, on the other hand, didn’t upgrade. She continued to surf the Internet through AOL on a dial-up connection, right into late 2006. Worse yet, she refused to get a second phone line, so she limited her Internet access or was impossible to get on the phone.

Let me take a little side trip here to discuss why her attitude wasn’t a bad thing at all. Personally, I believe we have too much dependence on the Internet. I recently read “I Survived My Internet Vacation” by Lore Sjöberg on wired.com, which takes a comic but all-too-real look at Internet withdrawal. If you’re the kind of person who uses the Internet to check the weather, look up vocabulary words, and find obscure information throughout each day without really needing that information, you owe it to yourself to read the piece. It really hit home for me. So in the case of my Mom, the fact that her Internet use was minimal wasn’t such a bad thing. Not at least as far as I was concerned.

But it had gotten to the point with my Mom that she was spending more time waiting for her computer than her computer was waiting for her. And it had nothing to do with processor speed. It was her dial-up Internet connection that made it slow.

At first, I don’t think she understood this. I think that when she replaced her aging Macintosh with a PC about 2 years ago, she really expected everything to get faster. But the Internet got slower and slower for her, primarily because Web designers don’t design sites for dial-up connections. (Shame on them!) The Internet had become a tedious, frustrating place for her and she couldn’t understand why so many people were spending so much time using it.

In November 2006, I came for a visit. I had to look up something on the Internet and within 15 minutes, I was about to go mad. I asked her why she didn’t upgrade to a different service. Then she showed me a flyer that had come with her cable bill. We sat down with her phone bill and AOL bill and realized that she could upgrade to cable Internet service and actually save money. A little more research with her local phone company saved even more money.

So she was paying a premium to connect at 56Kbps or less.

I made a few phone calls and talked to people in the United States and India for her. I’ll be honest with you — the price difference between cable Internet and her local phone company’s Internet was minimal, but we went with the phone company because the person who answered the phone spoke English as her first language. (Subsequently, my Mom needed some tech support after I was gone and that person was in India. Sheesh.) The installation would happen the day after I left to go back to Arizona, but I was pretty confident that they would make everything work. And although it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, my Mom was soon cruising the ‘Net at normal DSL speeds.

In other words, wicked fast.

My Mom was floored by the difference. I’d told her it was much faster, but I didn’t tell her it was 100 times faster. And it’s always on — all she has to do is turn on the computer and she’s online! And she can even get phone calls while she’s on the Internet! Imagine all that!

The happy ending of this story is that my mother now spends a lot more time on the Internet. (I’m not sure how happy that is.) And of course, she’s now back to the situation where the computer is waiting for her.

Who’s Waiting for What in My Office

I reported a hard disk crash here about 9 days ago. I know it was 9 days because that’s how long I’ve been waiting for the data recovery software to churn through whatever is left of my hard disk. And although it’s still progressing, it’s slowed to a crawl. I think it’s teasing me. But I’ll get the last laugh — I’m pulling the plug today.

There comes a time when you simply can’t wait anymore. I think 9 days shows a great deal of patience on my part. I know I couldn’t have waited so long if I didn’t have other computers to work with. I did get some work done this past week. I wrote up the outline for my Mac OS X book revision for Leopard. I did a lot of e-mail, fixed up a bunch of Web sites, wrote and submitted a bid for Flying M Air to dry cherries this summer in Washington State.

But what I did not do outweighed what I did do. I didn’t work on my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide. (I need the big monitor to do layout.) I did not pay my bills. (The latest version of my Quicken data files are on the sick drive.) I didn’t update Flying M AIr’s brochure. (Original files on the sick disk, need big monitor for layout.) The list does go on and on.

Now it’s time to get back to work. So I’ll pull the plug on the current data recovery attempt, put the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours, then reinstall it and try again by accessing the sick disk via Firewire from another computer. I can try multiple software solutions to fix the problem. And if that doesn’t work, I take the long drive down to the nearest Genius and let them give the computer a check up to make sure there’s no motherboard damage (again). If the mother board is still fine, I’ll leave them the disk to play with, get a new disk to replace it, and get the hell back to work.

That’s the plan, anyway.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite

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Hardcore .htaccess stuff for mere mortals like me.

Somewhere along the line recently, I got this idea in my head that I wanted all subscribers for my main feed here to get the FeedBurner version of the feed. Those of you who are familiar with RSS know that a feed icon appears in the address bar of most modern Web browsers, offering visitors a quick way to get the feed URL or create a live bookmark. Other folks might know that they can enter the URL for a WordPress-based site followed by the word feed to get a feed URL. There are a few other formulas that can be used to generate a workable feed URL for subscribing to a feed, too.

While that’s all well and good, with so many methods to subscribe to feed content, it’s nearly impossible to get a real count of subscribers. How many people are subscribed to my feed? Beats me. How many hits a day does it get? I don’t know.

And those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know how much I love stats.

So a did a little poking around on the Web and found a few articles that explained how to use .htaccess to redirect hits to WordPress-generated feeds to my FeedBurner feed. One was this thread on the FeedBurner site, which has special instructions for WordPress users (scroll down on that page). Another was this article on oneafrikan.com, which offered some additional tricks I found useful.

Unfortunately, these solutions had one thing in common: they redirected all feed links to a single FeedBurner feed link. While that’s fine for most people, I’ve just gone through a lot of trouble to set up and promoted category feeds on my site. The last thing in the world I wanted was for someone to subscribe to a category feed and then get the main feed in their feed reader.

Of course, all of this redirect magic is done with .htaccess, the “invisible” file that works with your Web server to provide some last-minute instructions for your site. I’d already played a bit with .htaccess settings to make sure that outdated URLs published in some of my older books still pointed to the right thing on my current site. And, of course, WordPress uses the .htaccess mod_rewrite module to change ugly PHP URLs into something more attractive and logical (although very lengthy, if you ask me). I knew only enough about .htaccess to be dangerous with it, but since I treat it like a vial of nitroglycerin, I haven’t gotten myself in trouble yet.

So I figured I’d take the oneafrikan.com settings and modify them to meet my needs. The trouble is, when I looked at the code, I couldn’t translate them into a language I understood (such as English), so I couldn’t modify them to meet my needs or anyone else’s.

I spent some more time on the Web and found lots of documentation. Unfortunately, all of it assumed I knew the basics of what I now know are called regular expressions: those punctuation marks that mean something completely different from the punctuation I’m used to as a writer. Not knowing what they were called made it impossible for me to look them up online. When I started looking at the same apache.org page over and over and it never changed (not that it should, mind you), I realized I needed more advanced (or perhaps basic) help.

What I needed was a book.

I don’t just write books. I read them, too. Although I very seldom read a computer book cover to cover, I have a bunch of them that I consult when I need to figure something out. Oddly enough, some of them are books I’ve written; I tend to forget things I’ve written about when I don’t use them regularly. (And they call me an expert! Ha!) I have a book by another author that covers Apache, but the information I needed was not in there. In fact, I’m trying to figure out why I bought that particular book in the first place.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewriteSo I went on Amazon.com and I searched for .htaccess. I came up with a list of books that referenced it, but were not about it. Then I searched for mod_rewrite. And voila! I found The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite by Rich Bowen.

Not anxious to plunk down $30 for a book I might not find my answers in, I did some more research on the Web. I found a few book reviews and they were all positive. It appeared that this 160-page book covered the topic quite completely. It was definitely the book I wanted on my shelf.

Of course, I didn’t feel like waiting for Amazon.com to ship it to me. (I like immediate gratification almost as much as stats.) So when I realized that the publisher’s Web site offered the book as an eBook for only $20 (half the cover price), I bought it online and downloaded it. In five minutes, I had the answer to my question and enough information to tackle the problem. But rather than read the book on my 12″ PowerBook’s tiny (well, 12 inches, right?) screen (my G5 is still feeling sickly), I printed the whole thing out, punched holes in the pages, and put it in an old binder I had sitting around.

I realize that once again I’ve turned a short story — I found a great book about using mod_rewrite — into a long and drawn out one. (There are no short stories here.) My apologies to those of you in a hurry.

The point I wanted to make is that The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite is an extremely well organized, reader-friendly, well written, and informative book that explains exactly how to use mod_rewrite for anything you might want mod_rewrite to do: rewrite URLs, control access, set up virtual hosts, and so much more. Plenty of examples, each of which is analyzed and discussed. It’s all there.

I’m only about 30 pages into it so far, but I’m already very pleased.

Link Bait?

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Unintentional, perhaps, but very effective.

I’m getting ready to upgrade my blog-based Web sites to WordPress 2.1 from WordPress 2.0.4. It’s a big task for some sites and the biggest hurdle I have to jump is the plugin compatibility hurdle. This site and wickenburg-az.com rely on plugins for many of their features. If a plugin were to unexpectedly stop working, the sites could be brought down by PHP errors. This is not something I want to deal with, so I started thinking about the plugin situation. And, as I often do when I’m thinking of something that might benefit other people, I wrote an article about it and published it here.

Does that make the article “linkbait”? I suppose it does. But I’m willing to accept that label if it’s used in the context of “simply compelling content.”

It took me about an hour to write the article. (Those of you who know me and my work know that I can produce original material at often alarming rates.) It was all fresh, out-of-my-brain stuff, inspired by the WordPress upgrade instructions and compatible plugins list, which I linked to in the article. It was better organized that a lot of the posts here — especially the long, rambling ones about flying and the things that go on in my life — and it included headings and lists to make it easier to read.

It hit the site at 7:24 AM MST. Within two hours, it had been linked to by Weblog Tools Collection (thanks!) and the article with the link just happened to appear in the Dashboard for all WordPress users. That’s when all hell broke loose. Visitors swarmed over. The article collected 10 comments and pingbacks in a matter of hours. The pingbacks, in several languages, brought even more visitors. At one point, I had 29 visitors (including bots) online and 19 of them were reading that one article.

Now that might not seem like a big deal to many of you, but it’s a huge deal here. My daily visitor count, which averages about 250 per day, jumped to almost 900. And my page hit count soared to over 1250 from a daily average of 400-500. Whew! And the trend is carrying over to today; at 8 AM, I’ve already reached my daily average counts.

What’s So Special about This Article?

So the question remains: why has this one article been such a boon to the site?

In looking at the article and how it differs from other site content, I’ve come up with the following:

  • The article was 95% original. I based it on my own experience and knowledge rather than material I’d found elsewhere. This was new content — not something I read and regurgitated here. And given the 1/9/90 rule discussed earlier today, only 1% of what’s in blogs is original content.
  • The article was timely. WordPress 2.1 had been out for less than 3 days when I wrote it. (Oddly enough, two commenters said they wished I’d written the article sooner. Sadly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to work with software under development these days, especially when that software is based on a computer language I hardly know.)
  • The article provided valuable information. Anyone who jumps blindly into a major WordPress upgrade deserves all the grief he gets. To me (and apparently others), the plugin issue is serious business. My article explained why it was serious and listed things that should be done for a less troublesome upgrade.
  • The article was well organized and well written. Sure, it’s easy for me to say — I wrote it. But I can look at all of my work objectively and I can say without a doubt that among my blog posts, this article was one of my better efforts. In fact, if this post wasn’t so time-sensitive, I would have submitted it to Informit.com, which pays me to write for them. (If I had, however, it would not have reached the Web for at least a month. So yes, I gave up a few hundred bucks, but WordPress users need this information now and I didn’t want them to wait.)
  • The article was well presented. I’m talking here about readability, which I discussed in another blog post earlier this month. This post included headings and lists, which help break text into bite sized pieces and make it more scannable.

It’s gratifying that the article was found by a “WordPress authority” who found it worthy to link to. I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t get the support of the folks who linked to it. They brought visitors to the article, pumping up my daily numbers accordingly.

Is it Linkbait?

Does that make the article “linkbait“? I suppose it does. But I’m willing to accept that label if it’s used in the context of “simply compelling content.” After all, I didn’t write it with the goal of getting lots of links and readers. I wrote it because it was on my mind, is a topic my readers claim they’re interested in (33% of those who took the poll said they’re interested in blogging), and is related to a topic I co-authored a book about. The article was forming in my brain — why would I keep it there if others might find it useful?

That said, I’m not one bit sorry that it has attracted all the attention it has. It’s given me a lot to think about — and more to write about here.