The title is a misquote of George Orwell’s quote from Animal Farm
All animals are equal - but some animals are more equal than others
We tend to think of browsers as a utility and don’t really care what version it is when viewing a web page
Unfortunately, the most common browser (and probably the one [...]

It seems that APC is causing some issue with our Wordpress installation so we’ve disabled it for now.
We took this opportunity to upgrade our webserver to run Apache 2.2 for which readers may find the list of new features interesting. We’ve also got PHP 5.1.1 installed and volunteers experienced with our content tool-chain [...]

Sorry, it’s been a while since the last post. Real life interfered for some volunteers but still software toolchains were upgraded and we have migrated our authorative DNS servers to the new server
Our DNS server is tinydns . This has been our choice for a long time primarily for its ease of use, security (it [...]

Many developers assume that the performance of a website depends on the server’s CPU performance and the connectivity of the server to its ISP.
Whilst this is true, another important factor on server performance is how the connectivity characteristic of the sites end-users impacts it
Keep in mind that a dynamic website consists of 2 components, creation [...]

A website developer should always strive to provide a better user experience, with a combination of a design and layout where the information the end user seeks is easily available and a performant site so the user is not experiencing the World Wide Wait.
An engineer deals in terms of tradeoffs. With Moore’s Law showing no [...]

Astute readers will remember this post where we alluded to the setup of a web-server for dynamic content.
We’ve also mentioned our use of Linux,Apache and PHP. In the Free/Libre/Open Source Software world, the use of these software solutions typically alongwith a database such as MySQL is known as using a LAMP software stack.
The ability of [...]

In the last post we discussed how sending Cache-friendly headers made for a much more enjoyable experience for site visitors and also helped reduce bandwith usage and lowered costs for operators.
Let’s say you are web developer showing of your l33t Photoshop skills on such a site and you upload a gif or a png called [...]

The task is simple, setup a webserver to serve images,videos,audios and other static content as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible. A simplistic view would be to just get some fat pipes and a uber-fast i/o system and pump the bits out with a webserver such as Apache .
A few things to keep [...]