I stumbled on an article from Matt Galligan about the initial versions of Cir.ca, a news aggregator app from a few years ago that recently closed up. So the article talked about many of the design ideas they had, and the struggles they worked through before changing or abandoning some ideas.  This is an example…

When building any site that will interact with Facebook, you need to have a user connect their Facebook account with your site.  You create an app listing on Facebook, get some handshake tokens, put them in your code, then have a user initiate a connection between your site and their Facebook account. The initiation is…

Have been dealing with a couple of PHP projects recently which have been a far bigger pain in the backside than I anticipated, and both had some of the same stumbling blocks. In both cases, and in other projects I’ve seen, there’s a huge assumption that the code will be run from the root of…

I hit a problem the other day with concurrent queries causing deadlocks.  Using innodb gives you a lot of protection with respect to transaction support, but it carries a moderate amount of overhead, and unless you’re aware of what’s going on, you may be paying a higher price which can eventually cause performance or deadlock…