Adobe XMP with an Hierarchical Subject Array in PHP

January 7, 2013Updated on November 2, 2013 JS Morisset 6 Comments PHP

This morning I had a bit of a challenge parsing Adobe XMP information for images on Underwater Focus. The Adobe XMP is too complex for SimpleXML, and anyway, I only needed a few values — one of them, the LightRoom hierarchicalSubject keywords, is the reason I’m sharing some of the code I wrote.

Using regular expressions to get at single values is quick and easy, but I wanted to create arrays for rdf:li values, and split each lr:hierarchicalSubject keyword into an additional second-dimension array.

Memcached vs Disk Cache

December 4, 2012Updated on November 2, 2013 JS Morisset HTTP Server, PHP, UNIX (Generic)

I recently added some disk caching for MySQL queries, WordPress objects, PHP opcode, and PHP web pages on my server. There are several different caching techniques and applications available, and memcached seems like one of the more popular ones. Right or wrong, it appears to be the default go-to for many developers these days.

Since I’m a SysAdmin by profession (with maybe a penchant for scripting and integration), I tend to have a more “systems” oriented approach — which led me to first consider, and then choose disk caching over memcached. In this post, I’ll outline the reasons I chose disk caching, and why in most circumstances it might be superior to memcached.

WordPress Caching and Plugins for Performance

December 1, 2012Updated on September 30, 2019 JS Morisset 6 Comments HTTP Server, PHP, WordPress

Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at different solutions to improve the speed of my WordPress websites. The first step was to mirror and redirect the static content to another server (aka Content Delivery Network or CDN). I’m currently using a DreamHost VM, but I may look into using Amazon S3 as well. This is an easy way to save bandwidth, and off-load a web server that is configured for dynamic content (larger and slower). In the case of PHP and WordPress, there are several additional options available to improve local web server performance. I’ll describe the ones I’m currently using, including their expected impact to performance and short-comings. This article deals mainly with the local Apache Httpd and PHP configuration. There are additional infrastructure solutions that can improve performance, like using Nginx servers on the front, Varnish cache servers in the middle, and Apache Httpd on the back-end (for PHP and WordPress). This post is only about optimizing the Apache Httpd back-end. If you’re considering adding a Varnish server in front of Apache Httpd, you should probably avoid caching whole pages in Apache Httpd and leave that to the Varnish servers.