I’ve been using Freshdesk for a week or two now. It has quite a few limitations — like not being able to use pre-formatted code in Tickets and Topics — but it’s also quite flexible in other ways. As an example, I found a way to make custom ticket fields clickable, so I can quickly visit a customer’s website and lookup information using a WordPress plugin.
Here is my solution to maintaining Development, Staging, and Production apt mirrors on a “deployment” server with Puppet. I assume the reader is familiar with Puppet and has a working Puppet infrastructure.
Here’s a little snippet I use to remove multiarch / i386 support from Ubuntu with Puppet.
if versioncmp( $::lsbdistrelease, "12.04" ) > 0 {
exec { "remove-architecture i386":
command => "/usr/bin/dpkg --remove-architecture i386",
onlyif => "/usr/bin/dpkg --print-foreign-architectures | /bin/grep -q i386",
}
} else {
file { "/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch": ensure => absent, }
}If you have a server with multiple interfaces – either public and/or private – your routing table might look something like this:
sh# ip route list
default via 17.10.20.1 dev eth1 metric 100
192.168.0.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.51
17.10.20.0/23 dev eth1 proto kernel scope link src 17.10.20.51
105.104.72.16/28 dev eth2 proto kernel scope link src 105.104.72.23
This example shows one private interface with IP 192.168.0.51, two public interfaces with IPs 17.10.20.51 and 105.104.72.23, and a default route to 17.10.20.1. This means that any traffic to/from an IP outside the interface’s subnets is sent to 17.10.20.1 — and this is where problems occur (and probably why you’re reading this article). ;-)
I’ve found a few snippets of PHP code to read XMP / XML meta data from an image file, but none that I would call very robust or efficient. I ended up writing my own for Underwater Focus, and I’m quite pleased with the result. In fact, after adding support for a shortcode, I packaged it as an Adobe XMP plugin for WordPress.
The first part of using XMP meta data is reading the XMP information from the image. I’ve seen a few solutions that read the whole file into memory, and others that read-in just a small part. If the XMP / XML contains a lot of information, that small part may be incomplete. And each time the XMP meta data is required, the original (and sometimes quite large) image file must be re-read. Since the XMP doesn’t change unless the original image is updated, there’s no reason to keep re-reading the same large file time and time again.
Continuing the earlier theme of Optimizing Images to Save Bandwidth and Speed Page Load, you can also encode small (background) images directly in your stylesheets. For each image / page element encoded within a stylesheet, it means one less HTTP connection for content, which in turn means pages finish loading faster. These images should generally be small and downloadable quickly — what you want to save is the HTTP connection overhead, not the download time (both images and stylesheets are generally cached after downloading). The images should also be encoded within sourced stylesheet files, so the stylesheet files can be cached by the browser. If you encode images within your content (using `<style></style>` tags for example), the encoded image will have to be downloaded for every page view, so although you’re saving HTTP connections, your page size has increased. By encoding images in sourced stylesheet files instead, the browser (and content delivery services) can cache the whole stylesheet, including the encoded image(s).
A few weeks ago I mentioned the wesley.pl script from GitHub to optimize images, and how I had modified it to keep (or discard) the EXIF / XMP information. Making sure images are as small as possible is important to save bandwidth and improve page load times (and google rank), so I think it’s worth discussing my image optimization process in more detail.
To improve page load times (and Google ranking), you should make sure all jpeg, png, and gif files are properly optimized. Instead of writing my own script for jpegtran, pngcrush, and gifsicle, I used Mike Brittain’s Wesley.pl script on GitHub. It works great, though I did have to modify it to change the “jpegtran -copy” parameter it uses — I need to keep the EXIF on larger files, and strip it from thumbnails. I posted the diff on the GitHub Issues page.
Update 2012-12-31 : In case Mike doesn’t merge my diff, with the addition of the
--copy=[all|comments|none]command-line argument (see my comment below for more info), you can download the patched wesley.pl script here instead.
