There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work. Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do ...

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology ...

Tonight I found myself down in the gastown area, having a few beers with old pal Boris Mann down at the Bryght offices. He was nice enough to invite me to some of the Thursday night BBQ lovin at his offices, and introduced me to the ever-sought-after “Save On Meat” store around the corner from the offices. Photo by Roland TanglaoAfterwards, I stuck around and hung out for the Drupal monthly Vancouver meetup and learned both about Drupal 6.0 and some of the Install Profile work that the guys at Bryght have contributed back. I’m in the process of setting up a new website with a different ...