httpAsia relaunched!
Adaptability is an important trait in this industry, I think. You need to constantly reinvent, realign, recode yourself and your products in response to shifting trends, competition and your own available resources - the latter being the main reason behind this relaunch.
httpAsia is no longer a blog updated by one person, it is a social news site that aggregates and filters relevant news items from hundreds of different sources. And it runs completely on autopilot.
Less than a month into my new 100% freelance lifestyle and I’m finding myself busy. In fact, more busy than I was when I was working full-time. Kinda ironic…I thought I was supposed to have more free time doing it this way…
Anyway, gradually it dawned on me that I need to free myself of ongoing commitments as much as possible*. I need my web products to work for me, not the other way around. I think I was being a little optimistic - even naive - to think that I would be able to support 2 blogs with any kind of dedication, when I have corporate and small biz consulting work on my plate as well as the ongoing development of new web services to add to the Yongfook Empire. As well as, you know, having a life.
*yes, I am also reading 4-hour work week…
So whilst I’m sad to see the httpAsia blog go, and somewhat sheepish to admit that it was more than I can handle, I’m happy with this new development as it is actually something I’ve wanted to do for a long time - and that is to build a near zero-management platform for a social news site. Nearly all management aspects of httpAsia are outsourced to services that can do the job better than I can alone. The system, based on MVC and written in PHP5 is one of my most advanced projects yet, despite not looking like much! For example:
Intelligent Feed Handling - httpAsia picks and chooses news articles from hundreds of sources, based on keywords I set in a config file. Feeds are grabbed and parsed every hour automatically, thanks to a cron job. Influencing what gets added to httpAsia is as easy as editing the config file.
Comment Management - commenters have to enter their email and verify the comment via email before it gets added to the site, ensuring a minimum amount of spam. And even before any DB query is made, comment content is checked against the Akismet database to see if it is a possible spam comment, meaning spammers don’t eat up my server resources.
Beautiful, simple MVC - switching to MVC architecture in all my projects earlier this year really helped ramp up my productivity and increase the maintainability of my code. The httpAsia index page controller is made up of about 10 lines of code. And more recently, using ORM frameworks such as propel have allowed me to write even less code than before. Once you get your head around using concepts such as MVC and tools such as propel, you become a much more efficient programmer, write much cleaner code and the tools start working for you as opposed to the opposite.
Flat file caching and query caching - to consume the minimum amount of resources, httpAsia uses both these types of caching to minimise the amount of processing overhead and database calls required.
Not bad for two days work ;)
So zero management and less server resources - this is all great for me, but what about the users? Well, whilst the users lose that human touch in my personal blog posts, they benefit from a much wider pool of news articles, and constant updates, amounting to dozens of new posts each day. I’d say that if the goal of httpAsia is to help spread information about the web industry in Asia, I have improved on the previous model.
For those who are interested, some of the tools and services I’ve used in this project include:
- CodeIgniter - a wonderful, simple PHP framework for MVC projects.
- jQuery - hands down the best javascript library out there for rapid development.
- SimplePie - cute little PHP class for parsing RSS feeds.
- Akismet - omnipotent spam filtering.
p.s. for now I’ve populated the “blogosphere” section with feeds from relevant blogs that I am a fan of - if you are the blog owner and you don’t want your feed appearing there just let me know and I’ll be happy to remove it. However, bear in mind that for the blogs, all traffic is directed back to your site. It’s only the news articles that have discussion pages on httpAsia.
p.p.s yes I know the news article filtering is still a bit iffy. Rogue, irrelevant news articles might occasionally slip through for now…
p.p.p.s it is most likely borked in IE. I haven’t even checked it yet (for personal projects I always leave tedious IE checking until the end) will get round to it this week.
