A Better HAProxy Health Check For Dynamic Websites
Nobody wants their website to go down, or worse, for users to notice the site is down. Because of this most larger websites will run on multiple servers to provide some level of high availability. In a multi-server architecture there is typically a load balancer (or cluster of load balancers) to distribute the load among a pool of web servers. When a server goes down it’s taken out of the pool until it is once again ready to handle requests. HAProxy (a software load balancer) has the ability to perform this task by doing periodic health checks on all the servers in a cluster. The default settings, though, could give false positives in some cases, and thus create a bad user experience by allowing ill application servers to continue receiving requests.
.htaccess File Causes 500 Internal Server Error on Network Solutions
How’s that for a search engine friendly title, eh?
This is just a quick note for anyone who has to deal with Network Solutions hosting (for clients or otherwise). Apperantly Network Solutions doesn’t run PHP with Apache’s mod_php, but rather as a CGI application. That means if you try to put PHP configuration directives in a .htaccess file it will cause a 500 Internal Server Error. My helpful reference: Because Network Solutions Sucks.
You have been warned.
Auto-Linking URLs with PHP
A week or so ago I was working on a bug in the auto-linking code for Laconica, the software that powers Indenti.ca. Squashing that particular bug wasn’t too hard, but I wanted to take the functionality a step further (closer to the calibre of Gmail) and it turns out, writing robust auto-linking code is more difficult than it initially seems. So I played with it a little at a time here and there, testing as many edge cases as I could think of. The result is a function that’s more robust than most URL auto-linking code I’ve come across.
I still need to add support of internationalized TLDs and HTML. So, although it only works with plain text for now, I think it’s off to a good start. Check out the demo or download the source.
MySQL SELECT Entries Before NOW()
I’m in the business of making things faster. Using NOW() in a SQL query is something I’m going to complain about. Here’s a familiar scenario from the online publishing industry where future dating articles is a commonality:
You have a news site. You need to display only articles that have been published, and one of the criteria is that they need to have a publish_date before now. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
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About
Sean Murphy is a freelance web application developer currently living near Orlando, FL. Aside from building his own applications and contributing to open source projects, he works with clients to provide top-notch consulting & development expertise.
