After three months delay from the inital plan I finally got DSL access.

My friend Abdulaziz Alqudhibi offered me NetGear DSL Modem/Router/Access point for really great price but it will take two days to install, but I couldn’t wait so I went to the market and bought a SpeedTouch 585, I hope I won’t regret it

Today my friend Feras Al-Jumah sent me a link to a WordPress theme called PaintedDesert. I liked it so much that I installed it on my blog, hope everybody like it.
Thanks Feras for the link.

Here is a screenshot of my old theme:

Today I’ll end my Alexa experiment. During the last 60 days I tried to improve my Alexa ranking, my ranking jumped from 1,603,040 to 133,430.

Today I removed Alexa ranking banner in my website footer, and I’ll remove all A9 toolbar extension from Firefox, it is occupying 20,000 pixels from my screen and I rarely use it.

PHP 4.0.5 and above added new feature to compress your PHP pages on the fly, all you need is the zlib extension, this how I configured it.
# vi /usr/local/etc/php.ini
:
zlib.output_compression = On
:
# apachectl graceful


Alriyadh.com front page size dropped from 20.5 K to 5.6 K, according to my tests almost 50% of browser don’t support compression, IE for instance turn off gzip compression support if you have bad firewalls (Zone Alarm), and even some IE extensions (specially ad wares) turn off the compression.

Several month ago I researched caching methods to use with Alriyadh.com, it was essential because we used old and slow hardware.

The result of my test showed that MySQL based caching was superior to memcached caching.

I did a new benchmark comparing MySQL, PHP memcache extension, and PHP memcache class.

The text is done by fetching the result of a complex query 1000 times, and calculated the time it took using my bechmark library (link dead!), times in seconds:

WikiPedia definition:

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.

I’ve just received my Google Analytics Invitation, so I subscribed to the free service. Of course no interesting reports until now, but I’ll keep you updated when I got anything interesting.

It cost 150SR per year and I never use it in the Kingdom, even abroad I use for reservation only, because the last time I used it to pay for my hotel stay I couldn’t get approval for a rented car because the hotel held more money than the cost of my room, and my credit card limit was reached, so I had to pay double in cash 🙁

To make thing worse, I tried to purchase a product from the Internet using my credit card and they refused to process my credit card most likely because it is Saudi card.

My brother Eyad graduated from Aman University.

1000 Mabrook Eyad

Sorry for the photo bad quality, I took it using my phone from the TV.

Today alriyadh.com main website migrated to FreeBSD, now the complete website runs on FreeBSD on HP servers.