Scott Nixon

For me this would be the ideal way to live. I know it would be a little bizarre but it’d get 4 extra hours to each day!

Jun 18

BeerFingers live today or tomorrow

Come hell or NYC BeerFest I’m getting it up before I go tomorrow because I want to keep track of all the beers I’m going to drink. I’ve made sure the database has all the Breweries from the United States and a few from outside of the US. You will still need to add individual beers before you rate the beer.

May 24

May 18

Feb 24

Jan 27

How we re-designed HappyHerbivore.com Overview

Here’s my rough outline from my video discussion. Enjoy and please ask questions! And visit HappyHerbivore.com

Systems Administrator
- Strong background with all technologies necessary to build and deploy web applications.
- Web developement
  - Casual experience over about a 10 years
  - Programming: ASP, Coldfusion, and Django
  - HTML, CSS, Image editing, JavaScript
What where some of the problems with HH?
- We wanted to do more than WP could easily accommodate.
- Slower load times(too many things, from too many places, fighting to be downloaded by your browser)
- Is Wordpress flexible? Yes, as a blog and a very simple CMS.
- Wanted a new logo, and improve overall sites look and feel
- Recipes locked in the blog post
Goals for HH redesign
- Wanted to be more than a Blog
- Speed
- Flexibility with design and data
What did we do?
- Worked with a designer to create a logo first and then had them design the reset of the page.
- We did not use an existing CMS.
- Do I learn php, use my coldfusion skills, or something total different.
- Do I use a CMS and learn out to build things on top of it? Time consuming too…
- Total different: Django is a web framework based on python.
- Consolidated: CSS and JavaScript into one file
Amazon Web Services
- CloudFront gives us global distribution of media
- Multiple datacenters in the US and across the globe
- All media is distributed through CloudFront: images, css, and javascript
- End result SPEED!

Yahoo Developer Network: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website

Jan 13

Happyherbivore.com redesign vids

Wordpress is great but the addition of many plug-ins will slow down your website considerably. I’m going to post a few videos about the website redesign and you should expect the first video in the next few days.

Dec 30

Security Theater - it’s time to rebel

I think it’s important to try to introduce all American’s to the term “Security Theater.”

Security theater has been defined as ostensible security measures which have little real influence on security whilst being publicly visible and designed to demonstrate to the lesser-informed that countermeasures have been considered. Security theater has been related to and has some similarities with superstition. source: Wikipedia

Basically not allowing people to use e-book readers, ipods, laptops, and blankets during any point in the flight is not going to make us safer. It’s time to file complaints with the TSA and airlines to let them know these measure will not make us safer. I also recommend contacting the White House and letting our president know that we want real measure and not puppetry. Lets elevate individuals such as Bruce Schneier who can make effective and actionable change to security without wasting money on BS measures. Read Bruce’s discussion of this debacle in the New Yorker.

Dec 04

Google Public DNS - Surf the web faster

Edit: I've since switched back to OpenDNS after performing long term ping test to both google dns and opendns servers. On average over several days, OpenDNS pings were on average 3-4ms faster at about 9ms.

My home network is switching from OpenDNS to Google Public DNS (http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/). Because faster is better when it comes to the internet. I don’t know for sure that using Google Public DNS will be faster but it’s worth trying something new.

Speed on the Internet is proportional higher the lower your latency so Google locates their data centers across the global and uses anycast routing to send users to the geographically closest data center. They are heavily using caching and prefetching to improve the performance of this system. Get more geek details here.