My fellow Tokyo tech cheapo Greg Lane and I co-founded TokyoCheapo.com three years ago. From our humble beginnings as a little side project, our baby has really grown up. Three years on and the traffic has really jumped up, especially in the last year – from 50K monthly UV around April 2014 to 150K UV […]
Script for launching load balanced EC2 auto scaling group
We just migrated the image processing on artweb.com from our own load balanced EC2 auto scaling group of instances to use blitline instead. The auto scaling group is launched and shut down with the scripts attached below. In our implementation the instances were a simple phpthumb installation that we processed images via http request. Whilst […]
Increase Facebook Fans – Case Study: Sponsored Story vs Advert
<for the lazy> I found sponsored stories gave 4x better cost performance than standard FB ads at just 0.18GBP per new fan. If you wanna find out how/why read on! </for the lazy> I recently decided to test out facebook’s advertising platform for artweb.com with the goal of increasing the number of fans to our […]
moving/migrating svn repositories
For those of you still on SVN (and so I don’t forget) here’s a few SVN tips for when moving repositories Updating your local copy If your repository is moved If the repo moves, to a new server or changes protocal (ssh -> https) etc. Then there’s a simple command for seamlessly updating your local […]
Preparing Your Website/Web App For Scalability
Congratulations, your server is melting. This is a good problem to have (server heat is proportional to # of users). And it’s not so difficult to deal with if make a few preparations in advance. After launching a number of web services and viral social media apps, some of which grew to hundreds of concurrent […]
Amazon s3 versioning
Amazon now offers what I would veritably call “indestructable fool proof” file storage. S3 already provides an extremely high level storage durability – multiple geographically separated copies of your data. Now Amazon have taken it a step further with versioning, so even if you accidentally delete your data it’s still safe. The amazon S3 announcement […]
Cloud Computing Price Comparison
Apples and Lizards I’ve just been researching the estimated cost of cloud computing on some of the various providers out there who want to absorb your servers into their clouds. Doing this research has been like comparing apples to lizards. The providers all have their own way of billing you, and there’s a whole host […]
Cyber Mercenaries For Hire
I have one or two allegedly white hat friends and enjoy stories of lore and legend regarding their chivilarous and well contained sporting activites. However when it comes to professional cyber crime, I feel my Tokyo life is somewhat sheltered from the darker forces that glide through the veins and fibre cables of the internet […]
Tate Modern, Brick Lane and negative utilitarians
Just at the end of my trip to the UK, highlights include: A visit to the Tate Modern A stroll down Brick Lane with master painter Darvish Fahkr And lunch with ‘Philospoher’ David Pearce
My Secret Voodoo SEO Technique
I’ve been on the fringe of the SEO industry for over 10 years now. I’ve have watched it change from the good old days of when keyword stuffing would get you at the top of AltaVista to the modern day which uses some of the worlds most sophisticated software and technology. And after experimenting, researching, […]