Lately I have been doing alot of research on how to make an exceedingly fast website. So in order to accomplish such a task I had to identify all the components I use when making a website and what they depend on. So let’s do a break down of the components you use when developing a website:

• Programming Languages – PHP, Java, Perl, Python, C#, C++, Ruby, etc

• Browser – Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer (this browser is not worth mentioning but it is popular so it shall remain) client technologies are HTML, Javascript, CSS and Images (Not a client technology but is loaded by the browser)

• Database – MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server

• Hardware – CPU, Ram, Hard Drive

Programming Languages

This has always been a common debate amongst programmers, what is the fastest programming language? I have heard and heard this time and time again and when I hear the debate it’s something that can be easily SQUASHED! You have two different types of programming languages. You have compiled and interpreted languages. Compiled programming languages (C++) are faster than Interpreted languages (PHP, Python) period. The reason why is because compiled languages go from source code to machine code which is what the computer understands. Interpreted languages have to be read by an interpreter and than changed into machine code on the fly every time it is executed. Better example is imagine a compiled language as a person who speaks English and the interpreted language as a person who speaks Spanish and the computer is a person that speaks English. When the compiled language speaks to the computer it already speaks English helping the computer quickly understand what it is saying. With the interpreter you have to have a person who is the translator aka interpreter to translate the Spanish to English so to the computer can understand. So hopefully at this point you can determine who is faster. COMPILED LANGUAGES!!!

You may ask why do people use interpreted languages instead of compiled languages? Mostly because they make it easier to accomplish complex tasks with less code base on them being created at later times than compiled languages and being made to accomplish more modern tasks with website design. Still there are ways to still use interpreted languages and get around the speed issues. Facebook has came up with an interesting solution. Facebook uses php to fun their famous web application but in order to speed up there website and use less resources they created something called hip hop php. Hip hop php translates php into a compiled language. By doing this Facebook has nearly doubled their performance gains. Python even have frameworks that when started by the server changes the python into a compiled version of the original code creating a faster version of the website.

Browser

Well you may be asking yourself why is he bringing up about the browser since we can’t control what browser the user is using. As true as this is we can control what code the browser sees. The browser interprets HTML, CSS, Javascript and Images from the web server and loads it for your eyes to see. Now the question is how can we speed this up? Well one word compression. For HTML, CSS and Javascript you can use gzip compression. Gzip compression works by finding similar strings within a text file, and replacing those strings temporarily to make the overall file size smaller. This form of compression is particularly well-suited for the web because HTML and CSS files usually contain plenty of repeated strings, such as whitespace, tags, and style definitions. It works by first checking to see if the browser supports gzip encoding. If the browser approves it will send a compressed version of the web page to the browser to interpret it. Here is a better example here if you like pictures. It’s pretty easy to use, just check and see if your programming language supports it and than implement accordingly.

Another type of compression you can also do that works whether the browser needs to approve it or not is minifying your css or javascript files. Just like Gzip compression but eliminates spaces, tags and style definitions within the file so if a request is sent over the internet your browser can download it quicker without any type of approval process and regardless of how old your browser might be. Yahoo has developed program to minify your files here. Jquery uses the same method for their files also. They mention it here

Images are probably one of the main things that take the most time when downloading a website. Especially with newer and newer cameras coming with bigger mega pixels. Usually after you take a picture on today’s camera it will be usually over 1 megabytes which is way too big for a website. So what you do, you guessed it right you need to compress it. My favorite method for compressing files is using photoshop save for web function and resizing the images can reduce the size of a image that is 2.0 megabytes to under 50 kilobytes or less. Another option if you do not wish to buy photoshop for several hundred dollars (understandable) you can use an online program called Image Optimizer. There are other alternatives out there but I have tested them.

Databases

With databases I have tested and played around with such as MySQL, Oracle, SQLite run pretty good considering how optimized the query is and how many results you are fetching. Also it depends on the hardware (read the hardware recommendations) and if it is a 32 or 64 bit version. If you read one of my earlier articles you see that 64 bit is faster than 32 bit versions. But in order to use 64 bit programs you have to first have 64 bit operating system which is offered by every known manufacturer nowadays. I will even recommend that you always get the 64 bit version if it is available, unless it is unstable or not in its final version.

Hardware

This is probably the MOST important aspect with the speed of your website. Programming languages, databases, every thing software related depends on hardware. Even though every thing depends on the hardware you need to know what aspects of the hardware correlate to the software. Since we are talking about the speed of the website the most essential thing with speed of the CPU. The faster the CPU the faster your programming languages, databases run. I would suggest a CPU that has multiple cores.

The next thing is memory, memory can run out pretty fast on high end systems. With hard drives I really like solid state hard drives but they are really expensive for the size you might want. They are the fastest drives on the market right now and you will definitely will see the increase in speed. I would personally suggest getting sata 3.0 drives and sticking with that until the price of regular hard drives drop, because you probably be making several backups of your site and database.

Another aspect of memory to remember is Ram. With the server, database and website running ram can get used up pretty fast but it always depends on what you are doing. If you are just experimenting you really don’t have much too much to worry about but if you are running something the whole world is going see I suggest getting ram that is pretty fast and over 4 gigabytes of memory. Also remember there will be several other applications and plug-ins that you might install to complement your website so we didn’t even factor this into the equation yet but that can vary greatly. Other than that have fun! Feel free to leave any questions or comments.

1. Speed

All the top websites have quick load up times which quickly conveys the information to the viewer. Websites that take too long to load up drives potential viewers away. So what the top websites do is reduce unnecessary graphics and compress their scripts. I wrote an article before on Reducing load times and bandwidth usage. This article tells you how to compress your scripts with php. So when designing your website I would say design it so it loads up in at least under 7 seconds on T1 connection.

2. Color

One thing that every top website has is white as their background or a big color in your website. Not only that they have all the other colors work along with the white. Because certain colors make people feel a certain a way so its good to understand the philosophy of colors when designing a website with whether its with white or not. Every color conveys a certain feeling to your viewers. So know how to manipulate colors.

3. Keep it Simple

Do not make your website too complex. Know how to quickly deliver what your website is about in a few seconds. If you can do this effectively you will keep the viewer on your website if you got what they are looking for.

4. Excellent product or service that caters to the masses

Having an excellent product or service is something that greatly increases your website traffic period. If you have this you will not have to market your product because viral marketing will take over. Viral marketing is the fastest way to spread word about your product or service and all it is word of mouth which is better than SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If people like what you are presenting I guaranteed you will not have to do anything.

5. I can’t tell you everything yet, lol.

Some details I have discovered about having a top website I can’t disclose but instead implement my company website.

Text to Speech in Android

Version of android executed in: 1.6rc2 in Windows

TOOLS we used:

Eclipse and Android library 1.6rc2

How it works:

1. In android 1.6rc2 the text to speech library is built in called android.speech.tts, here is link for the information http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeech.html

2. Here is the code

package com.android;

import java.util.Locale;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech;
import android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech.OnInitListener;

public class TtS extends Activity implements OnInitListener{
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
private TextToSpeech mTts;

int MY_DATA_CHECK_CODE = 0;

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);

Intent checkIntent = new Intent();
checkIntent.setAction(TextToSpeech.Engine.ACTION_CHECK_TTS_DATA);
startActivityForResult(checkIntent, MY_DATA_CHECK_CODE);
mTts = new TextToSpeech(this,this);

}

@Override
public void onInit(int arg0) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
String myText1 = “Did you sleep well?”;
String myText2 = “I hope so, because it’s time to wake up.”;
mTts.setLanguage(Locale.US);
mTts.speak(myText1, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH, null);
mTts.speak(myText2, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_ADD, null);
}

}

3. To make it even easier you can use you can download the code and open as an existing project. Click here to download.

References:

1. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-text-to-speech-in.html

]]> http://compscistuff.com/2009/04/text-to-speech-for-googles-os-android/feed/ 15 http://compscistuff.com/2009/01/8-ways-to-increase-your-website-security/ http://compscistuff.com/2009/01/8-ways-to-increase-your-website-security/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:52:06 +0000 Michael Washington http://compscistuff.com/?p=301 Recently I have heard about how Twitter has been hacked using brute force techniques and even how Barack Obama page was hacked on Twitter. You would think a web application as popular as Twitter would have better security measures. There are different ways to hack websites but the most common way websites are hacked is by poor configurations and weaknesses found in the websites. Here are the ways to combat hackers.

1. Check the file permissions for files on your server

If you have files that allow anybody to modify them such as groups and users then you already have a major problem. You need to only allow users to view your content not write to it.

2. Check the privileges of user names accessing the database you are using.

Sometimes granting all privlieges for a username of a database can be dangerous. When designing your website that stores all of your information in a database it is best to split the privlieges between multiple usernames. This could cause the hacker some pain and time when trying to retrieve information from your database.

3. Make sure passwords are above 6 characaters with CAPS and Numbers and double hash them.

When passwords are short lengths and contain no caps and no numbers it makes it easier to do brute force attacks on the websites. So always make sure it is over 6 characters and add caps and numbers to your password. On the backend make sure you double hash passwords. When you double hash them use two different types of hashes. This is will throw hackers off some.

4. Always validate the visitors input.

When you have visitors enter in information that will be sent to the database make sure you protect against query attacks. There are certain combinations that visitors could use to reset passwords or drop your database. So every time they enter in values make sure you have a function to remove bad characters to protect your database.

5. Use computer generated pictures when allowing users to login or signup.

When hackers hack login information, they use a program and to loop through all the possible combinations for a password. If you use computer generated pictures for validation it will cause them even more discomfort for a hackers because they will need a program to read computer generated pictures which is close to none!

6. Use SSL.

SSL is a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data. SSL creates a secure connection between a client and a server, over which any amount of data can be sent securely. To get a better understanding look below at the block quote from php.net.

SSL/SSH protects data travelling from the client to the server, SSL/SSH does not protect the persistent data stored in a database. SSL is an on-the-wire protocol.

Once an attacker gains access to your database directly (bypassing the webserver), the stored sensitive data may be exposed or misused, unless the information is protected by the database itself. Encrypting the data is a good way to mitigate this threat, but very few databases offer this type of data encryption.

You can buy SSL certificates from your web hosting company or from independent websites.

7. Keep your system up-to-date.

If you are using php 3 and php 5 is out then you need to UPGRADE!!! Usually when you update your system they include patches to solve security problems that the previous release did not have.

8. Customize your security and create no documentation for IT!!!

Most of the time on the internet everybody is using the code because they downloaded it from somewhere in which over a thousand users downloaded the same thing. Hackers will download it to so they can know how to hack it to. If you are real serious about security I suggest you create your own technique after researching other methods out there and create NO documentation for it. I agreed with open source but not when it comes to SECURITY! This will make it hard for hackers and they will move on to an easier website to wreck havoc.

Search Engine Optimization – by using these techniques it will bring your website a long way google alone brought 300 people to our website each month.

Fast loading times – by using gzip and picture compression techniques this allowed our website to load up in considerable amount of time on just about any internet connection.

Search Engine Submission – by submitting our website to yahoo, google and msn live it allowed regular internet users to explore our page without any knowledge of our page.

25 articles – by writing 25 articles on computer technology that readers are normally attracted to it appealed to an already large market of people out there.

Giving free information that generates money or saves money – Giving out free information to strictly benefit people always grasps people attention.

Using a wordpress – wordpress is a beautiful content management system for managing information in your blog and contains several extensions that can take your page a long way!

Passion – Always writing about your passion always produces results. So no matter what it is always follow your passion and pursue what makes you happy!

A note from M.E. Conwell – As the co-writer on this site I too would like to thank all of you, our valued readers, for helping Mike and I make Compscistuff what it is today. Now we want to hear from you our readers on what it is that we can do to make this site even better. We want to know what it is you like or dislike about the site or what you would like to see added to the site. This feedback would be greatly appreciated and will help us take Compscistuff to the next level. Mike an I are committed to making Compscistuff as helpful and useful as possible so be on the look out for more great articles and a few surprised in 2009.

1. Compress your images
2. Compress your code

Images – this is something that is very common to use up a lot a bandwidth, if they are not placed in the right format. I use Photoshop and the save for web function they have which can be located under the file on the menu. Of course photoshop cost money but there is a free alternative you can use. I found a website http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx which can optimize your pictures for you! If you decide to do it by the bulk you can download the program off their website.

Code – I use php to code most of my applications and wanted to find a simple way to make it load up faster. Well I have found a simple solution and this is through enabling gzip compression for php. Just put these two lines of code into your php.ini which is your php configuration file found on your server, thats if you have php 5 or higher.

zlib.output_compression = On
zlib.output_compression_level = 6
To make sure it is active, type in your website into this Web Optimizer. It should say congratulations this page is compressed for main domain name. And thats all, with gzip compression enabled it will decrease the size of your code by 80%!

1. Visits
   
2. Pages
3. Hits
4. Bandwidth

Visits

Usually called unique visitors, this is a deduction of how many “people” visited your site. Usually based on IP address and sometimes other factors as well. This is always an estimation since there is no accurate way to measure that. Therefore different stats programs could come up with different numbers using the same log file. I use awstats and another stat program to gauge how many people come to my website.
Example: A visit from User A at IP address X would count as one unique visitor, regardless of how many pages they viewed or how many hits they generated.
Usage: Great metric to estimate the number of unique people that visit your site. Your reach.

Pages

How many pages have been viewed on your website, ignoring embedded images and such.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 1 page view.
Usage: Useful metric to determine how many and what individual pages of your site are being viewed. Helps you guesstimate the number of pages each visitor views each time they come to your website.

Hits

How many objects are loaded up when a visitor comes to your website.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 4 hits: one for the index.html document, and one for each of the three images it had to fetch to complete the page.
Usage: To see how many objects your server is loading up.

Bandwidth

This shows the amount of data sent from your server
Example: If your homepage is 14k plus 3 images at 12k each, then when a typical user requests that page they’ll pull 50k of bandwidth (14+12+12+12).
Usage: See your bandwidth usage.

Reading the numbers…

Example of everything together

Example of a statistic: 100 unique visitors, 300 visits, 1200 page views, 3600 hits, 2.2GB bandwidth

This means an estimated 100 different people have visited. Those 100 people visited on average 3 times each (300 visits / 100 uniques). During each of those 300 visits, those 100 people viewed an average of 4 pages each (1200 page views / 300 visits). Those 1200 page views generated and average of 3600 hits, or 3 hits per page. All together, 2.2GB of bandwidth was consumed.

2.2GB of bandwidth is a lot for that level of traffic. Unless they are movies, the graphics could be way too big. 3 hits per page view? are images being cached appropriately? Could signal some coding inefficiencies.

The number of visits being higher than the number of uniques is good. Means you have repeat visitors.

4 page views per visitor, how good/bad that is depends on the site. Measures the “stickiness” of your site.

Dreamweaver – A great IDE for HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc which makes it easy on the eyes when coding.

Flash – For creating very animated websites and add spice to whenever your doing. Also can be used to display movies too.

Adobe Photoshop – For designing almost anything your mind can think of, but I use it for design layouts for websites, flyers and decorating graphics.

Now these tools are the best tools out there but the thing about it, IT COSTS MONEY!!!!

The new Dreamweaver CS4 costs:

• Buy US$399*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Flash CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Photoshop CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

If you are a student you can get a 80% discount only if your school is on the Adobe list for discounts.

Now what about every body else that wants to design websites? What will you do when it is time for you design websites? Are you going to use Notepad? Well I have found solution for you.

I have found alternatives to all these expensive programs:

1. Quanta Plus (Dreamweaver) – Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don’t have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.
2. OpenLaszlo (Flash) – Before OpenLaszlo 4.0, OpenLaszlo applications were compiled in .swf format to run on Adobe’s Flash Player. With OpenLaszlo 4.0 (OL4), we added the option of compilation to DHTML (browser-native JavaScript). OpenLaszlo 4 handles browser idiosyncrasies so you don’t have to.
3. Gimp (Photoshop) – It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

With these alternatives they are both for windows and linux and FREE!

After researching this is what I found (this is from their website you can check here under some important disclaimers):

The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.

As you can see there is a margin of error in their system but this paragraph gives the reason I’m experiencing slight decreases in my alexa ranking (this is from their website you can check here under some important disclaimers).

Sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Alexa’s data comes from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users and other traffic data sources; however, the size of the Web and concentration of users on the most popular sites make it difficult to accurately determine the ranking of sites with fewer than 1,000 monthly visitors. Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes.

As you can see Alexa ranking are not reliable but its purpose is to guesstimate how popular a website is and how much it costs. I use Alexa to find up and coming websites, to track website trends and analyze data. I’m not discouraging people from using Alexa but to be mindful that everything is not 100% accurate. On a sidenote if you really wish to accurately track your stats of your website consult your website hosting providers for tools they provide. I personally use awstats.

Also here is a random fact I found from Alexa website that readers might find interesting.

Question

Why are there so many Chinese sites in the top 500?
Category: Traffic and Site Stats
Answer

Because Alexa’s traffic data reflects the usage of the entire global population of Internet users, large members of that global population, such as China, will be heavily represented in that data. Many Chinese sites do receive very large amounts of traffic, which is consistent with their inclusion in our top 500 list.

This is why I was trying to pass w3c standards:

1. Helps ensure accessibility for the disabled.
2. Makes your web site accessible from a number of devices, from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using mobile devices.
3. Regardless of the browser, resolution, device; etc., your Web site will look and function in the same, or at least a very similar, fashion.
4. A site that has been created using W3C standard-based code performs generally better in the majority of browsers, be it (IE) Internet Explorer, (NN) Netscape Navigator, (FF) Firefox or Safari.
5. Saves both time and money. A site that has been programmed to W3C standard has two advantages: it is downgrade-able (able to be viewed correctly) in older browsers; it is viewable and will look nearly the same across newer and continuously updated browsers (i.e., Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.)
6. When upgrading or maintaining a website this can save an enormous amount of time and research for the person performing the updates, base on you following these standards.

After further researching it came to my amazement that google, yahoo, facebook and youtube did not meet the standards of w3c! You would think the moguls of the internet would abide by such a code! I guess the oddball in this case is msn, because they actually passed the test. I actually pass the test on my homepage but I probably won’t in the future because of youtube.  It always some case in which you have to deviate away from a standard but make sure you are still on point with your infomation and delivery. The most important thing with website design is making sure you end your html tags, no hanging loops and optimize your webpage to load within certain times. So if you want to abide by it you have to make a choice avoid google, yahoo, facebook widgets and youtube videos on your page and meet w3c standards, or break the standard and entertain your viewers!

If you want the link to check your website go here and type in your url.  Also try out google, yahoo, facebook and youtube to see for yourself.