Monthly Archives: March 2014

AltruistClick.net is two weeks old!

altruist-medium

AltruistClick.net is proving to be an enjoyable side project, and I’ve posted a summary of its first two weeks on the site itself.

Some of the more popular posts included

I’m learning from the unpopular posts too. I’m aiming to write one post per day (I tend to write several at a time and schedule them for gradual release)

Technology behind the site

For the first few weeks it lived on an old Linux server in my loft, hooked up a to Virgin Media cable connection. Not brilliant, but fine for a low level of traffic.

I want to the site to cope with spikes in traffic, but I need to balance that against the cost. I found a good balance in Digital Ocean, a cloud provider which can provide a reasonable virtual server for just $5/month, with plenty of options to scale it further.

The site is based around WordPress, and to keep things zippy it uses a combination of Nginx and Varnish to deliver things as fast as possible – around 20 times faster than the relatively dumb setup it started out on. It could be faster still, but it’s a good trade off of time-spent-tweaking vs time-spent-creating-content!

What’s next

I’m writing a WordPress plugin which allows quite sophisticated ‘What X are you?’ type quizzes, as I’d like to have some more interactive content on the site. Plus, it’s an interesting project in itself!