This post is about trying to limit SQL queries, by the use of a method called “caching”. I’m going to talk about different methods ways of thinking about caching.

In my 20+ year career as a coder I have seen, many times, cases where someone thought they had found a way to make things easier and simpler, and, this is the crucial bit, more powerful. I did a maths degree at Uni, and I intrinsically understood the problems here. It’s the law of diminishing returns. Let’s get concrete with some examples. The no code lego-esque dream that never dies The first time I thought about it was in my first job out of uni in 2002.

I’ve been working for a client, and the e-commerce solution I built along with Mandy for them has a multi-currency feature. They wanted to have the customer shown the most suitable currency when they arrive on the site, and so we had to come up with a way to do that. The first thing was to find out which country they were in, and the answer we fell to first was a lookup service by IpLocate.

I spent a lot of my career up to April 2023 working in e-commerce, but I was always focused on specific goals, and specific customers. Mainly Online4baby, but also David Village Lighting, and a couple of others. I worked for these guys for so long and they had such unique needs that they ended up with their own bespoke systems. I’ve often wondered what the off the shelf systems can do, and look like.

We use timers everywhere, and most of the time how they work is fine. But I’ve come across a slightly different need. For those who struggle with working, and procrastinate, there is the “Pomodoro” technique which advises on setting a timer for 20 mins and commiting to focusing on work throughout that 20 mins before stopping for a break. I like this and have used it a couple of times to just get going on a project, but this use case actually means a normal timer is often not quite the right thing.

A quick survey of schema.org usage on Product List pages with some conclusions

Schema.org is a website that holds the commonly used standards for encoding information about the content of your webpages in a way that makes it easier for the likes of Google and Bing to understand what your page is about. This post is about how products information is encoded. Here’s the page for a Product. The question I want to address is “How do I create an acceptable entry for a specific product”.

There’s been some discussion on Hacker News about the use of Google Analytics. Specifically legality in the EU and privacy concerns. Companies must stop using Google Analytics - as per the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY). I remember before we had Google Analytics. The discussion back then was between Webalizer and AWStats and I’m surprised to see that AwStats has a beta version from January this year, so clearly it’s being actively developed.

News is bad for you, but there’s a way to take control and change that

I’ve repeatedly come up with the issue of “where do I put this file” and even “what should I name this file”. There’s a bunch of things to consider. Is it important that the original name of the file persists if someone were to “Save As” on it. That is, do we need to reference the original filename in the url it’s accessed from Is it important that the image cant be guessed.