Webmaster Mike

I've been learning Unity game programming the last few months by watching tutorials and working through the book: Unity 3 Blueprints - A Practical Guide to Indie Games Development.

I recently began experimenting with Node.js and decided to connect a Unity game to a Node.js server. The basic idea was that there would be a game server and a Unity game that would play in Unity's web player. The game could record high scores as a start towards the kinds of functionality that a game server might need.

Continue reading "Bughunt game demo" »

I regularly monitor my network and CPU usage. After running into performance problems with my Apache web server I decided to update the network statistics process I was using to try and catch performance problems before they happen.

Continue reading "Network Statistics" »

Back in December I noticed problems with timeouts while trying to connect to our website. I could secure shell into the server with no problem. I ran top and noticed no processes running amok and CPU usage was low. There were some httpd Apache server processes running. I could also login to the Plesk control panel. Everything looked ok.

I opened a ticket with our host provider and found out that I needed to learn how to tune my Apache web server.

Continue reading "Apache web server performance" »

Recently we decided to prune our list of email subscribers. We had been noticing a drop in response rates to our mail outs and wondered what was going on. Last month we sent out 44,754 newsletters with 24% either viewing or clicking on a link. A year ago we sent 29,255 and had a 30% activity rate.

Continue reading "Pruning Your Email List" »

I've never liked how Movable Type handles Recent Entries. They only show up on the main index page, the very place where your recent posts are already displayed. Why show a list of titles in the sidebar, when you're already displaying the entries themselves. Here's how I 'fix' that so recent entries show up elsewhere, but not on the main page. The beauty of this approach is that you don't even have to republish to have Recent Entries show up on all your pages even if they're static.

Continue reading "Recent Posts in Movable Type" »

Now that the new VPS has stabilized I wanted to see what my network and CPU stats are like. I lost my old scripts when the old hard disk failed. I'll post something about my new and improved backup process soon. However, because I blogged about them, and I was backing up my Movable Type database, so I had copies of my Perl scripts.

Continue reading "September Network Traffic" »