Rails cache in distributed environment
Page and fragment caching are life-savers for Rails application scalability. Specially for page cache, they can make your app fast, specially if you use a webserver like Nginx, serving static files directly without touching the Rails stack.
But maintaining cache consistency across a distributed Rails application can be challenging.
Capistrano deploying full text search on Rails using acts_as_xapian
acts_as_xapian is a rails plugin for Xapian, a full text search engine.
acts_as_xapian installs the search engine database inside the plugin directory, under xapiandbs. If you use Capistrano as a deployment tool and since the entire codebase is rewritten (including the plugin directory), you will have to rebuild the entire index every time you do a deployment.
Please make the web faster
Let's make the web faster, says Google. Best practices for speeding up your website, says Yahoo.
Search engines want to crawl the web faster, and website owners want their users to have a good navigation experience which includes fast page loading.
Both Google and Yahoo say approximately the same regarding techniques for optimizing page load and rendering speed. I am not going to go through each one of them, it's not the point. Let me just tell you my experience regarding the implementation of these rules.
Structural SEO
SEO, SEO, it's all so 2005... but yet, if you check the average website, the SEO concerns lack on the implementation side.
Everyone in the Marketing department is concerned about metadata, keyword density, and all the other recommended metrics to quantify you content SEO, but, for the most part, their website implementation lacks at least one part of something that I call Structural SEO.