Brightball Articles

A Study of Pricing and Billing Models for the Web

Barry — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:00:00 -0400

Asking people for payment for work is a touchy subject for everyone involved. We've had the luxury of experimenting a little bit over our first couple of years, and here's what we learned.

Cache Miss Storm

Peter — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:19:06 -0400

I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything would go back to normal. What was interesting is Same query was ...

The difference that expert Quality Assurance makes

Barry — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:33:00 -0400

When we first started out, we listed the thorough quality assurance review as an optional piece of our estimates. We had this incredibly naive idea that if we gave people the option to save a little money up front that they'd fully understand if there was anything that needed to be tuned up, post-launch. We learned our lesson...hard.

Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace

Peter — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:24:00 -0400

So you're running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it?

The Wonders of SSH Tunneling

Chris — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:37:00 -0400

Have you ever been working on a website and needed direct access to the database, but couldn't get access without using something like phpMyAdmin? SSH tunneling can solve this common problem and a whole lot more.

Should my domain name include a "www"?

Barry — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:27:00 -0400

In the age of Twitter and Web 2.0, we've started to see a lot of websites drop the standard www from their domain names. This could simply be a product of people following trends or just trying to be a little different, but the real question is "What are the drawbacks?"

Brightball.com scores higher on YSlow than Yahoo!

Barry — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:02:00 -0500

We're a bit obsessed with performance optimization around here. It's an itch that can never be fully satisfied because there's always something more that can be done. Brightball.com is powered by our web application development platform, The Intersect (we're also fans of NBC's Chuck). The Intersect is the same system we use as the basis for all of our client's projects and we decided to put...

Search Engine Optimization Begins with Quality Pages

Tom — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:00:00 -0400

Most people think about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) solely as an exercise to increase the amount of external links to their pages. I call this the Link Equity strategy where the goal is to accumulate and hold on to as many external links over time as possible. The logic behind this is simple: the more links to a page, the better it ranks; and while Link Equity certainly is a very important...

13 Easy Steps to On-Site SEO and How To Implement Them

Drew — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:01:00 -0400

Developing a strong website thatâ€™s easy for the search engines to catalog and index is all about following a few simple steps. Site structure can be your best friend when it comes to getting high search engine rankings and once you have established that perfect site structure your website can continue to grow and adapt with the search engines.

Process Oriented Innovation

Tom — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:10:15 -0400

Implementing new technology is not an end in itself. Rather it should be though of as an ingredient in what I call the Process-Oriented Innovation Cycle, where the goal is to improve the overall efficiency of a company through continuous process and workflow improvements. I have successfully used this approach for many years to deliver innovation that targets ineffective processes and workflows...