Blog | Eric Paul Snowden

My issues with Cloudflare and Ajax

Eric Snowden — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:04:50 +0000

I want to start this post out by saying I love Coudflare. I think the democratization of IT is the future and Couldflare is positioned to be a huge part of the movement. That said, I’ve been having some issues with Cloudflare and ajax and I’m not the only one.

This website uses ajax to load every page. There is a html fallback, but on modern browsers and mobile devices all the heavy lifting is being done by javascript. I’ve always felt it lagged slightly but could never find the culprit.

I’ve used Cloudflare on other websites and it never occurred to me that it could be slowing down my site, or even causing errors. I started doing some digging I found a few blog posts about increased time for ajax requests and decided to run my site without Cloudflare for a few days.

Immediately I noticed a perceptible increase in responsiveness and went to Google Analytics to confirm my thoughts. It’s too early to see if there has been a measurable drop in bounce rate, or an increase in pageviews, but I immediately saw a change in other key metrics.

Page Load Time

It’s hard to see from this chart, but the peak is about a 5x increase in page load time. Even the smaller bumps are almost 2x increases.

Ajax Errors

This is the important stat. Since turning off Cloudflare I’m seeing no ajax errors. Not one. In the past I was tracking between 15-20 a day through custom events in Google Analytics.

I’ve logged these my issues with Cloudflare, and their support staff has been amazing in the past so I have no doubt they are looking into this. I just wanted to share my experiences so other people can spend a little less time troubleshooting their issues.

Launching phase 2 of Halestormrocks.com

Eric Snowden — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:59:14 +0000

On Tuesday, to coincide with Halestorm’s launch of their new album ‘The Strange Case Of…’ we launched a new look for their website. Tying into the dark concepts behind their album, and the “Hello, It’s Mz. Hyde” EP, we launched Jeckyl and Hyde inspired themes for the website. If you view the website during the day you will see a light website, neat and organized. If you view the website after 6pm you will see an all black design with different images and erratic fonts and colors. Design work done in house by Lina Gonzalez and project managed by Jeremy Kutner.

Check out the new Halestorm site here.

Open Jobs in the Atlantic Records Digital Department

Eric Snowden — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:52:43 +0000

I have three open jobs in my group at Atlantic Records. All of these positions are on the Digital Creative team where we design and build websites, apps, new products and marketing tools for artists from Atlantic Records, Elektra Records, Fueled by Ramen, Canvasback and other Warner Music Group labels.

Apply for the Project Manager position.

Apply for the Freelance Junior Web Designer position.

Apply for the Freelance Junior Designer/Developer position.

70+ websites on Drupal Gardens with new designs for Prince Royce, Halestorm and Shinedown

Eric Snowden — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:54:53 +0000

Last Thursday was a big day for Atlantic/WMG. It marked the end of a very long migration from Cisco’s EOS platform (rip) to Acquia’s Drupal Gardens platform. It took the entire digital staff at WEA and Atlantic Records (not to mention Acquia, Blink Reaction, Infosys and MyPlanet Digital) but we finished two days ahead of our deadline. Amazing work all around!

And now we move towards the future. In addition to our migration, we launched a new website and two redesigns. We launched the first Prince Royce site since his signing to Atlantic Records, and relaunched Shinedown and Halestorm. Congrats on Tiffany Ahee, Edith Levin (her last site with Atlantic) and Lina Gonzalez on their amazing designs.

Check out Prince Royce here.

Check out Halestorm here.

Check out Shinedown here.

Acquia, Enterprise Gardens and WMG – Announcing our new OpenSaas artist website platform

Eric Snowden — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 02:17:12 +0000

Yesterday was a big day for Warner Music Group. Or rather, the public acknowledgment of big days that have been happening for months now. We announced a deal with Acquia to power our new artist website platform and are entering an exciting new stage of growth for our web properties. But more on that in a minute.

About a year ago it was announced that Cisco EOS, the website platform we at Atlantic Records used to build/manage artist websites was shutting its doors. The details of Cisco’s decision are no longer relevant, what matters is we needed a new home for almost 100 high traffic, feature rich artist websites. Each of us involved in the vetting process had a platform wish list – open source, Saas, a mature platform, robust developer community, rich feature set, scalability etc. and we looked at partner after partner trying to find the right fit. We’ve now launched nearly 70 artist websites on Enterprise Drupal Gardens and can confidently say we found an amazing new home for our artists.

The platform is based on Drupal 7, but ultimately the piece that really matters is OpenSaas. There are multiple amazing web platforms out there, but none of them allow us the mix of Saas, OpenSource and the rich feature set of Drupal. We get the benefit of a huge open source developer community, but have an amazing partner in Acquia vetting the core code and maintaining the platform for us. We don’t have the hassle of maintaining our own servers, but can export our own code at anytime and take it anywhere (it’s Drupal). Saas without vendor lock in. OpenSaas has also allowed our Acquia to iterate extremely quickly and anyone who knew Gardens just a few months ago will be blown away by the functionality of our newly launched websites, and we can’t wait to see where the platform takes us in the future.

I want to thank everyone on the Atlantic digital media team, the WEA D2C group, and the amazing team at Acquia for their tireless work over the last few months. It’s been inspiring to see so many smart people come together and push towards a common goal. In the following days I’ll be posting links to the new websites we have launched on the platform. In the meantime, take the tour of the platform, or read the official press release here.

Our W3 Best in Show Award arrives and the Shinedown eBook is featured on Mashable

Eric Snowden — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:01:48 +0000

This past week was a good week for the Atlantic Records digital department. First off, our W3 Best in Show Award arrived! Huge congratulations to everyone at Atlantic Records and our partners at Code and Theory on such a prestigious (and heavy) award.

W3 Best in Show added to our Webby and Narm Awards

Eric Snowden — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:02:22 +0000

Our new W3 Best in Show award for the Atlantic Records redesign next to our Webby and Narm Awards for Fanbase. Congrats to our partners at Code and Theory. An exciting day at Atlantic!

Animate.css – an extensive library of CSS3 animations

Eric Snowden — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:55:22 +0000

Since the most recent Foursquare.com redesign, I’ve been enamored with the the animations on their homepage. They are quick, useful (showing change of state) and responsive. Their performance on devices lead me expect they were CSS3 not Javascript, but digging into the code I saw something I didn’t expect. They didn’t write the animations themselves.

Foursquare (and many other companies) are using a CSS3 library called Animate.css to get those subtle, hardware accelerated animations that are popping up around the web. Using the library is simple. Link to the external animate css file, and add some of the predefined classes to elements on your site. When those elements appear on the screen they will automatically execute an animation. You can chain together animations or add them at runtime with javascript, but at its essence the library is simple and requires no javascript.

Check out Dan Eden’s website here to see examples of all the animations.

Get Animate.css from GitHub here.

Reviewing Shadow – A great new mobile website debugger from Adobe

Eric Snowden — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:22:21 +0000

Shadow is a new beta product from Adobe that aims to simplify the testing of mobile websites on iOS and Android devices. Shadow broadcasts a website from the Chrome desktop browser to Android or iOS enabling realtime debugging on the device.

Mozilla and Atlantic Records Show off HTML5 Apps at Mobile World Congress

Eric Snowden — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:01:10 +0000

At Mobile World Congress 2012 Mozilla announced its upcoming HTML5 app marketplace for desktop and devices. Using HMTL5 developers will be able to deploy the same app across tablets, phones, desktops and other HTML enabled devices. Atlantic Records worked with Mozilla to build two responsive applications that were showcased at their booth. They are currently being polished by our dev team and will be available at the consumer launch of the platform later this year. In the meantime we’ll be posting web based links to the apps in the coming weeks. We’re huge believers in HTML5 here at Atlantic and are really excited to be working with Mozilla to help push the open web as a platform forward.

Get started developing apps for the Mozilla Marketplace.