I recently came across this article at Infoworld titled How to Make PHP Apps Scale. The article is a bit short on details, particularly in terms of solutions, but I think does a decent job of explaining where the bottleneck commonly is on PHP-MySQL-Apache sites.

 in this new series I’m writing, I discussed the process of identifying the book you want to write. This comes down to answering these questions:

• What topic do you want to write about and what do you want to say on that subject?
• Do you have the expertise and writing skills to do that?

Once you’ve answered those questions, and therefore defined the book you want to write, the next step is to get a book deal: officially begin turning the idea of a book into an actual book. Now, to be fair, what it means to be a writer doesn’t always follow these steps (e.g., I’m sometimes lucky enough to be offered book deals without answering the first question), but when you’re just getting started, this is the logical path.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Are You Thinking? => Sponsorships and Ads
• On the Web => Chive, a phpMyAdmin Alternative
• On the Web => What HTML5 Features are Safe to Use?
• On the Blog => Larry’s Odyssey, or Offending the Travel Gods
• On the Blog => Building a Successful E-commerce Venture, or Failing Gracefully
• Q&A => Should I Expand My Programming Horizons?
• Book Giveaway => Take Your Pick!
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming”

Here are my slides from my “Building a Successful E-commerce Venture, or Failing Gracefully” presentation that I gave in Istanbul, Turkey at the E-commerce Expo on May 30, 2012. A couple of the 3D graphs got clipped, but other than that, it’s all there. I actually started off writing a formal script, so the notes are fairly true to what I said during the presentation.

, I had just arrived at my hotel in Istanbul. At 3:30am local time. After traveling for 49 hours (was supposed to be 19). Having not slept for 36 hours. At 3:30am, it’s ten hours before I am to speak at the e-commerce expo. Oh, and my one piece of checked luggage is nowhere to be found.

I am wearing comfortable clothes for traveling (sneakers, shorts, a t-shirt) and no luggage means:

• No dress shoes.
• No dress socks.
• No dress pants.
• No dress belt.
• No dress shirt.
• No suit jacket.
• No laptop cord to connect to the projector (the laptop was in my backpack).
• No laptop remote.
• Very few business cards.

This is not good.

I check in with my wife (via email and Apple’s FaceTime), and then fall asleep. It’s a twin bed, which isn’t great, but it’s the best bed I’ve had in too long. I set a wake-up call for 10:30. The driver will pick me up at noon to take me to the conference, and I need to shop first. I try not to let myself consider the possibility that my bag will arrive in the morning. Which is good, because it doesn’t.