I recently discovered gzipWTF, and am so glad I did. The tool, currently in beta, takes a look at a Web site and reports which resources are being compressed (using gzip, which browsers can decompress, among other formats) and which are not. As compression has an impact on your site’s speed, and is relatively simple to implement, this no-brainer verification tool ought to be run on everyone’s site. Just enter your site’s URL, fill out the CAPTCHA, and click the button to see the results. If there’s any resource that’s not being compressed, get your hands dirty on your site to fix the problem. The end result will be a site that loads faster for users, and could also mean better Google rankings, since performance is a Google criteria. Could not be easier!

Okay, it’s a plane. Right now, depending upon when “now” is for you, I’m on my way to Istanbul, Turkey, from State College, PA, to Washington Dulles, through Frankfort, Germany. I’m traveling there to speak at the E-commerce Expo on Wednesday, May 30th. My presentation is titled “Building a Successful E-commerce Venture, or Failing Gracefully”. When I’m done, I’ll be certain to share my experience, but for the week while I’m traveling, I won’t be too good about replying to emails, forum postings, and blog comments. Which is to say, I won’t be doing those things because, as much as I can, I’m going to be touring Istanbul!

The wonderful hosting company that I use, ServInt, recently published an article titled " SSH Key Authentication". The article explains how to setup SSH key authentication for your server. By doing so, you can access your server without entering your password. Now, this may sound like a very bad thing, but here’s why it’s not: after setting up SSH key authentication, you can disable password authentication. By doing so, the only way to access the server would be to have the matching SSH key. Attempts to break into the server by guessing the password— or by even knowing the password—would not work. Taking this step effectively prevents anyone from breaking into your server, unless they’ve stolen your computer (in which case, you have many, many problems).

It’s a relatively simple procedure to follow and is highly recommended. If you plan on doing this, make sure you check out the comments section of the post, in which it’s pointed out that this will also impact SFTP. SFTP is just FTP through SSH, so the FTP client you use would need the ability to use the same SSH key in order for this to work.

A little while back, I had a series of emails with a reader named Scott, who was considering an opportunity to write his first book. Scott did want to try writing a book, but didn’t want to jump into the project blindly, and so asked me what it meant, in day-to-day terms, to write a book. We had a few long emails back and forth, that I thought I’d edit/expand upon (my parts) and share here for others to benefit. In my responses, I did try to stress the negative aspects of being a writer, so as to present some of the worst case scenarios. What originally started as a couple of long emails became a long post, and now a series of posts. If you’d rather not read it all, the short advice is this:

If you want to write a book because it’s something you always wanted to do, give it a go, but if you want to write a book to get rich, become famous, or the like, you’re barking up the wrong tree!

Note that my perspective and advice specifically focuses on writing technical books and articles, which is what I do and know best, although much of the advice applies to other types of writing, too.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Ajax and Search Engines
• On the Web => My Web Host, ServInt
• On the Web => 37 Tested PHP, Perl, and JavaScript Regular Expressions
• On the Blog => Review of “Technical Blogging” by Antonio Cangiano
• Q&A => Have You Changed Your Opinion of OOP?
• Q&A => Why does false equal 0?
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming

There was a recent posting by Jeff Atwood titled " Please Don’t Learn to Code", which received a lot of recent discussion. It’s a bit silly, to me, because the impetus for that post—a tweet by NY Mayor Bloomberg suggesting he was going to learn to code in 2012—was almost certainly sent out as a promotional message for a NYC-based company ( CodeAcademy), not as a sincere expression of the mayor’s side interests. In any case, Atwood’s piece came across to some as unnecessarily harsh, and while it’s hard to argue that everyone should learn to code, it’s also elitist to suggest that people should’t learn X because they’re not going to be able to do it in a way you think is right.

The reason I mention Atwood’s piece is because Rands in Repose had a very nice reaction post titled " Please Learn to Write". Maybe it’s because I am a writer, but the suggestion—Hey, if you want to improve yourself, communicate better.—rings true to me.