A List Apart is running their annual survey “for people who make websites.”
Category: Websites
Ok. Cool…er Cuil. You’re not going to be a legitimate search engine until you strip raw HTML from your search results.
Joyent published an article a month or so ago about how they scaled a facebook application to support millions of hits. The application, BumperSticker, simply serves out customized images to users – online bumper stickers. It’s not hard, not complex and processes around 20 to 27 million page views a day. That’s a good number by anyone’s standards.
But, this dinky little Ruby on Rails app required the following architecture to do it
- 13 Application servers.
- 8 Static content asset servers
- 4 MySql databases
Thats a staggering 25 servers just to serve a bunch of images at a rate of no more than 320 hits per second.
CushyCMS is a new hosted Content Management System from Stateless Systems – the people who brought you bugMeNot.com, PDFMeNot.com and other similar services. It’s a dead simple CMS that requires no software install and no real programming knowledge. Found out about it via this Techcrunch post.
I don’t like to make judgements about things I haven’t actually tried, but this app is so simple that I think the video is all the explanation I need – I mean that as a compliment.
I’m a huge fan of simple solutions that solve specific problems really well and I think CushyCMS is a big step in the right direction. A lot of CMSes are extremely complicated to install, setup and do a poor job of actually managing content easily. Cushy is simple to set up and simpler to use.
It does a few things that I can’t really call good or bad, just “interesting.”
Hosting the CMS on a third party site definately makes it simpler to set up, but it has some obvious privacy concerns, you’re giving cushy access to your own site, not just setting up an account on an isolated service.
Using the CSS class property to define content areas is also interesting. I really want to say that this is a good solution to the complexity of implementing a templating language. I just can’t stomach the ideal of defining a CSS class that isn’t actually used to display a visual style, it’s just wrong; but I’ll admit, it is a pretty ingenious solution.
Even though I really really want to write a positive review about this app – I honestly think it’s a big step forward for simplicity – in it’s current itteration it has one serious flaw that makes it almost completely unusable. It is not at all possible to add any dynamic content! It’s only possible to edit existing HTML pages, with CushyCMS defined elements. The Administrator has to add individual pages with statically defined content areas. CushyCMS can’t even re-generate this content to create repeating elements within this HTML page. This means that Cushy can’t even be used to manage the even simplist newsletter, blog, photo gallery or photo gallery. Essentially, it’s only really good for managing what I would normally consider “static content areas,” things like about us, privacy policies, contact us pages, intro blurbs. For the most part this type of content doesn’t need to be updated often and therefore, doesn’t really need a management system.
Because of this, CushyCMS is almost nothing more than a glorified FTP client.
Categories
Facebook Fix Your News Feed, Seriously
Seriously, 3 out of 5 of the items at the top of my facebook feed right now are from someone on my “Less About These Friends” list.
Why can’t you just give me a list of updates in chronological order?!
#End Mini-Rant