TaskForest

A recent post by Derek Parker introduced me to advisory locks in PostgreSQL.
Advisory locks are a very straightforward way to prevent multiple instances of a program from running at the same time. However, there are some cases when you shouldn’t use the database to enforce this constraint.

Google reported yesterday that their search engine will now include a website’s speed in the list of factors it uses to decide how high to rank the site in its search results.  In this post I consider what this means for web developers and what steps you can take to make your site faster.

SourceForge.net has a blog in which they feature a different hosted project every day.  Today’s blog entry features my open-source job scheduler, TaskForest.  I’d like to take this opportunity to thank SourceForge for their support of open source software.

Happy with my experience with a custom WordPress installation for this blog, I decided to try using the blogging platform for the TaskForest website.  The two main reasons were the ease of creating RSS feeds and the ability for users to comment on posts or articles.  After a few days of tinkering around, I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least for TaskForest, WordPress would cause more problems than it would solve. Here’s how I came to that conclusion:

I came across some comments made about an open source program that I had written in perl.  The user was complaining about how he couldn’t get it to install.  The reason was that the program relies on other modules from the archive of open source perl software known as CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), and one of them failed to install.