The Internet
About The Author
Starting on a Commadore C64 in the mid-80's, Rob has been programming ever since, though thankfully the hardware has improved slightly.
After learning Basic, Visual Basic, Assembly, C, and C++, Rob eventually found himself needing to create a forum for a personal website; that's when he found Perl.
He's been developing in Perl for the past 10 years in various dev-manager roles. He has a few contributions on CPAN and works primarily with Plack and Catalyst, on a CentOS/MySQL stack.
He's always keen for his team(s) to understand where their applications are running, and what is going on outside the Perl-space they're familiar with.
This blog aims to cover the various technologies he's worked with over the years, and found useful to know about when working specifically on web-apps.
Understanding SSL and TLS Certificates
Many web developers and sys-admins will from time-to-time have to install SSL certificates on websites to make them secure. This is usually done by searching online for 'Apache SSL HowTo' or similar. Doing it is usually straight-forward, but without fully understanding what you're doing, it can be a dangerous and confusing process.
Building Fast Websites
Complex websites have a tendency to be slow, and can give a horrible user-experience leaving your visitors waiting for pages to load.
To prevent this you need to look at all aspects of a website, and how it all hangs together, from the web-server, down to the very last pixel of an image.
Fundamentals of CGI
The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is an interface between a web server and any backend scripts or programs that perform a given task.
It's very easy to get-by without knowing the full details of how CGI physically works, but this can often lead to a lack of confidence when debugging website issues.
Website Hosting
Choosing the right web hosting package can sometimes be a bit daunting; did you get enough bandwidth? disk space? etc. And are you paying over-the-odds for what you actually need? What is SSI and CGI anyway? Do you need a database and what about keeping your website secure?