Perl Development and Internet Technologies

I have many web-apps running online, and most are supported by a MySQL backend, with tables using the InnoDB engine.

InnoDB is great, it enforces data-integrity with foreign keys, not like MyISAM that doesn't give a damn.

With a QFH antenna you can pick up weather satellite radio transmissions and convert them to images on a modern PC.

Google along with many other search engines has a habit of treating URLs differently if they end with a trailing-slash or not. How much this actually harms your SEO is questionable, but I prefer things consistent.

If you've ever had to deal with delays in getting CPAN modules installed on a dev server, or simply had issues with a new server build and can't get CPAN running at all, then it may be time to look into running a modern Perl development environment, enabling you to run a local development environment, with no outside hassle.

If your web-apps are ever dealing with large data-sets or complicated translations of data, caching with memcached may provide a clean and effective solution to improving performance. Caching is the act of remembering things for later use, usually complicated objects that take a long time to prepare, but are needed regularly.

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.

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.

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.

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?