I’ve been working with a client to optimize parts of their Rails application. The problem is that a method in the app does some simple updating of a few model objects but because the model has so many relations it goes through a ton of unnecessary callbacks. There are issues related to data concurrency which means you have to do the callbacks but in this particular situation there won’t be any concurrent updates to the data so the callbacks can be omitted. The solution to the problem was trivial when using the save_without_callbacks Rails plugin. Just adding a simple:

[source:ruby]
some_object.skip_callbacks = true
[/source]

before the update_attribute reduced the number of SQL UPDATE queries from 90 to 8. Lesson learned. If you need to skip model relation callbacks on save this plugin is for you. Be careful about data concurrency issues though.

This isn’t really the proper forum to be blogging about political preference, however, I stumbled upon a key difference in the three presidential candidates Obama, Hillary, and McCain with regards to the language they chose to program their campaign websites with. A quick browse through the links on the McCain site shows that they use ASP as you can see from this link:

http://www.johnmccain.com/ActionCenter/registertovote/information.aspx

A similar search through Hillary’s site confirms the same. They use ASP and you can see from this url:

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/video/158.aspx

Now, saving the best for last, Obama has a smarter approach to technology and uses PHP instead as you can see here:

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

Based solely on programming language choice for their web development which candidate would you choose? Given that I’m a Rails and PHP developer (albeit I once programmed in ASP for a paycheck) I think I’m going to have to go with the better language choice. It says something about where your head is.

I’ve been working with one client for several months now and they are extremely pleased with the results I’ve produced for them thus far. Here is a snapshot of the monthly analytics data for the site over the past year. You can get a larger view of the graph if you click on the image.

I started working with them in July and by August you can see that their traffic more than doubled. From July to now, I’ve continued to work with the client on increasing rankings through seo, link building, and improving visitor retention. The result is that their natural organic search traffic has seen an increase almost 10 times what it was, from 1,800 to 17,000. I’m pointing this out because I like the latest Google Analytics monthly graph view. It really helps in showing trends over time and its encouraging for clients to see the upward results from my seo work.

Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.