Here is a list of 7 Online Resources that you (and I) can’t live without”

1. Web Templates:  Theme Forest
   Theme Forest is a young site, but is my number 1 source when I need a new fresh template.  They offer a pretty good selection between PSD, HTML, and pre-made themes for CMS’s like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.  The prices are cheaper then the famed competitor Template Monster and the designed (in my opinion) tend to be more Web 2.0 and trendy.  Also, because you’re technically buying the theme from a fellow designer/developer, they become a resource for updates, bugs, etc.
2. Small Apps: Code Canyon
   Code Canyon, also very young still (just a couple months) is already starting to dominate the market and take traffic from sites like Hot Scripts.  The reason?  Their stuff is much better, better organized, more useful, and less oriented at selling “premium listings”.  Because they make money on every thing bought from their site they don’t offer specialized listings, or push you junky apps first, they really allow you to find what you wanted in the first place.    Much like Theme Forest, once you purchase something, the developer who created the small is usually pretty easy to get a hold of, and have changes made.  This is not a “must see” site, but it’s very useful and I can’t live without it.
3. Flash Apps: Active Den
   Active Den as you can imagine after checking it out for 5 minutes, is the best place to get Flash Apps.  I have in the past outsource projects on sites like oDesk, Elance, etc, but the problem is, I’m never happy with their work.  For literally hundreds less you can usually find a pre-made app that does exactly what you need and the developer is usually more then happy to customize it for you if you would like for a small fee.  Also, it’s more of a community with discussions and ways to chat with other users and collaborate.  I’ve used a couple things from their site, MP3 players, banner rotators, etc and all of them worked great and the source code was actually very neat and clean with comments on most of them.  Of course this is up to the individual developer/designer but the ones’ who succeed on these type of sites are the ones who go the extra mile.
4. Graphics: Graphic River
   Graphic River is a great resource to add to your stock photo site bookmarks.  I can’t say it fills ALL of my needs but I can usually find stuff here, and cheaper then more expensive stock sites.  I still wind up using other sites here and there, and that’s okay with me, but Graphic River has quickly became priceless for me.  Also, the competition of photographers really helps keep the photo’s top notch!

Well there you have it, that is my list of awesome resources…  That you or I shouldn’t live without and you should learn and love them.

Because of the nature of Social Networks traffic tends to have huge spikes and then very low bandwidth usage during the night.  Up until a couple years ago this was just a thorn in the side of web developers across the world.  However, with the onslaught of Cloud Hosting companies coming to the forefront of the hosting arena, we have seen a huge problem solved!

Going with a cloud setup allows us to only pay for what we use.  This means we can expand the servers needed when we need, and then scale back when traffic dies down at night.  The move will take sometime but be worth every penny.  This summer we are hoping to release the new site which was built using Spring MVC 3.0 and Java to replace our current PHP/Joomla setup.  The advantage with Java is that we will be working with a pre-compiled language finally.  Doing away with the many many layers of code caching and “accelerators” that have plagued us since 2005.

The new hosting platform will be Linux still (CentOS or RedHat) and will utilize GlassFish v3 web server.  This setup allows us to cluster the site much easier and setup load balancing in a much more seamless solution which can be controlled from the world class GlassFish administration panel.

The site will likely still run on MySQL for the time being however, we plan a move to Postgres (Enterprise DB) to give us better scalability and speed for transactional data.

We will also be installing a new Apache Solr server which will handle all of our search needs.  Currently we are utilizing full text searches in MySQL, and not only is this slow but severely crippled.  Solr was a project started by CNET for search on their tens of thousands of articles and utilizes Apache Lucene for it’s searching algorithms.

Have any questions about how or what we’re doing?  Post a comment!