Yahoo has donated the caching proxy server they use internally to Apache Foundation. This, apart from acting as a high performance proxy server has many other cool features. If you’re trying it out here’s the minimum required settings that you should set in order it to act as a caching proxy server.
First you have to compile it from svn, or git. Info on doing this is available in the README file. After doing make install, by default it’ll be installed into /usr/local. Configuration directives are broken down into a series of files in order to make it easy to find and change aspects of the system. Main configuration file reside in /usr/local/etc/trafficserver/records.config. Open it up with a text editor and make sure that proxy.config.reverse_proxy.enabled and proxy.config.url_remap.remap_required are set to 0. Then open up /usr/local/etc/trafficserver/storage.config and configure a simple file cache. Uncomment the respective entries and make sure a folder with the name exists that the traffic server user can write to.
Start the traffic server by trafficserver start. Configure your browser to use <ip of the machine running traffic server>:8080 and you’re all set. Now you can test with the bazillion other options available in the config files.
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This article explains some worthy insights into making lead generation pages. An interesting idea that’s new to me was to make the page a dead-end. Having no links on the lead generation page that links back to the main site. Making it “harder” for the user to click something and navigate away from the lead gen page. Hmm … Also the article has some intriguing example designs of lead generating pages.
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No matter how many browsers are out there I still haven’t found the one true browser that rule ‘em all. This has the awkward situation where there has to be multiple browser instances running at any given time. All the memory that these fellows eats up is not much of a bigger deal because memory is not a problem these days.
For general browsing Firefox is ideal with Adblock Plus and Noscript. Safe and sound. For email (mostly Gmail and Gmail hosted these days) and other Google apps, Chrome fits nicely. Albeit you can’t use Google Chrome because of the annoying user tracking which cannot be turned off. Fixing that is easy, you just have to forget about Google Chrome and use Chromium nighty. Since I’m logged into Gmail no searching on Chrome. Can use the Firefox instance that’s there for general use. Next problem comes when opening up random links that include blogger and other sites with Google analytics. Gah, copy and paste those links to Firefox. My laziness prevent this from happening. Firefox is having Noscript so login to Gmail in that. Now have to use Opera for searching Google. This becomes irritating and I just use Firefox and search on Yahoo.
Using proprietary browsers is an unacceptable solution. You just don’t know what the hell is going on. There are other annoyances as well. A good candidate is Maxthon. Maxthon 3 interface looks like a step in the right direction but has a long way to go to become functional. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to change Maxthon proxy settings without it being changing the IE proxy settings.
When you go beyond Firefox, searching for a better browser, quite frankly there is none.
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