The ONEsite team and I just returned from the first ever Web 2.0 NYC conference.  The show was at a large convention center in Manhattan and was right next door to the Interop expo.

ONEsite was a sponsor of the show and we had a great booth.  Several members from the team helped work the booth including Thad, Andy, Robby, Elichia, Bob and I.

This was my first expo and I very much enjoyed it.  We met a lot of great people and had the opportunity to demonstrate in person all of the terrific communities running on the ONEsite platform.  It is quite thrilling to be able to demo a live site on demand very much similar to what a potential client is describing they desire to build.  The ONEsite platform powers thousands of communities ranging from small startups, to trade-specific communities, to massive social networks for large media brands.

I'm very proud of what we've built at ONEsite and know that the best is yet to come!

Recently we've been doing a significant amount of performance work preparing to take the ONEsite platform to the next level.  We've crossed a number of incredible milestones recently (total number of users on the platform, amount of new user generated content per day, amount of data imported from other platforms, etc.) and have been proactively tackling existing performance issues whilst planning for the next waves of growth.

While there are a number of great blogs discussing how to increase performance, nothing beats a well-written book (except for personal experience, of course).  That being said, I've been particularly impressed with two books recently.

First off is Steve Souders "High Performance Websites for Front-End Engineers."  This book details how to improve the client-side performane of a website.  This involves everything from gzipping stylesheets, to minifying javascript, to parallelizing browser connections to increase performance for modern Internet connections.  Steve works at Yahoo! as "Chief Performance Yahoo!" and definitely knows his stuff.  The book is well written and filled with things you may not have realized if you mostly pay attention to the backend side of things.

Next up is the 2nd Edition of "High Performance MySQL."  I simply cannot say enough wonderful things about this book.  The 2nd Edition is twice as thick as the original and every single chapter seems to be both relevant and insightful.  The book covers everything from replication setups to advanced MySQL storage engines to Sphinx and full-text search indexing.  Here at ONEsite we are very fond of MySQL, Sphinx and all the other great LAMP technologies that make up the foundation of the ONEsite platform.

Great things are ahead!

One of my favorite projects while working for ONEsite was developing the chat component of our interactive media player.  The first version of this player was developed using Actionscript 2, Server-side Actionscript and Macromedia's Flash Communication Server (FCS).  That player was very impressive technically, but we found the license for FCS to be prohibitely expensive.

The second iteration of the player was also developed using Actionscript 2 and Flash but was built upon open chat standards and socket connections instead of the closed source FCS.  The new player offered the same features as the first player but was much easier for us to administer and scale.

The third version of the player was built upon Actionscript 3 (AS3).  It was designed to be a dramatic overhaul of our player--leveraging more and more of our web services to enable increased social functionality during the media streaming.  I really fell in love with AS3 even though at the time the documentation for it was sparse and the community was in its infancy.  AS3 was such a refreshing change of pace from AS2 (especially the changes to the visual layers).  It felt and acted like a *real* programming language.

This week we've begun to deploy Event Driven changes to our PHP architecture.  This essentially allows all of the actions on the social network (of which there are tons!) to have listener events associated with them to enable custom functionality or achieve unique flows.  Our platform is already incredibly extensible and these AS3 inspired enhancements are going to let us achieve another level of customization for our clients.

Over the past several months we've been hard at work on a new forum architecture.  Discussions are integral to social networks and we just weren't satisfied with our previous forum system.  The old system was one of the only pieces of code in the entire ONEsite system not to be written by scratch--and it showed.

The new forums are the culmination of a lot of hard work by Mark who headed up the project.  They are built using services from our SOAP architecture.  What this means is that if one of our customers doesn't like how a particular piece of the forum works, more than likely they could use the SOAP services themselves to achieve the desired flow changes or to embed functionality similar to our forums on their external webpages.  We built the forums using the exact same services available to our customers.  The new forums demonstrate the power and extensibility of the ONEsite platform.

We're really excited about the first version of these forums.  In the next several days we'll be deploying several unique features to the forums to really drive engagement in discussions on the social networks.   We've learned a lot about what does and doesn't work on our networks and we believe that it is time for forums to once again be a centerpiece in social networking.