David Xia

Category Archives: Internet

How I Increased My WordPress Site’s Speed

2012-03-04T11:45:50+00:00 | By

I spent yesterday optimizing the performance of this site. I love fast page loads and have little patience for sluggish performance. Here’s what I did.

1. Leverage browser caching

Tell your web server to set expiration headers for static resources so browsers know to store them in local disk. This will keep requests off the network altogether. I use Apache: 

 ExpiresActive On
 ExpiresDefault "access plus 300 seconds"
 ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
 ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
 ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
 ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access
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Hear TV Show Characters Say a Quote – Playing With Twilio

2012-02-15T16:59:11+00:00 | By

I was inspired by Rob Spectre’s Laugh-o-tron and made a telephony extension to my Twitter Bots.

Try it out. Call 646-480-6046 to talk to various TV show characters. Right now the vast majority of the quotes are spoken by a text-to-speech program because I have to find, crop, and upload audio files for each one. But McNulty from The Wire (choice #1) has a few real audio clips. Let me know how I can improve it… more

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The Origin of the World Wide Web

2012-02-04T19:35:20+00:00 | By

I’m reading Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web about how he conceived of and designed the world wide web.

For a long time I never really got the distinction between the “Internet” and the “world wide web.” To me they were the same thing, and they might be for many other folks too. But in hindsight this is just a testament to how successful Berners-Lee’s creation is.

Most people’s perceptible interaction with the Internet is through a browser where they visit a website. The Internet is simply a… more

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How the Internet’s Domain Name System Works

2012-02-12T22:45:24+00:00 | By

So what exactly happens when you type “davidxia.com” into your browser’s address field and hit “Enter”?

A website is simply a collection of online content ranging from text documents to images to video. All this content lives in physical machines called servers. Servers listen for incoming calls or requests from web browsers or applications and respond with the appropriate content.

Think of the Internet as having a giant Yellowpages phone book

So how does this content get from a machine that could be halfway around the world to your computer? Every machine that’s connected to the Internet… more

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Why an Aesthetically-pleasing Internet is Important

2012-01-04T16:34:28+00:00 | By

I prefer to write code for backend. The plumbing, infrastructure, functionality of a product. Backend developers want the computer to spit out all the relevant data for a page as fast as possible. Their primary concern isn’t how it looks, just that it gets there efficiently.

But I’ve learned that functionality is necessary but not sufficient. Form that only fits function fails to attract users. A well-crafted web app must also have good design. This is why UX and UI are increasingly more important. In the early days of the Internet when only hardcore hackers and geeks were online… more

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What I Learned From Chris Dixon’s Skillshare Class

2012-02-09T16:48:18+00:00 | By

I attended Chris Dixon’s Skillshare class “How to Raise Your First Round” earlier this week. It was my first time meeting the entrepreneur and investor. I learned a lot from his class. Here’s a summary.

Whether to Raise Money

Avoid taking money if you can. Some businesses are not suitable for VC funding. This includes mom and pop stores and companies that can’t scale up to have revenue in at least the hundreds of millions.

I asked whether our current culture of celebrating fundraising as a mark of success is a recent… more

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Ignore Spam Email From John of Ygnetworkltd

2012-02-09T15:24:08+00:00 | By

I received a strange email a few days ago from a man named John. He told me

Dear Manager,

(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO,Thanks)

This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally in China and Asia.

On September 19th 2011, We received Tianhua Ltd’s application that they are registering the name ” davidxia ” as their Internet Keyword and ” davidxia .cn “态” davidxia .com.cn ” 态” davidxia .asia “domain names… more

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How to Improve Your Facebook Experience

2011-09-06T14:32:34+00:00 | By

For quite a while now I’ve logged onto Facebook only to close the tab five minutes later feeling unsatisfied. But until recently I couldn’t put my finger on why I consistently had an unpleasant experience. I slowly began to realize that one of the primary reasons was the Law of Internet Entropy.

The Law of Internet Entropy states, as my friend friend once told me, “Websites eventually become Craigslist.” There are many examples of online communities and websites losing their niche and eventually catering to broad interests. It takes energy to maintain a focused service and well-defined… more

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Wikileaks’ Cablegate Tag Wordle

2010-12-27T16:39:54+00:00 | By

I did a frequency analysis on the tags of all 251,287 Wikileaks diplomatic cables and created a Wordle word cloud. Size is positively related to frequency. You can download the basic data set from The Guardian (sorry, no text included) here, and create your own Wordle here. The meanings of the tags are here.

Wikileaks' Cablegate Tag Wordle

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The Age of Smart Systems

2012-02-09T19:11:10+00:00 | By

The Economist‘sĀ special report on smart systems in their November 4, 2010 edition has inspired me to read and learn about this fascinating movement. I’ve compiled a list of all the thought-provoking articles, gagdets, and business ventures I’ve seen – a snapshot of the flurry of ideas bouncing around in my head right now.

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