Robert Swarthout Has a Blog

Just got a call from Robert Swarthout of PaperBackSwap.com and SwapaCD.com. Robert’s a member of the Atlanta PHP user group, and he was calling to let me know that he and Zack (also of PaperBackSwap and SwapaCD) want to speak at a meeting about what to do when your “pet” project grows into a huge, heavily-trafficked website.

I also noticed today that Robert has a blog (which is why I’m writing this post), so I decided to check it out. Looks to me like he’ll be sharing some of those same experiences with scaling their sites from hardware issues to helpful scripts to build a standard install of Apache, MySQL, and PHP on new machines. Good luck with the blog, Robert!

While writing this post, Robert sent me the blurb for the talk he and Zack will give at the Atlanta PHP February meeting. If you’re in the Atlanta area on February 1st, feel free to attend the meeting. Here’s the blurb:

So what happens when your pet project is no longer a small little site but rather a site with thousands of visitors a day? This month we will talk about the growing pains and code changes we have experienced in taking our pet project to a site that has in excess of 650,000 page loads a day. Can your site scale? What kind of hardware, database and software has it taken to scale our site, PaperBackSwap.com? We will share our experiences with these issues and many other problems we have tackled. Let it be known that we are not experts, just normal Joes sharing what we have learned and continue to discover.