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Tuesday, April 22 2008

Magento vs OsCommerce, migration et site eCommerce

By Nicolas Crovatti on Tuesday, April 22 2008, 10:33

Mon collègue Julio va très bientôt se voir affecter l'interressante tâche de piloter la migration d'un site Ecommerce tournant sous OsCommerce vers une nouvelle plateforme Open Source : Magento. Il a déjà bien étudier son sujet et prévoit de nous tenir au courant de l'évolution de cette migration par le biais de son blog.

A suivre donc !

Tuesday, April 15 2008

Introducing : moBlur's Favicon Archive Project

By Nicolas Crovatti on Tuesday, April 15 2008, 11:54

All hail to  the world's first Favicon Archive!


In the next days you may notice yet another crawler visiting your site; identified by
"FaviconArchiver/1.0 (+http://moblur.org/workshop/favicon_archive/)" user agent, it will gather your homepage (and only this page unless redirected) and save your favicon to moblur's dedicated database. Once crawled, if your site does have a favicon, it will appear on our index page and on the search engine. A dedicated page will also be directly accessible and will display a summary of your site based on meta tags and a link to your domain.


This project is born from curiosity in large database driven web applications. How to scale, how to optimize, how to deal with a huge database and gigantic filesystem entries were the main questions i was asking myself.


The project itself is far from being optimal.

  • The crawler, written in PHP 5 can be better, faster... in fact, it could have be written in C++ ...
  • The database  system recently upgraded from PostgreSQL 8.1 to 8.3 still needs some fine tuning ( Thanks Phil for your precious help and advices on this :D ).

So far, (a couple weeks) so good, the crawler discovered 2.5M unique domains (subdomains counts too)  and saved  1/2 M  Favicons on the filesystem (ext3 on debian stable)

Current room for the application :

  • CPU 1.20GHz
  • RAM 256 Mb
  • HDD 144G
All dedicated (well almost dedicated) to the favicon archive.

My goal now is to optimize the application to keep it inside this nutshell for the longest time possible.

3 comments

Sunday, March 16 2008

moBlur's First month! (Firefox usage evolved)

By Nicolas Crovatti on Sunday, March 16 2008, 20:45

To celebrate moBlur's first month, I generated a pie chart of browsers usage on moBlur.org according to my analytics reports.


1. Firefox                   701  77,29 %
2. Internet Explorer         104  11,47 %
3. Safari                     45   4,96 %
4. Opera                      26   2,87 %
5. Mozilla                    21   2,32 %
6. Mozilla Compatible Agent    6   0,66 %
7. Camino                      3   0,33 %
8. Konqueror                   1   0,11 %
This is almost 80% Firefox usage. Impressive, the blogs and developer's communities seems to know where the truth is.
It also saves me because I don't have any Windows license to debug my pages in Internet Explorer ...

Anyway, if you are still using IE, do yourself a favor : get Firefox.