How We Grew TheJournal.ie

Taking Irelands fastest growing news site from a Wordpress install to a stable platform.

Transcript

1. 14 Adorable Pictures of Cats Coding How We Grew TheJournal.ie John Needham – Web Developer
2. Who Are We? • Irish and International Content • News, Sports, Entertainment and discussion • Launched Sept 2010 • iOS and Android apps • Desktop and touch websites
3. Who Are We? • 25 Journalists • 2 Web Developers • 2 App Developers • 1 Cat
4. Site Launch Basic Wordpress site: • Quick to build • Large feature set • Large and experienced WP talent pool • Lots of online help • Good CMS Launched our iOS app within first month Android app Feburary 2011
5. Site Growth 1 million page views a month after 3 months: • WP does not scale easily • Lots of features = Complex code base • Debugging a nightmare (hooks..) • No native caching • ( °□° ╯ ）╯︵ ┻━┻
6. Site Growth - Maintenance Developing in WordPress: • Tried to use the WP framework (plugins) • Slow and messy (hooks) Gave Up: • Edit the core code • Faster development • Upgrading issues
7. Site Growth - Maintenance $query->get_posts(); 1 Function – 875 lines
8. Site Growth - Caching Caching in WordPress is a nightmare: • All plugin based • Used w3-cache - cached to file • Dynamic Elements – not maintainable • Want to increase amount of user specific content
9. Site Growth – Reliability Dara O'Briain – crashes the site with only 10k views
10. Solutions? Buy – options are too customised More Cache (varnish?) – wont fix dynamic content problem Build New System – Resources and time?
11. Our Solution Goal – Build a simple API to power site and apps • Use WordPress database, keep the CMS • Cherry-pick from WordPress for formatting and styling • Lightweight and simple PHP front end • All in EC2
12. Site Structure
13. Challenges - Caching 110,000 posts 100,000 tag rivers 1,063,000 comments Solution: • Cache all objects forever • Cache all rivers by IDs • Immediate cache invalidation
14. Challenges - Content Making Content Work Everywhere • Platforms: browser, iOS and Android • Rich media support? (flash, silverlight, gifs) Journalists. Awkward.
15. Challenges - Content Solution: • Make our server do as much heavy lifting as possible • Keep app html parsing to zero • Handle unknown embeds as a link • A lot easier to update a server than an app
16. Challenges - Content - Faster render time for apps - Unknown content still accessible
17. Mistakes along the way Overdependent on external plugins • Liveblogs, JSON API, Social Could have made better use of (small) frameworks • Avoid learning lessons the hard way. • Slim Framework Doing Friday Deploys
18. Mistakes along the way EC2 does quirky things: • Random IP changes causing an accidental DDoS • Unpredictable Auto-Scaling – killing a healthy Varnish instance
19. Mistakes along the way Keeping Clients in Sync • Could stop comment on apps, not on desktop...
20. Some Lessons Learned Lots of good start-ups to use: • Pusher – realtime websocket api, used on liveblogs and scores • HostedGraphite – hassle free stats, essential for our API
21. Some Lessons Learned Profile EVERYTHING • Xhprof • 3x load time improvement
22. Some Lessons Learned Know when Good Enough is OK: • Too tempting to try and perfect everything • Ship it, Iterate Hat tip: @dermdaly
23. Results Desktop Growth in 2012:
24. Results 3x mobile growth in 2012:
25. Results Traffic Spikes? • Reddit test 2 weeks ago • 477,735 page views • No crash :)
26. Results Rolling out new features on new site • Easier to develop new features • Live scores rolled out over last few weeks
27. Going Forward Continue our growth – 3x in 3 years Build our commenter community Number 1 news service in Ireland by next year
28. We're Hiring! www.thejournal.ie/jobs/ Can find me @JohnANeedham Thanks to: Miguel Molina Brian Fallon (@brianfallon) Paul Conroy (@conroyp) Steven McMemeBride (@steemcb)