Daily Kos CTO Jeremy Bingham
“Using a content delivery network to serve up our images has also worked pretty well, with faster load times for images,” Bingham said.
Bingham said he will ignore cloud computing and instead ramp-up the site's dedicated hosting service with provider Voxel.net. He said the service upgrade will allow capacity to be scaled up and down in response to traffic spikes and to provide fine tuning for the servers.
Democrats open to change
The philanthropic ideals inherent in open source chime well with the Kossacks' liberal values, so it is no surprise that proprietary technology is a scarcity on the site. Moreover, Bingham is giving back to the community by freely publishing modified code that has improved the efficiency of Daily Kos back-end systems.
Bingham said open source is not only cheaper and more flexible than commercial alternatives, but it effectively transforms the developer community into an enormous support group.
“[Open source] works well, and I like the freedom that it gives the user,” he said. “For instance, if we need a new feature added to Scoop, or find that something is running too slow, I can just go in and fix it, rather than wait for the vendor to release a new version or a bugfix.”
IT-savvy Kossacks help Bingham to keep the site bug-free, and offer some invaluable advice on open source cosmetics.
“Sometimes they write in with an idea I'd never thought of, or a suggestion from their line of experience that can be very handy. As far as keeping bugs off the site, they're the best people to report them,” Bingham said. “If something breaks on the site, they're not shy about letting me know about it.”
Bingham, a Scoop developer from his prior role as a consultant, returns his polished code into the community. He released mod_mcpage, a module to cache pages in lighttpd, which helps reduce the work load on his Apache web server back ends, and is adding more improvements to make it more useful to other developers.
He said open source is gaining traction in corporate and government IT shops, but concedes advocates must press its advantages to management for adoption to increase significantly.
