Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Ugh, you might've seen some weirdness with the site lately.  Well, that's me trying to get some of the new blogging code up.  Now, i'm using more search engine friendly files that also might be a bit better in terms of performance from this server.  But I'll tell you that I learned a whole bunch from this encounter:

• make DAMN sure you use File::close from PEAR if do any file writing or reading.  Otherwise, you might end up leaving a ton of files open on the file system.  It's just not automatic (sad).
  
• The server, cron and shell have massively different environments that can adversely affect things like paths and environmental variables.  Even if your crontab is under the same user as someone who tries to run a script with that login id, you still can get different results.
• Using a cache is a real bitch.  I'm starting to question using a cache for anything outside of massive websites.  After reading an article about how Digg uses highly optimized sql, I started to realize and regret my decision for using a cache system.
• Make certain you set your domain in your cookie.  I had some issues with sessions without it.  It really is a pain since the session gets confused with another cookie getting started, only to be distinguished by the domain.

There's some other things I've learned recently, but I'll write them up later.