There's two of us at 37signals building projects on top of the HttpLua / ngx_lua module. The OpenResty (http://www.openresty.org) project is absolutely worth a look if you are willing to live on the edge and you wan't incredibly fast performance. I can't say enough good things about the work agentzh and chaoslawful have been up to lately -- just check out their Github profiles.
For those who don't know, agentzh and chaoslawful made these super-awesome tools around nginx to power Taobao, the largest e-commerce site in China. agentzh left Taobao to work fulltime on OpenResty now. Stay tuned for what's to come from them!
I worked with agentzh on a module at one point, and he was extremely helpful in validating my ideas and helping me out. He answered all my questions by thorough example and explanation, which is why I'm excited that I saw this post. Hats off to agentzh!
I was looking forward to learning nginx, until I read this...
It's very nicely written and explains things well, but it doesn't so much teach nginx as it does point out all the contradictory and unexpected behaviors. That doesn't look fun to learn (or work with) at all.
Edit: I just looked in to agentzh's other project OpenResty, and I take everything back. It may be difficult, but it's extremely powerful, and seemingly worth dealing with the 'gotchas'.
His and chaoslawful's github projects are worth taking a look at. I slapped on a Lua scripted cache layer on top of Nginx, which ended up boosting a response into low ms.
agentzh is a great mentor. He has helped me number of times, often looking at my configurations and getting into my systems and tweaking things around to make them work. He even installed the powerful openresty on one of my machines to demonstrate how it can solve my problems and did some benchmarks for me. Respect to agentzh!! cant wait to see it evolve from here
Are there any tutorials on how to start a vps as a beginner from scratch?
I mean in one place rather than looking for a tutorial in linux then another on apache or nginx and so on...
But I'd highly suggest learning how to administer a Linux installation from the command line locally before you create a VPS and open yourself up to be hacked as you try to learn how to do everything.
Fix your browser/OS default font settings. This page have 0 styling and page with 0 styling should look perfect on your screen if you have everything configured correctly.
That page declares lang="zh" in the html tag. So it's probably not using the default font for Western or Unicode, but whatever the browser maps to Simplified Chinese.
In my case that was much uglier, and I had to fix it to read the page.
Looks good on firefox/ubuntu. It's strange that there's a browser using the lang tag for this; as I understand it web pages create a font spec according to style attributes and not lang tags, and fontconfig would only substitute fonts for a range of actual chinese characters if the preferred matching font didn't cover that range.
I saw the problem with Firefox 10 on CentOS. My default font was specifically configured to Bitstream Vera Serif.
Setting the default font in the Preferences seems to only change it for the encoding in the active tab (unless you go into the Advanced dialog). For several Asian languages it wanted to use "serif", which appears to be the 20-year-old X11 default version.
