Canadian Jen posts a picture, then Scottish Carol posts a picture of the same thing (only Scottish). Then Carol posts a pic of something else, then Jen posts a pic of the same thing (only Canadian). And one day, with luck, we’ll have a photo blog that compares Burlington, Ontario, Canada with Glasgow, Scotland in some interesting way.

Thought you might like it! Check it out here.

What has impressed me most about MyHalton is, despite the fact that it is a young forum, knowledgable moderators ensure that virtually every posting had a response in a day or so.

This has enabled anyone to find Halton-specific information from others who live and work in the area. They share information fast with a lot of collaboration—every post or question that I came across had a minimum of one reply.

Comprehensive what’s on listings for Burlington, Oakville, Milton, Georgetown and Acton include theatre, arts, comedy, clubs, music, classes, special events and more! The site also provides a handy event calendar. All members are invited to post upcoming events.

Its aggregation system aggregates feeds from multiple sources, providing updated buy and sell listings from Craigslist, job postings from Randstad, news updates from the Burlington Post, Oakville Beaver and Milton Canadian Champion. The site’s format allows for quick and easy commentary and its small but active community is an encouraging one, eliciting viewpoints from both new and old members.

These aggregated listings provide the backbone for Halton’s largest and most visited free classifieds area. Categories include buy & sell listings, real estate, jobs, et al.

Restaurant reviews are provided by Menuism, making MyHalton the only source you need to find and recommend restaurants in Halton Region. Menus, restaurant guides, reviews and more are provided for Burlington, Oakville, Milton, Georgetown and Acton. You are also encouraged to post your own reviews, comments and criticisms.

The forum also provides an area for new or visiting residents. Whether you are considering Halton as a destination for your next vacation, to come as a tourist to one of the many Halton festivals, or are a visitor currently in the Halton area this forum is designed to provide a fun, user friendly way of discussing and discovering information!

I have recently discovered a new bookmarking service called LinkBag. LinkBag is new and is currently in beta, but is promising in its simplicity! Linkbag allows you to save and share web sites and pages of interest much the same way Del.icio.us does. Users can ‘bag’ a site, annotate it, and save it to a group of similar sites.

For example, here’s my Linkbag.

Have a taste for bookmarking and organizing a large number of Web sites? Linkbag can whet that appetite, giving you simple tools to organize those pages, access them later from any Web browser, and share what you save with other users or on your blog. Plus, you can tap into the Linkbag community to find sites that other users have saved. I find it to be a lot more delicious than some tools out there—but then maybe I’m a little biased! Not because it offers a greater feature set, but because it retains the simplicity and grace of the aforementioned website.

To get started, just visit Linkbag to create a free account, verify it, and log in. You can add new bookmarks individually within a simple form at Linkbag, or drag a bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark/links toolbar, so that you can click Post To Linkbag without leaving the window. It’s pretty cool.

Saving sites is made simple by the use of downloadable browser buttons. An RSS feed is available for your links and a forthcoming widget can be displayed on your web site or blog, previewing your most recent bookmarks. Although very similar to other bookmarking services in its functionality, LinkBag is a very nice addition. LinkBag also has the edge on other services with its aesthetically pleasing and simple interface.

The text-and-white-space interface of Linkbag remains monochromatic with a touch of blue, which is simple in its execution. The overall lack of design means Linkbag loads in a snap, so you don’t have to wait for big images to appear if you’re stuck with a dial-up connection.

Text ads appear within the Linkbag site, but they’re pretty low-key.

I have a Plesk box with Apache 2. The server doesn’t take a lot of hits, but runs a lot of scripts, so its pretty memory intensive. However, the load isn’t too high. I am trying to determine what are the best setting for my prefork MPM settings. I am getting conflicting suggestions on MaxClients.

I’ve learned that MaxClients limits the number of children Apache creates to handle requests. Each child only accepts one connection at a time and so these ‘children’ should equal the total number of concurrent connections.

Setting this too low has a very negative effect on performance. While all clients are busy handling connections, new connections will be put in the TCP queue and eventually timeout, while the machine itself will seem perfectly responsive and fast.

I’ve learned that it is generally a good idea to set MaxClients as high as the machine can handle in terms of memory. However, setting it too high will cause the machine to swap memory between hard ram and cache needlessly, which effectively kills performance.

I found this on ye old interweb, from Webmonkey:

The single biggest hardware issue affecting Web server performance is RAM. A Web server should never, ever, have to swap. Swapping increases the latency of each request beyond a point that users consider “fast enough.” This causes users to hit Stop and Reload, further increasing the load. You can, and should, control the MaxClients setting so that your server does not spawn so many children that it starts swapping.

Anyway — any suggestions for my Maxclients setting? Anyway, I created a LinkBag full of Apache performance tuning tips, as I’ve been reading through the interweb. It’s here, check it out! And feel free to comment if you have any suggestions.