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This is a collected article from GigaOM,  so please remember the copyright belongs to them:

In my years covering technology, I’ve gotten more than my fair share of pitches related to the latest consumer Internet startup. Thanks to this I’ve been able to witness what amounts to be a near-familiar life cycle for these companies. Not every company hits every step, but most of these will be familiar to those of you in the Silicon Valley Social Media/Web 2.0-Something trenches.

IN THE BEGINNING 

One day an entrepreneur is chatting with his friends, gets an idea, writes about the idea on his or her blog, and then starts coding. A few weeks or possibly days, a beta — increasingly a euphemism for a not-fully-thought-out-product — emerges.

THE LAUNCH 

Then the buzz builds and the company opens up the beta far and wide. Maybe TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily or WebWare write about the product. Either way, this is the first traffic spike and the entrepreneur rejoices. The VCs come calling. If they don’t, the angels will certainly do a fly-by.

But eight weeks later reality sets in. The traffic stops growing or — worse yet– dives. The VCs stop calling and blogs start posting Alexa charts that look like ski slopes or tabletops. But as an ever-optimistic entrepreneur it’s time to regroup, gather your programmers, toss back some Red Bull and…

LAUNCH A SOCIAL NETWORK WIDGET 

If the user adoption press releases, the widget and subsequent coverage can’t get your site growing again, it’s time for the big guns...the open API. Now you’re a platform! The startup gets a fresh round of publicity, maybe more exposure to new users, and the founder rejoices again. This time the money men get serious because you have shown them you can survive the Silicon Valley jungle and you have a Facebook strategy.

12 MONTHS LATER 

Maybe the media is getting too insistent with their questions about how this service is supposed to make money. Maybe the bills from Amazon Web Services are getting too high, or the VCs are getting impatient. The blogs are back to posting unflattering Alexa numbers. Compete data backs those charts up! So it’s time for advertising.

If the startup is well-funded or has a famous founder, the ad unit might be something novel like awidget, pre-roll voice ads on a mobile phone, or Beacon. Otherwise it’s generally based on banners and Google AdWords with promises of more to come.

THE END IS NEAR 

But selling online advertising is hard. If Google, Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft haven’t stopped by with a buyout, it’s time to consider reality. You could always try your hand as an ad network or merge with a competitor, but more than likely it’s time to sell that domain name and user base on eBay or quietly shut your doors. Better luck next time.

Yeah, this type of blogging is copied from other blog but I think it’s cool to remind what I have done or at least my friends can keep up to my work. Make a comment if anything went wrong here . Ok, in the previous week, I did:

1. Deploy a new production server.
2. Write a php script to clean redundant files on that server.
3. Solve DNS problem with the domain.
4. Install memcache on my test server.
5. Convert real link from text in the book description, for example: mahshelf.com now becomes http://mahshelf.com.
6. Change page title dynamically to improve page SEO.
7. Make a presentation about Web 2.0 user interface at EVTEK school and receive lots of criticisms about that .
8. Think about my mom, forex rates showed 1 Euro = 26,058.5 Vietnamese Dong yesterday, my currency lost its value for the last 5 years. Being a Vietnamese is tough.
   

Moreover, I also write a quick note here as a to-do list, if you find sth missing, inform me through the comment.

• Make a good benchmark on how memcache can really save the day.
• Although the link is automatically linked, it still breaks the layout if the URL is too long, need to truncate the URL (not easy with those php preg_replace functions )
• Need to add dynamic meta keywords to improve page SEO as well.
• Improve URL routing system.
• Fix current CSS tooltip, an alternative is using an AJAXed one to save bandwidth.

Before writing anything about this, I would like to apologize Odin Chen because I did not fulfill my exaggeration that I will make my web app run 500 times faster than before. After the most recent benchmark, it probably runs only 10 times faster

Here is the list I have applied to my app, hope it helps someone

• Compress web files such as javascript and css files, that saves both web traffic and loading time.
• Add an expires header to web files and images, it is only necessary when those files are not changed before they expire (I am still finding the best way to do it)
• Choose a small footprint server, I know Ubuntu 7.10 is great but you do not need the latest PHP 5.2.5, why dont you consider Debian?
• Compile your own package with your own configuration, or at least install only the essential packages from the repos, not all of them
• Use a caching engine such as APC, eAccelerator, Zend Optimizer, or memcached …
• Use your skill in programming, yes by that I mean code efficiency : do not forget to join foreign table, that saves many time in database querying, and unset the variables or objects that used in actions file that are no longer needed in template file

In the future, if I read or think of some other tips I will blog about it, if you have any advice, do not hesitate do leave a comment here.

When I was a normal web surfer, I never thought it would be a critical issue for web page to display correctly on every browser. But recently it comes to me as a head-ache matter when designing the layout of mahshelf.com. Luckily there is a javascript file that makes IE5-6 behave like a standard compliant browser. Although the situation about web design is temporarily stable, I am still looking a talented web designer in the future.

PS: I made a quick look at browser statistics table and in this month, IE5-6 browser users are continuously decreasing.