WordPress-as-a-service tip: Flywheel

flywheelAt work I was asked to provide advice on WordPress hosting. As we don’t have in-house LAMP-experience and as I didn’t want to have to take care of server operations myself (been there, done that), I decided to look into WordPress as a service solutions. To make things a tad more complicated, hosting had to be in a European data-center as we wanted optimal performance for our local customers and as our Privacy Officer requires all company data to be in Europe.
I contacted several US companies, but eventually Flywheel came out on top; they confirmed they could host in Europe (Amsterdam), seemed pretty eager, had a great package and they could provide me with a test-account to play around with their solution. And so I did; I set up a stock WordPress 3.9.x with Autoptimize and WP YouTube Lyte (call me prejudiced, but I like my own plugins), imported a bunch of posts from this blog and had WebPageTest be the judge.
The results were quite impressive;

Document CompleteFully Loaded
Load timeFirst byteStart renderDOM elemsTimeReqsBytes InTimeReqsBytes In
First View (Run 3)0.457s0.120s0.292s9260.457s473 KB1.008s12152 KB

0.120s until first byte, 0.292s start render and 0.457s doc complete? Sweet! So yeah, given those numbers, their offering and the fact they can deploy to a datacenter in Europe I do think Flywheel is a great choice for those who are looking for WordPress-as-a-service (well, PAAS really) solution!

Music from Our Tube; Fatima’s “Do Better”

Fatima is a renowned female vocalist who has been working with Floating Points’ Sam Shepherd for a couple of years already. “Do Better” is a Shepherd-produced track off of “Yellow Memories”, her new album which is out on Eglo Records:

Fatima - Do Better (prod. Floating Points)

Android Chrome bug when styling unicode character?

symbols CSS weirdness in chrome for androidWhile experimenting with the use of Unicode characters in a small proof of concept, I stumbled upon what I think is a bug in Chrome for Android. Apparently character ☰, which renders as ☰ and which most people consider the “options”-icon, cannot be given a color in Chrome for Android whereas other Unicode characters can.
As you can see when visiting this test-page, the 3 symbols styled correctly (font color white) in most browsers (tested on IE8, FF on W7, Ubuntu and Android, Chrome on W7 and Ubuntu), but the options-symbol is not white on Chrome for Android (at least on my Samsung Galaxy S4).
So, does this qualify as a bug, or did I just mess up? Anyone happens to know a workaround?