Apparently the terms slant rhyme and near rhyme are interchangeable, as are the terms half rhyme, off rhyme and oblique rhyme. I’ve been using the terms near rhyme, and almost rhyme for the most part when describing this site. I find people automatically understand these terms and I don’t have to work so hard explaining things.

I bring this up because I’ve been reading about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and apparently I need to research keywords that people put into search engines, especially using this google tool, and I’ve discovered that there’s almost 10x as many searches done for slant rhyme than there are for near rhyme!

Now, my intuition tells me that 90% of those people are wondering ‘wtf is a slant rhyme’, or maybe it’s a British term or something. However, it shows you shouldn’t assume anything, or you’ll be barking up the wrong tree for half your life.

Update: Apparently it’s a hiphop term. Now I feel like an idiot for thinking it might be British.

My friend Pat proposed making a B-Rhymes iPhone/Blackberry app so you can find near-rhymes on the go. We talked it over, and it seems like it would be pretty straightforward. So look for it in the near future at your local app store.

B-Rhymes used to be pretty slow, so in the last month I’ve made a lot of optimizations to make it serve up near-rhymes faster than ever. I’ve:

• Rewritten the entire site with Kohana (a PHP framework), switching from Django (a Python framework).
• Made a ton of web optimizations as advised by YSlow. eg. gzip, image optimization, cache configuration etc.
• Streamlined things, getting rid of unnecessary JavaScript, and added paging so you don’t have to wait for all the rhymes to come in before you can see it.

But after doing all that it was still slow! not all the time, just sometimes. See, I was on what’s called a Virtual Private Server (Cool people call it a VPS), meaning I was sharing a big web server with lots of other people (it being “Virtually Private”, ie, not private at all). If your neighbors don’t behave, and I’m guessing mine weren’t, it can really hurt your performance. So then I was like, screw it, I’m getting a new server!

So I got a new VPS from lylix, and then blam! It’s been blazing ever since! My benchmarks are twice as fast as before. So maybe I didn’t have to do all those optimizations after all, though it won’t hurt to have them, especially once you beautiful people tell all your rhyming friends about b-rhymes, and the traffic really starts coming in (hint hint!).