Category Archives: Tech

Gizmos, widgets, and doodads.

Atlanta PHP

Tomorrow night, I will be attending the April Atlanta PHP meeting. My friend Glen Gordon will be giving a presentation titled, “I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. [...]

Roadwork Next 15 Miles

I am preparing to move all of my web and email hosting to a new server. I’ve been fortunate to have an in-trade hosting arrangement for many years now (thanks to Jeff at Iguanasoft!). But my host’s owner is winding down some of his equipment, and I had outgrown the server I was on. [...]

Internet Explorer 8: Progress!

It seems that Microsoft has reversed their previous decision to make Internet Explorer 8 crippled by default. They will be enabling the standards compliant mode by default in IE8, and webmasters will have to use the X-UA-Compatible header to force it into IE7 mode, for sites that can’t be updated immediately. [...]

Internet Explorer 8: This is progress?

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!

But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. [...]

Reactivate All Plugins feature in WordPress 2.5

Once upon a time, I whipped up a Reactivate All Plugins feature for WordPress, to compliment the Deactivate All Plugins action (which is recommended before an upgrade). [...]

No more daily Twitter posts

Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary. [...]

Firefox 3

Late last night, I installed Firefox 3 Beta 2. I’ve been running it all day, opening and closing tabs throughout, with a peak of around 45 tabs open, and an average somewhere around 25-30.

I don’t know what they’ve done to improve the memory handling (it’s currently using 394M virtual, 161M resident, 19M shared), but the responsiveness has been awesome. [...]

VPS Recommendations?

I’m looking for a Virtual Private Server host. The server I’m currently on is woefully underpowered for the handful of sites I running (on the plus side, it’s been free), and it’s high time that I moved my stuff to a box that’s up to the task.

Ideally, I’d like the following features:

  • Virtual Private Server with at least 1GB of RAM (preferably with root access within my instance).
  • SSH shell access.
  • Decent monthly bandwidth allotment (at least 250GB/month).
  • Plenty of disk space (25GB would be be plenty, but I can live with less).
  • Hosting of multiple web/email domains.
  • PHP5 and MySQL 5.
  • Ability to configure many email alias fowards within each domain.
  • Procmail for mail filtering.
  • DNS hosting, preferably with the ability to directly edit my own zone files, but I’ll live with a web interface if I have to.

Those are listed roughly in order of importance. [...]

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

As announced on the dev blog, WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. Some of the features of 2.3 include automatic notification for plugin and core code version updates, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.

The new tag system includes an importer for those using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and importers for a couple of other popular plugins are in the works. [...]