Technical Blog – Page 44

Will Wonders Never Cease…

I can’t believe it. A month ago my hosting nemesis, Purehost, performed a server upgrade. I sort of read their email about it but did not grasp what they were babbling about when they mentioned this upgrade would improve site performance.

Curious, I checked my dad’s site that I designed and web master for,and saw his old index.html page up. Not good. I guess they somehow put it back. So I took it down. The site ran slow as molasses and you couldn’t login to the blog. Checked the file permissions. They all had wierd capitalized ST’s in them.

WTF?

I uploaded new copies of the same files and the login problem was fixed. But I was logged out if I clicked on any part of the blog functions.Weird. I decided to remove all the session_save_paths I had to put in to make any script with session_start(); work .That did the trick. I removed it from the CMS as well. And now the site is chugging along fast as ever.

Great success!

This makes me wonder if now we can have better stuff for the site.Stuff that works! What a concept.I hope my days of purehost-bashing may be over…we shall see.

Remarks…

… while trying to switch from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress.

I just read this article that’s got some IT people’s panties in a twist.Most of the ire seems to be because the Wall Street Journal published an article about 10 things you can do without your IT dept. Techrepublic ,an online tech magazine, is mad because they think it’s giving out unsafe advice. Stuff like “How to send large files”(no.1) and “How to store your files online”(no.6), they deem semi-innocuous. But other stuff like “How to go to sites your company blocks” and How to clear your tracks on your work computer”, they think go over the line.

I don’t do IT for my job but I was still interested enough to go to the WSJ and read the article. Ok, I wanted to know what IT people actually did.

I thought it all seemed reasonable enough advice until I got to (no.8)

“HOW TO ACCESS YOUR WORK EMAIL REMOTELY WHEN YOUR COMPANY WON’T SPRING FOR A BLACKBERRY“.

Then goes on to describe “The Problem: Anyone without a BlackBerry knows the feeling: There’s a lull in the conversation when you’re out to dinner or an after-work beer, and everyone reaches for their pocket to grab their BlackBerry, leaving you alone to stir your drink.”

I want to know what kind of people are these? A lull in the conversation drives these guys to start fidgeting with their toys? Is being quiet for one second so uncomfortable for these gadget-junkies that they have to start groping their electronic doodads in desperation for something to do?

If you don’t have a Blackberry, you’re not cool. If you don’t have an iPhone,you’re not cool.That has been pretty much established by advertising. It’s so soulless. People seriously need to get a grip.

I know that writer was just needing a cute preamble to lead into their solution…I know that it can’t be that we have devolved to the point that we cannot be silent amongst each other without the aid of some shiny piece of plastic to keep us occupied. Have we?

Anyway, if you want to read the article go here.

Time to Move

I know I said just over week ago I wouldn’t switch blogging tools.But I have to.Why? Because there just isn’t a reason to stay with the one I have when I can have a WordPress blog.It’s safe to say I knew I’d outgrown my SimplePHPBlog when the gallery plugin I tried to use (there was just one to choose from) said I had to have the GD Library installed for it to work. I do.I tried to convince it but no luck.

Also, all my session id’s attached themselves to every link. Security risk.I think.I’ve read it isn’t so great,anyway.

WP is just so freaking handy.There’s so much support,it’s rabidly developed and so many people are obsessed with it.So if there was ever any problem I could find out how to fix it spit spot because 300 other people have already had and fixed the exact same problem.

I am going to retire this blog as soon as I get all my content switched to the new blog.

Don’t worry, you’ll be sure to see me and my big mouth back in action super soon.

I Love PHP Classes

I used to love Sourceforge. Now I love PHP Classes.

How can you not love a site that has tons of smart people constantly uploading new classes(I think classes can be called applications in most cases-they’re pretty robust) for PHP that they wrote and that you can have for free? If you haven’t gone there you should. There is so much stuff.I am not saying it is all great.But if you stick to the top 10 new releases to try out you will save yourself wasting time on useless stuff.Sleektabs is one class you should test for yourself.AJAX and PHP. I’ve loaded it up and am going to try it out. I will report my success or failure.