This has been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally decided to move this blog (and a few other things I’m hosting) to DreamHost. Why DreamHost? Because they offer a great package, what can I say? I’ve been hosting at 1and1 for over a year, but after a few bad experiences, I’ve decided to move to something a bit more robust.

Although it’s not really fair to compare DreamHost to 1and1 Hosting, let’s give it a shot:

Cron Jobs

I use these for my MySQL backups. Download a nice PHP script and set up a cron job to run said script at a scheduled time. Without cron jobs, I have to go through the hoopla of running some PsuedoCron stuff, which basically runs a script if a user visits your website after the script has been scheduled to run. This is fine for small scripts, but didn’t really fly much for my database backups, since the poor sap that happened to trigger the script would have to sit and wait for it’s completion, as it would appear to be something the website was loading.

Ruby On Rails

After working so much with CakePHP, I can’t help but be curious. I really doubt that I’m going to jump ship, but it’s good to have an environment to play with.

Space and Bandwidth

You got 500 GB of disk space to play with, and 5.0 TB of monthly bandwidth. This is enough to host at least a few good sized sites under one account. The unlimited Domains makes this a breeze.

Welcome to the September 24, 2007 edition of web development 2.0. Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor) posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog. General Paul presents Make Web Site Development Easy posted at BigTechnical, saying, “Great CSS tools and more.” Although I don’t really dig the Blueprint CSS framework, the tips on Nifty Corners and gradients are good. Don Albrecht presents Why Are CSS Frameworks Important to AJAX Development posted at Ajax Bestiary, saying, “It’s way to easy to get burned in AJAX development when you don’t start with a good foundation.

Now I know you’ve read about this and it’s usually a good idea: concentrate most of your ads on your older posts and hide ads from your regular visitors. I mean, they come here everyday, reward them with a little bit of clean content. But also, if you’re like me, you’re lazy and haven’t gotten around to coding this yet. Well here you go, a WordPress plugin that I’ve stumbled upon: Who See’s Ads?

Introduction These guys make it a point of duty to try their hardest to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to drive traffic. Who benefits from this service? Based on the name of this service, you can see that it’s not for your average blogger. This service will benefit folks with eCommerce sites or some other type of static content. They specialize in SEO for static pages. They use targeted key words, to help you build key word rich content for your website to drive the most traffic to it.

Introduction In the spirit of rapid web development, I’ve stumbled upon jQuery. Here’s a testimonial from a jQuery user: You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind." In my experience it’s been more like five (5) lines of jQuery.

I jsut realized that my brand new WordPress theme sucks in Internet Explorer 7. My footer doesn’t show up, and my sidebar is all the way to the bottom. I remember when I first started with this them, I went through the whole cross browser thing and everything looked fine. I tweaked everything to my liking and was satisfied. Now I have to go backwards, one element at a time and try to isolate which tweak, new content, post, or plugin that has caused this to happen.

I am proud to present the first edition of Carnival of Web Development 2.0. This is my first time hosting one of these things, so enjoy: General Doug Boude presents DEMYSTIFYING JSON posted at Doug Boude (rhymes with ‘loud’) sylv3rblade presents Stages of Software Development posted at Atma Xplorer, saying, “My take on the process of software development” prakash presents A2Z Informative-Technology, Software, Internet, Tips, Ideas posted at A2Z Informative, saying, “Identifying the color code of an image on the screen is not an easy task.

The power of CakePHP has a lot to do with conventions. The framework (like many others) harnesses its power by enforcing certain conventions and standards that users must follow. You name your database tables, file names, etc; a particular way and boom, models, views and controllers are automatically created and ready for use. This is the beauty of the MVC structure. Your URLs also follow thing structure: www.site.com/controller/action/params.

Straying From Convention

But sometimes, conventions suck. Sometimes you want greater control over things, but still don’t wanna do them from scratch. The strictness of the MVC structure dictates how your URLs will look. Consider this: CakePHP has a basic pages controller, which you can use when you don’t need a model or controller. You just enter the view and voila , a page. But your pages have a URL of:

www.site.com/pages/page

Wouldn’t you rather:

www.site.com/page.htm

The Routes Configuration examples in the CakePHP manual are a bit simple. Here’s how to use a bit more advanced routing:

Router::connect('/(.*).htm', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display'));

This says, consider everything that comes in with an HTM extension and send the URL as a parameter to the display action on the pages controller.

The idea was stolen from Lumad CMS. They use the following in Rewrite in .htaccess for their pages:

RewriteRule ^~(.*) content_pages/displayurl/$1 [L]

They use a prefix of ‘~’ instead of a suffix of ‘.htm’, but you get the picture. I’m sorry to disappoint you, I’m not as creative as you thought.

To develop PHP and MySQL on a Windows machine, I usually use WAMP. I had tried XAMPP before, but I found that it was a bit bloated, with the OpenSSL and FTP Server, etc. So WAMP it was. But lately, I decided to give XAMPP another try and I like what I’ve got so far. For the past three weekends, I’ve been away from my personal computer. The only life line I’ve had is my stock of Portable Apps on my 512MB USB disk.

Introduction As you guys know, I’ve recently discovered the marvels of rapid web development with CakePHP. This shall be the first in a long serious of CakePHP related material coming from me since I’ve now veered off on a slightly different focus. After a short analysis, I’ve picked CakePHP as my framework of choice. I’ve been struggling through it for a few months now, but it’s by far better than the alternative of coding by hand (Yeah, I know I’m lazy).