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★ DEVTRENCH is a web development blog about PHP, MODx, CSS/xHTML, Web Design,
SEO, and Server Admin. I've been doing web development since 1997, and in
2006 I started this site hoping to give back a little bit what I've learned.
Lately I've taken a liking to MODX cMS and the people in the community, so
you'll find alot about MODx HERE. ★
Alright, I'm back for part three of this action packed WordPress to MODx Migration mania. In part one I showed you how to use xPDO to connect to the WordPress database and import post content into MODx. In part two I demonstrated how xPDO handles table relationships by importing WordPress comments into MODx. In this part of the WordPress to MODx migration I'm going to show you how to create and assign templates, migrate categories and postmeta data.
Before we start, …
In part 1 of this Wordpress to MODx migration I introduced you to xPDO's schema and model generators and started work on migrating wordpress post and page data into MODx. In this post I'm going to show you how I built the relationships in the wordpress schema file and how I pulled in all of wordpress's comments and kept the threading in tact. Plus the script has evolved to handle where to store pages vs posts, what to do with versions, keeping child/parent relationship…
I wrote in my last post that I want to move this blog from WordPress to MODx and so I thought this would be a good real world lesson in using xPDO. Rather than custom coding a database migration tool using plain old php like I've done in the past, I thought it would be cool to see what xPDO could do, how easy it would be, and how robust xPDO is. I've spent 2 hours on the code below and have never used xPDO before, and so far I'm pretty impressed with what xPDO can do. …
I feel fortunate to have spent the last two days in Dallas, TX with the greatest minds in the MODx world. MODxpo 2010 was so far above what I expected that I'm at a loss to capture everything that went on. The most awesome and most humbling aspect of the conference was the openness, honesty, and down-to-earthness of all of people that attended, including the core team. As I've written before, the MODx community is a big reason why I've stuck with it for the past 3 yea…
If you've coded yourself into a problem that you can't figure out and you've spent hours debugging always remember this simple rule to solve your problems faster: Reduce and Simplify.
If a solution to a problem isn't obvious by looking at your code (or output), then start taking chunks away until you don't see the problem anymore. For example, I was having a tough time figuring out why some web pages I built were very slow in IE 6 & 7, but loaded fine in Firefox. I ha…
Have you ever asked yourself why you do the things you do? Why do you design the way you do? Why do code the way you do? I've been asking this question off and on over my career, but lately this question has really come back to me in a big way.
I've been reading Getting Real by 37signals and although this is my second reading of it, it's really hit home this time. The entire book is basically about your approach. How do you get up every morning and step up to the pla…
I've been busy writing and have launched two new tutorials:
MODx Templating Strategy is tutorial that will show you a best practice for developing scalable templates in MODx CMS.
PHP Tools of the Trade is for PHP beginners and will let you in on all of the software and server knowledge that you need if you want to learn PHP.
These are the first two tutorials that I'm launching on this site after the redesign and I've got more on the way. Enjoy.
Sometimes when starting out a new Wordpress theme it's nice to have something to start from that's pretty bare, but has enough code so that you don't feel like you're reinventing the wheel. I know there's lots of blank themes out there, but I created my own and this is what I usually start from. It's basically the default theme, stripped down with reset and typography CSS from blueprint. This theme has very little - almost none - html markup, but includes the common p…
I want to be honest with you, I've kind of been putting off writing my review of MODx Web Development from Packt Publishing. I actually finished the book about a week ago and just felt like I had to give it some distance so I didn't totally bash this book. It's not really fair to the author to just outright say that this book isn't good because they put some thought into it and worked hard. But if I would have written this post a week ago, that's all you would have he…
In September I wrote a post, "Duplicate Content Solution For Mobile Sites", which was about how to make a mobile version of your website and not get the duplicate content penalty. In that post I wrote "I've never had the chance of using an iPhone but I can't imagine that a few extra inches of screen space make that big of a difference". Well, last night my sister came to town for Christmas and I got to mess around with her iPhone for a bit. And the difference is huge.
…
I developed a new mobile tool for DEVTRENCH readers that finds the A, MX and NS records for any domain name you type in. I needed a way to get DNS records from my blackberry and I couldn't find one, so I coded a mobile DNS lookup tool. Just enter any domain name and you'll be served mobile friendly dns records. Try it out:
Search DNS Records
Comment here if you find bugs or have feature requests.
I recently received a copy of MODx Web Development from Packt Publishing to read and review here on DEVTRENCH. The book came a few days ago in the mail and I'm about 2 and half chapters in. So far, I'm pretty impressed at how detailed the book is, and think it would be a pretty good reference for someone starting out with MODx. Let's face it, the documentation on the MODx site is kinda weak. So after learning from that, the wiki, and forums, it just came down to a lot…
I didn't know much about the world of SSL Certificates a few years ago, so it was confusing about where to purchase them. Luckily my host had a deal running at the time that let me in on a little secret for purchasing SSL certs. Basically, ssl is ssl and any certificate, including a self signed one will encrypt your data just fine. However, now that modern browsers have bought into the whole SSL industry, you need to purchase one that works with them. IOW, self signe…
I've been pretty frustrated with the way that cPanel notifies (or doesn't notify) me of bandwidth overages. Seems sometimes I get them and sometimes not. So when I found out that you can do this with the WHM XML api I wanted to get it set up ASAP. This script can be used along with cron and PHPMailer to notify you of the bandwidth usage for all your domains in WHM. I have mine set up to notify me daily so I can keep track of my bandwidth usage.
To get your Access ke…
I needed to cache a chunk as a file so that another application (an ecommerce store) could include that file as well. I wrote this plugin that does that:
$chunks = array('StoreMenu'); // array of chunks that need to be cached
foreach($chunks as $v)
{
$res = $modx->db->select("snippet","modx_site_htmlsnippets","name = '$v'");
if($modx->db->getRecordCount($res))
{
$output = $modx->db->getValue($res);
$fh = fopen($modx->config['base_path'].$v.'.html','w');
…
I added a new tool today for MODx users that turns a MODx snippet call into a snippet call using the MODx API function runSnippet(). It's a pretty simple tool, but I made it because I hate doing this manually (it's just too tedious). Enjoy.
MODx Snippet Call2PHP
So I was looking at my Google Webmaster Tools this morning for devtrench.com and I throught it was pretty funny to see that this site ranks #1 for "modx sucks".
Just for clarity I wanted to write this post to let everyone know that my opinion is that MODx doesn't suck, but that there are few sucky aspects of MODx. In fact, I would say that MODx is the best CMS out there when you consider how easy it is for regular people (non-geeks) to use. If you've never used MODx and …
I found out last month how to use Wake On Lan (WOL) to start up my Linux development computer and I think it totally rocks. Now I don't have to get up and walk 10 feet to turn it on. I showed it to my wife and realized I had entered a new level of geekdom that I should really learn to just keep to myself.
Basically the steps are:
Set up the BIOS on the computer you want to wake on lan. The bios has to have the ability to do this as well as your network card.
Set up…
I've recently begun to develop a website in the symfony framework and that got me thinking about why you'd want to develop with a framework at all.
1. Security: All good frameworks come with security helpers to protect your code and data from XSS and other hacking attempts. Make sure the framework you choose escapes all form input and all html output.
2. Scalability: A framework can help you scale your site for massive traffic if it includes a good way to cache output.
…
I worked for a long time at a state funded university as a web developer and besides the great insurance they offered, it was a pretty annoying experience. We usually we'd sit down with teachers or researchers to develop custom web applications, but every once and a while we'd sit down with deans or heads of departments and be asked to program some monolithic web app that coordinated data across several departments and organizations. Some of these projects came to frui…
A hard thing for me to figure out when first using php from the command line was that it uses a different php.ini than apache does,and can even be a different version of php. It was also hard to figure out what php.ini was loaded. Here are some useful commands if you find yourself in this situation:
php -- (tells you which php.ini it's using and where it is, and any additional .ini files parsed)
php -v (php version number)
which php (shows the location of the php execu…
I got a chuckle today when working with X-cart's friendly urls feature. Apparently the folks at x-cart think a friendly url is just a url without a query string. However they seem to leave out the fact that the store actually has any kind of structure, so all of your urls will be at the first level no matter where they are in the categorization. For instance, if you have a product in Widgets > Super Widgets > Awesome Widget 25, the url will not be /widgets/super-widge…
I've been setting up mobile sites for my clients lately and wanted to share my experiences with you. I set up mobile sites on a subdomain using some custom code written for MODx CMS. This works out really well for the client because they only have one place to enter content, and the CMS takes care of serving the right templates to mobile users. This however creates a lot of duplicate content. On top of that, search engines love mobile content IMO because it's faster …
Well after a few months of development and absolutely no posting I've finally got my new theme up and running. This marks the 4th design change to the site, and represents a change in how I'll write here in the future. Now I'll mostly be working on in depth tutorials and I'll keep the blog posts short, sweet and hopefully fun :) I hope you enjoy the new theme and structure. Stick around for some good information coming soon.
I've been running this blog in earnest for about 2 years and in that time I've hopefully put out some useful posts. However, my vision for this site has never been completely realized. I've always wanted this site to become a staple resource for web developers of all skill levels but haven't really worked very had at that goal. During the next year I plan to work more towards that vision and develop some tutorials for beginners and intermediates. These tutorials will …
I've been developing this website in earnest for almost 2 years now and during those 2 years I've learned easy traffic tips that never fail. These might seem easy, and they are, but some do it better than others (and a lot do it better than me). But, no matter how good you do it, these two tips will help you get off the ground traffic wise if you are missing the basics.
Tip #1: Write Content and Wait
That's right, just write content and wait. It doesn't even have to be…
I needed a way to easily log all email being sent from my websites so I devised this solution where I just have to bcc the emails to a single email address and they get placed in a database.
First, add a forwarder in cPanel. Enter a super secret address to forward. I recommend a random string of 20-30 chars. Just make it something someone can't guess, otherwise your database could be filled with spam. Then select Pipe to a Program and enter the location of where you w…
I learned something new this past week: how to use Microsoft Virtual PC to test Internet Explorer. If you've been a web developer for some time then you know that it's hard to get multiple versions of IE running on the same Windows computer. My solution for this has been to keep a legacy computer around that has IE 6 on it, but when that computer died on me I had to find a different solution.
A friend tipped me off to using the virtual machine and it turns out that …
After reading Jeremy Shoemaker's latest newsletter I was pretty psyched about getting some speech recognition software to increase my blogging production by like 1000%. After a bit of Googling I found I've had this power in the palm of my hands ever since I installed MS Office. I just had to install speech recognition and wait for my muse.
Here is an especially enlightening passage:
and the went and the thirteenth when pitcher up into Europe and the doctor is like only …
I read this great post today that shows how to automatically backup cPanel with PHP and a cron job and FTP the backup to a remote host. The guy that wrote this recommends that you keep the file on the server you want to backup, but I have like 50 cPanel sites and so I thought it would be better just to keep all of the login info in one file on my laptop and run it with my local version of PHP (set up WAMP or XAMPP to run php locally on windows). I modified the script b…
If you've messed around with symfony at all you undoubtedly have seen or gon through the Askeet tutorial. Like many developers, the Askeet tutorial was how I dove into symfony and really appreciated how in depth it was. However, Askeet really doesn't reflect symfony's current code base and isn't as useful for new comers any more.
Well, the developers realized this and are putting out a brand new, up-to-date symfony tutorial that starts today. Each day up to Christmas …
Since WordPress doesn't support rss feeds for pages out of the box and I needed it, I decided to write this plugin to satisfy my need for now. Like the title says, this is quick and dirty, but it gets the job done. The next version of this plugin will be an RSS 2 feed. I just wanted to get this out since I saw a lot of people asking about this in the WP forums.
Download [download#11#size#nohits]
$pid,'sort_order'=>'DESC'));
} else {
$pages = get_pages(array('sor…
I take security pretty seriously because I've had about a handful of sites hacked on my watch (luckily none of it was code that I'd written). Over the years I've gotten used to programming with security in mind and there are a few PHP 'nevers' that I don't do any more.
A few days ago I read a post on Browie.com about rotating affiliate marketing offers. The logic behind this is great and everyone in affiliate marketing should be doing this, so kudos to Browie for remin…
If you use WordPress for a lot of sites, installing it with SVN is really the way to go. I've been switching over all of my blogs to use SVN since it makes updating sooooo much easier. In fact, updating WordPress used to be my biggest gripe about the program, and now I don't even give it a second thought - it really makes it that easy.
However if you are on a shared host like I am, then the checked out files might not have the right permissions for your setup. My host…
This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design colleges. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.
Adobe Photoshop and Corel PhotoPaint are useful tools, no doubt, but there's more to image editors than determined by the price tag alone. I know they say you get what you paid for, but there are times when the best things in life are free, …
Recently I've been developing websites using the Bluprint CSS framework. Blueprint itself is not new (it's a little over a year old), but I hadn't really committed to using it as a standard for my business until about a month ago.
So What's the Advantage?
The main advantage to using a css framework is speed. Once you figure out what the framework can do, it speeds up development quite a bit by helping to standardize the web development workflow. Blueprint can be the …
If you're a web developer or designer, chances are you've come in contact with the Linux operating system - most likely at the web server level. My first experience with Linux was in 1998 when I worked at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where our sys admins built web servers using this cool open source OS. What's not cool about a free operating system?
Anyway, it's a good idea to run a server out of your office or home just to get familiar with how it works and what…
It's pretty easy to hijack some core WordPress code and use it to extend the functionality of your WordPress site while keeping a cohesive look and feel. Basically, this technique creates a WordPress 'shell' that you can code inside of; utilizing all of WordPress's functions and themes, but leaving out the blog. I use this technique to add on functionality to my WordPress sites that don't fit within the WordPress framework, such as zip code locators and other custom da…
I was finally able to watch episodes 5-14 of TAC over a 3 day stretch last week. Overall I was pretty impressed with the show, even though my initial impressions left me wanting more. The acting got better, and they actually showed how some things were done, and some of the contestants shared pretty good details about how they got started and how they make money. Just the fact that Thor was able to pull it off while running his business and other things he does is pre…
When I find a new blog that I really like or think has some good information I usually want to read the whole thing, and in the past, I've been frustrated by how annoying it is to do it online. I just want all posts in one document, free of ads, that I can read from start to finish.
I've also been having the itch to learn the Perl programming language, and I thought this would be a good project to get my feet wet.
Strategy
Since the majority of blogs I read are in wri…
I've finally got the chance to view TAC episodes 2, 3, and 4 along with reading other people's comments of the show. I really don't want to add to the negativity of the show that seems to be in everyone's posts because I really don't see the point. I mean, yeah, the production isn't first class, the host leaves a lot to be desired (except for the wizard of oz songs at the end of episode four, can I get more of that wierdness please?), and it doesn't teach a lot, but to…
I just finished watching the first episode of TAC and I think it is going to be a pretty interesting show. I live in Lincoln NE, where it is being filmed, so it is pretty cool to see my hometown as the backdrop for this show.
My first impressions were that I expected a little bit more professional production (the opening credits were really bad), but overall the people involved and challenges they are facing are very interesting to me. There were no affiliate marketing…
Tonight was the Google Ad Manager Nebraska People Making Money Online meeting presented by Tigh and Jeremy at the new SMG offices here in Lincoln. It ended up being the best meeting that I've been to yet because only 5 of us were there (Jeremy, Tigh, Browie, some dude, and me)...it made for a nice small group. I'm not sure if people just couldn't make it or if they couldn't find Jeremy's new digs. I have to admit, it is pretty hard to find if you don't already know whe…
After upgrading to Wordpress 2.5.x one of my favorite features has to be the automatic plugin updating. But today, one DEVTRENCH reader alerted me that a certain download wasn't working. Well, as it turns out, none of the downloads that use the wp-DownloadMonitor plugin were working. Seems like the new automatic upgrading system changes the way that plugins can be made and after doing the auto upgrade of this plugin it ERASES your old download files with no warning! Of…
About 6 weeks ago, when my darling little girl was born, I had this grand notion that I would quit drinking Mountain Dew. After all, my 3-or-4-can-a-day habit was getting kind of expensive with the skyrocketing prices of 24 packs and gas. And I figured that I was probably better off not drinking all of the bad stuff that makes Mountain Dew sooooo good (namely BVO, caffeine, and reports of benzene).
Instead of just laying back on the stuff, I decided to quit drinking po…
I sure would like to win another ipod nano. I really enjoy the one I won last time, and having a second one would alleviate the problem of having to lend mine to my kids. So happy birthday Browie and thanks for offering this contest. Check out the contest on his personal blog where he reveals his most intimate and personal secrets.
I haven't blogged for the past week and for good reason...my wife had our third kid on Thursday the 17th and I pretty much didn't turn on the computer for 10 days. Olivia was born at 7:56am, the same time as our son was born.
For those of you that don't know, babies are really cool, especially when it comes around the third time. Unlike the first time where I pretty much freaked out for nine+ months, this time felt really natural and fun. And when you're not freaking …
I signed up for Google's new Ad Manager about a month ago and received my invitation to join the program last week. I finally got around to playing with it tonight and have to say that I'm pretty impressed. All of the ads on this site are now set up with Ad Manager and it uses less javascript code to do it!
I have to admit that I'm fairly retarded when it comes to putting ads on my site and when I tried OpenAds (now OpenX) a few months back, I was thoroughly confused b…
I saw on twitter that doshdosh has a wordpress.com account so I thought it would be fun to sign up for one just to see what it is like. I've always come at WP from the self hosted side of things and thought that the wordpress.com version would suck. I was pleasantly surprised that it does not suck. You can do pretty much anything you can do on a self install except have your own theme (looks to me like you can pay to have your own css). There are lots of things that y…
I came across a pretty interesting site today that shows how important links are to your site (just in case you think that they aren't). I'm not going to reveal the site here because it is not one of my own or one of my clients, so you'll just have to trust me that all of this is true. This person came to be concerned that none of their pages were showing up in Google.
The site in question is a PR 5 site that is not indexed in Google. Not a single page is indexed, and…
One theory that I have is that success can come from stupid things. Take this for instance:
Get your own Mclovin ID
The mclovin id maker* is a dumb idea. It's definitely something my wife would think is stupid. However, it is also a fairly popular idea, and as you may know, popularity and dumbness seem to go hand in hand.
This revelation has made my life a lot easier because I used to have the notion that I'd have to outsmart my competition, when really all I hav…
I thought it would be cool to have a directory on this site for web developers to get links back to their website or blog, so I set one up. This niche web developer directory is for the websites of web developers, web designers, web programmers, and search engine marketers - so basically everyone that works in a web related field and who might be interested in this site.
The rules are simple:
Reciprocal links are not required (because I'm not a jerk), but appreciat…
I have been searching for this solution off and on for about a month and finally found it. Found it through 'J's post, Multiple Instances of Mozilla Thunderbird? at http://www.wynia.org, off of a comment by 'Bortel'. Bortel linked to 'Run multiple copies of Thunderbird at the same time' on the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.
Basically, all you have to do is set the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE to 1 (obviously this is a windows thing and you mac people can figure it o…
I've been kind of a dick lately ranting in the last few posts so decided I should be nicer. Here are some free smilies for your wordpress blogs (or what ever you want to use them for). These are fun to make! Learn how to make and install them here.
Download SquareSmilies in zip format:
[download#10]
icon
text
text
full text
icon
full text
:)
:-)
:smile:
:lol:
:D
:-D
:grin:
:oops:
:(
:-(
:sad:
:cry:
:o
:-o
:eek:
:ev…
Ok, so this is going to be another post where I rant, but I'll keep it short. A client called me to tell me that she thought her server was having issues and was acting strange. They were experiencing dramatically high hits to their website in what was supposed to be a down time for them, so I told her that I would take a look at the apache access log to see if there was anything strange. This particular client runs a dedicated server and does all of their server admi…
Creating a lot of email address in cPanel can be a real pain the neck considering that there is no way to create multiple email addresses at once. However, this task can be accomplished with iMacros, a macro plugin for Firefox, and a bit of php.
If you don't have iMacros installed, get it here. Once you get that installed, here are the steps.
Create your iMacros Script
Here is where you need some php skills. You'll need a list of your email addresses (username only),…
This post started out titled Pros and Cons of MODx CMS, but today I'm rewriting it because I'm really not in the mood to give you a bunch of fluff about why MODx is great and then give you the bad stuff. Flat out, I think MODx is the best CMS for my projects at this point in time. Now on with things that suck...
<rant>
It says its a Framework, but I use it as a CMS
If you have used frameworks in the past, MODx is not going to feel like a true framework. My personal fa…
Here's a fun post that was prompted by my last one. It really is easy to make millions online and here's six ways how to do it..
Steal ItThese guys made millions of dollars stealing peoples identities and selling them online. I bet it was easy, but did they really think they wouldn't get caught?
Spam Spam enough people and you are bound to make some cold hard cash. What's easier than sending out billions of emails filled with affiliate links and stock scams?
Be a gen…
I read the post on John Chow's blog Earn Money Online Just By Showing Up and just felt like poking some fun at it. After all, why are people sill posting this crap?
Here is the list of things the author recommends as the secret to making a "few thousand dollars a month in earnings"...
1. Blog or write content for your web site every day. If you can’t do this, then just flip burgers for a living and get out of the way of the rest of us.
On second thought, don't. Blog o…
I get the question pretty frequently from those already using Firefox, "What Firefox extensions do you use?". This video shows all the addons/extensions that I use and then I go through and explain each one a little bit. I don't explain them a ton and most of them have advanced feature that I don't go into, but maybe I will in another post. I truly can't live and do my job without a lot of these plugins...
If you are a web developer and don't use Firefox (where have yo…
I feel pretty fortunate to live where I do, which might seem odd to some since I live in Lincoln, NE. I used to think that since I didn't live in a big city that my options were limited as to how much money I could make, what I could do, etc. That started to change about a year or so ago when I really started to figure out this 'make money online' thing.
In my search for knowledge about how to make some extra income I happened across Jeremy 'Shoemoney' Schoemaker's b…
I don't want to take credit for this, but I definitely wanted to blog about it because I think it is a big deal. In a forum post I made on modxcms.com, ganeshXL came up with an awesome way to cache snippet output with a MODx plugin. Here is what ganeshXL wrote:
create a chunk. Leave it empty. Name it whatever you want, e.g. testMenu
create a plugin. Enter this:
$myChunk = 'testMenu'; // your chunk name
$params['startId'] = '0';
$params['level'] = '4';
$html = addslas…
I was in need of doing some browser testing tonight and I thought I'd share the free sites that can be used for checking your web designs across multiple browsers and platforms.
browsershots.org
This is definitely the coolest free browser testing tool. There are lots of browsers and platforms (mostly Unix based) to choose from and the service is fast. If you need to check on alot of browsers at once then this is the place to go. It's also open source in case you want …
A while back I wrote a post linking to a css formatter and optimizer, not knowing then that it was a piece of open source code. When I figured that out I thought it would be a great idea to put it up on DEVTRENCH. I really love this code since it makes formatting and optimizing css so easy. I'm not sure why they spell optimize with an 's' instead of a 'z', but it's probably a British spelling or something (those crazy Brits).
Well you can find the CSS Formatter and …
Now that it's January 2008 some of my clients are noticing that the year in their copyright statements don't reflect 2008. Now, I always set this to drop in a dynamic value, but that wasn't the case before I was hired. This is such an easy thing to set up when you are developing a site so I suggest you do it right from the start. I use 3 main types of copyright year automation...
Javascript
<script>
<!--
y = new Date();
year = y.getFullYear();
CopyrightLine = "…
I've been doing a project lately that requires HTML2PDF generation and I was getting quite depressed at the 2 available options I'd found to do it with PHP: dompdf and html2fpdf. After trying to get them to work with the html template I set up I quickly realized that they just weren't going to work (both had problems processing images). After doing another Google search I found HTML2PS and HTML2PDF and it is practically a miracle! It seems to work pretty much the same…
I used to use inventory.overture.com for all of my keyword research but lately the service always times out for me. It is either dead, unsupported, or just blasted by so many requests that it can't handle it.
Today I found that WordTracker has a free keyword suggestion tool that works pretty similar to inventory.overture.com. I've been thinking for a while about signing up for WordTracker, but don't have the extra $$ around to get it going. I do plan to sign up for t…
I figured out this cool trick today: how to make update statements straight from phpMyAdmin. The normal way I go about this is either to write them using php or to do them using regular expressions in Notepad++. However, both of those can be kind of time consuming.
Today I needed to update one table with values from another table (replacing a last name with an id). Here is a simple version of how the tables are laid out:
Table 1 (counties)
id | person | county
Table …
Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. I got on my blog today and noticed the Do Follow plugin was in serious bad shape. As I looked around, I caught the new kid on the block, Show Top Commentators, red handed...literally...bloody knuckels and all. Since Do Follow was obviously down for the count, and STC wasn't backing down, all I could do was award him the top seat in the sidebar. So there he sits, on the sidebar of every page, waiting for your comments. Use him wisel…
I figured out a little trick to save some cash when buying things like domain names, hosting, printing, dinner plates, etc on the internet and wanted to share it. Any time you buy something online and see a coupon code input field when you are checking out, make sure you do a Google search for 'store name' and 'coupon code' or 'promo code'. There are tons of websites that collect and share this information and they can offer you some great savings. For example - the n…
Search Google for 'site:.edu Leave a Reply'. 'Leave a Reply' is the default text above comments in wordpress so this search will bring up a listing of edu sites that (most likely) have word press installed. You can leave comments on these sites to get a back link from an edu site, but it will most likely have the nofollow attribute.
If you look at the sites in the search results you'll see that a lot of people have already done this, and it's amazing to me how easily …
Ok, so I really didn't take an official blogging sabbatical (i.e. I didn't go anywhere), but during part of November and the month of December I pretty much took a break from blogging. I just needed to take a breather from the intense schedule I created for myself to get this blog going, and it was well deserved and well worth it.
While I was out, I did tons of reading, started working on a new site, and did a lot of relaxing and reflecting. Here's my list-o-seven thi…
Well, Christmas is almost here as well as my 29th birthday! I like to spend more time with my family around this time of the year so that means that I'll be slowing down posting until the new year. I've had quite a few projects the last two months that have really taken my attention away from this blog, and it's made me realize that DEVTRENCH is going to have to morph into something new for me to sustain it like I want to. In fact, this blog has really gotten away from…
About 2 months ago, Max Pool from Codesqueeze announced his First Annual Squeezed Reader Awards, and the day before Thanksgiving he emailed me that I'd won the iPod!! I just want to thank Max for the contest and for naming me the winner!
How did I win? Well, I wrote a guest post on 25 Signs That You've Got a Bad Client, made comments on his posts, put a link to the blog in my blogroll, stumbled and dugg almost every new post he wrote, and I already am an RSS subscrib…
Here we go...
I blame this post for not posting frequently this week (that and an incredible amount of work and no time). It got me all revved up to make better, less frequent posts, and....well you see what happened.
This photoshop tutorial really helped me watermark all of the images I've been adding to the new DEVTRENCH gallery. I know you can do it through Gallery2, but it compresses the images again and made some of them look bad. It's better to watermark befor…
Yesterday was Veteran's Day in the US, and I wanted to take this post to express my thanks to those that are in the military now and those that have been in the past. Thank you for your service and thank you for fighting for this country and what it stands for. Whether you served in wartime or peace, your presence and willingness to sacrifice your life for the rest of us is beyond commendable. Thank you for keeping us and our children safe, and protecting the freedom …
So I thought it would be cool to add a gallery to this site and to kick it off I've added 12 free vortex images. If you don't know what a vortex image is, here is an example. You're free to use the images for any non commercial purpose like desktop backgrounds, web site backgrounds, etc (just don't sell them).
I'll be adding more of these since I'm kind of obsessed with making them right now. In fact, I'm rendering 60 more as I write this. For those of you who don't k…
After IE 7 came out with 24 bit PNG support, I really wanted to figure out how to use PNGs better in my designs. However, the 50-60% of people still using IE 6 just didn't seem to justify going in new directions with PNGs. I knew you could make PNGs work in IE 6, but I always thought it was difficult and buggy. Well, as I found out, its not as hard as I thought. This tutorial will show you just how easy it is and how you can do things with your designs that are impos…
October was an awesome month for DEVTRENCH. Many thanks to everyone who continues to read this blog! Here are the highlights for October:
Guest post on CodeSqueeze. If you haven't read it, check out my post on codesqueeze.com: 25 Signs That You've Got a Bad Client
Over 5,500 unique views reported from Google Analytics (7500+ reported from Awstats), most of this traffic was generated from one StumbleUpon review. Read how I got all this traffic in my post about How to…
While others are reeling from the aftermath of the latest Google pagerank update, DEVTRENCH rises out of the ashes adding 4 points to it's pagerank. Sure we were at 0 before the update, but I'll take a pagerank of 4 for this site! This is one milestone that I've been waiting for, even though there have been rumors of pagerank meaning nothing, and getting replaced by something called trustrank.
I'm no seo expert, I read all of this stuff here:
Google PageRank Nuke Enga…
If you have a keen eye you might have noticed that the post on Monday has a few more page views than most of the posts on this site, something like 8,000 more. I promise I'm not fiddling with the database to push up my numbers, rather, this is the result of 1 stumble by me on Monday at 8:40 am.
I've kind of been obsessed with StumbleUpon (SU), since having some success with it a few months ago. So much success in fact that I got banned from posting things from my own…
Sign up for BlogRush and start getting more traffic to your site today!
Yesterday I got an email from the BlogRush team congratulating me that I passed their strict quality test:
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria -- we believe you have a high-quality blog and we are happy you're a member of our network!
It feels good to know that BlogRush (BR) thinks I have a high quality blog, especially in light of the…
This tutorial is now out of date since Yahoo has changed the map API. I'll try to make a new tutorial using the new Yahoo AJAX API soon.
Why pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial zip code locator when you can make your own in a few hours? This post is a start to finish tutorial on how to make a simple zip code locator using PHP, MySQL, a free zip database, and the Yahoo Maps API. Here's a demo if you want to see it first.
Let's get started:
1. Requirements
You'll ne…
Here we go...
Great CSS tricks for Custom Bullets
MODx had some FUD thrown at it this week so I wondered, "What is FUD?"
Squidoo: This has been around for a bit, but I just signed up. You should too if you haven't yet.
Commission Junction: I also signed up this week for this. I'm learning all I can at CJU and will probably make a million dollars next week.
Good SEO Tips for social bookmarking. I mostly saved this one just for the list of social bookmark sites.
Link …
Since 1997 I've used quite a few different programs to develop websites, and here is the cream of the crop as far as I am concerned:
BBEdit
I used this software on the Mac from 1997-2004 and it was great back then (and I assume it still is). If I used macs on a regular basis (which I don't), then this would program would have a giant 128x128 icon shortcut right on my desktop. I still tear up a bit thinking about my BBEdit days ;)
From Bare Bones Software: "BBEdit is th…
If it wasn't for a ton of work that got dropped on me last week, I would have blogged about this sooner, but last week this site was graced by the presence of John Chow! As you can see, his MyBlogLog avatar is still in the sidebar (if it's not you can see it here).
This is one of the reasons that MyBlogLog and services like it are so cool. Here are some more reasons why MyBlogLog is cool:
MyBlogLog provides stats for your blog
Your visitors can join your my blog log c…
I was kind of in an odd mood this week and I thought it would be a fun experiment to try to rank for an odd keyword. I'm pretty much an seo n00b, so I thought this experiment would help me bit to find out what works when trying to rank for a keyword. Well, I'd had the tagline "DEVTRENCH is not Waxed Meat" going around and around in my head for about a week, and decided to go with Waxed Meat for my keyword.
At this point you might be wondering what in the hell is waxed …
Have you ever wondered who your neighbors are on your shared host? I wondered this for quite some time before I found this useful site that will tell you all of the host names that are on your server.
By using the Whois and Reverse IP service offered at whois.webhosting.info, you can find this out. Simply enter your domain name into the search box and click 'Go'. On the page that follows, either click on your ip address, or the link in the line that says "IP hosts n…
It's time for another round of links. I found some really cool design sites this week...
Photoshop Tutorials from psdtuts.com
This is a great Photoshop tutorial site and just a cool site all around. First of all, the tutorials are written really well, and secondly, if you want to write a tutorial they'll pay you for it (if it's any good). They also look like they are monetizing the site well. It's just really worth it to check this site out since they are doing so ma…
This is the first month where traffic didn't increase on this blog. It's amazing how getting banned from StumbleUpon can affect your traffic :) I was banned at the end of last month and can no longer submit my own stuff. I know I can probably just sign up with another user (against TOS) and drive more traffic here, but seriously, what's the point of having a big traffic spike if its just going to go down the next day? After I was banned last month I decided to do mini…
Wow, it's been four months since this blog really started and so I decided to celebrate with a new design! The new design is a fixed width, something I covered last week, and has a new feature bar below the header. These 'feature bars' seem to be all the rage right now in blog design (seen here, here, and here). Since Nate Whitehill designed all three of those designs, maybe it isn't the best example, but you get the point.
My goals for the new design were:
Better …
If you're a programmer you probably get the request to create a form that sends an email somewhere. Writing forms is probably the task I hate doing the most because it can be so tedious. There's the initial form creation, the validation, and finally the email template to stick the data into and send off. With MODx and eForm, the first two steps are made easier, but the last step still took me forever if the form was really long or complex.
Well, on the last form I cr…
Designus Fixedwithidus: A web design that has a standard and measurable width, where the content is laid out in a fixed state, and does not change orientation when resizing the browser window.
Designus Fluidious: Sometimes called a 100% width design, full width design, variable width design, etc, this web design does not have a standard measurable width. Rather, the width varies depending on width of the containing window, and the content in the design shifts in accordan…
Ever get the feeling that an operating system just has it out for you? Every time I use a mac I just think that the thing is trying to butt heads with me. Macs also have a tendency to burn up around me. It's true, in the past month, 3 mac laptops at work have fried. Scary stuff.
Today I was trying to install MODx on a mac OS X server, and I just had a hell of a time getting it to work. In fact, it still doesn't work. I scoured the Mac friendly MODx forums for a hint…
That's right, Adsense sucks -- at least it does on this blog anyway. I'm sure that others are doing very well with it, but on this blog, the ads are not targeted very well, and no one clicks on them. I'm thinking that the readers of this blog are like me and are just to savvy to click on Google Adsense ads.
I've been controlling my ads with OpenAds for the past 3 weeks and its been very enlightening to see the stats. The stats say that the Text Link Ads ad gets clic…
If you haven't seen/heard this interview yet, you have to check it out. This is definitely the best Shoemoney interview out there and possibly the best interview about making money online that I've ever heard. It's really making me do some deep thinking about what my goals for this site are and if I should even be trying to use adsense on this site. Below is the first video on youtube, the others are here. InternetBabel only has 7/10 videos up so if someone knows whe…
I've been creating a php application that runs from the command line and I have a few tips that I've learned from my adventures.
If you've installed php before, and reinstall it, make sure what version of php you are using from the command line by checking out your environment variables in windows. This happened to me today when I realized that I was actually using a version of PHP that I installed a year ago (and forgot about), and not the new WAMP version I just inst…
Screen scraping has been around on the internet since people could code on it, and there are dozens of resources out there to figure out how to do it (google php screen scrape to see what I mean). I want to touch on some things that I've figured out while scraping some screens. I assume you have php running, and know your way around Windows.
Do it on your local computer. If you are scraping a lot of data you are going to have to do it in an environment that doesn't h…
How Make Money On A Site With A Small Budget
Shoemoney had an awesome post this week on how to advertise on a website with a low budget. A reader of the blog posed this question to him in his QA post last week, and he answered the question by delving into how to use Google Analytics to track your goal (new rss subscribers), and then how to use those stats to decide where to advertise. While his math seemed a little fuzzy to me (he even points it out), the overall conce…
I wish I had found DBDesigner 4 a long time ago, but it works out that I just found it last week. Have you ever come across a program where you instantly realize that you know it is going to be useful, and it feels like it was written with your ideas in mind. This is what I experienced after installing DBDesigner 4.
I'm a visual person so it really tires out the left side of my brain when I have to create a database through code or phpMyAdmin. That's just the way it …
A while back I posted an sql install script that I use for MODx that I called ResourceInstaller. My plans of creating a module based around this script haven't materialized into anything yet, but the script has evolved a bit. I've renamed the sql script to AutoSiteStart because there was another project named similar to ResourceInstaller, and this script now installs more than resources. I wanted to take the time to post the sql script I'm using now since I think it s…
I just about crapped my pants yesterday when I went to my blog on Alexa and saw...a graph!! In the last three months this site has seen some pretty good growth, but I was still surprised to see a graph since this site is not in the top 100,000 yet. The "Not in top 100,000" image was all I'd ever seen before so I just assumed that before they started to track your site with a graph you had to be in the top 100,000. This is apparently not true since my rank today is 440…
I've been working at home for over 2 years now, and while I do run my own freelance business at night, the bulk of my work time is spent working 8am-5pm for my employer (it has been two separate ones over the last 2 years). Working at home is a huge benefit and one that I enjoy very much. I can't imagine anymore having to work in an office for 40+ hours a week -- I'd go nuts.
Here are five things that I do to make working at home easier. Warning: These are slanted tow…
Last night I threw my back out, and I couldn't get up this morning. So here is a late-in-the day Links from the Trenches...
CodeIgniter - A few days ago I found this framework and so far I'm really enjoying using it. I've already started a social bookmarking site in it and hope to have it up an about a month. I'll keep everyone up to date on the progress of this if it gets off the ground.
Xinu - this is a site that shows a ton of info about your site. Looks like a…
If you've come to this blog recently and found an error message in place of the content, I apologize for that. It was due to an incompatibility with OpenAds and the Popularity Contest plugin for wordpress. I shut off the plugin yesterday when I discovered what was going on and found the fix this morning. I thought I would share it with you all.
Basically this is what is going on (quoted from the forum post linked below)
Here's the sequence of events that leads to the c…
I found CodeIgniter yesterday and it looks really promising for a php framework. It's very similar to Symfony but its geared towards the shared hosting crowd who wants a framework that can work with them a little better (or at all). I worked with Symfony about a year ago on a project called MeetFish and it was really cool to see how rapidly we developed the site using a framework (the awesome programmers at Agathon were the real code masters here while I did the design…
This question assumes that you, like me, work a full time job, plus do other projects online. So if you did lose your job, or quit, what would be the ways that you would make money online? I guess what I'm asking is if you had that extra 8-10 hours per day to devote to your online money making efforts, what would you do?
I would do all of the things I'm currently doing:
Ehly Design -- Doing web development for others has been the biggest way I make money online for the…
September is here and now fall is just around the corner -- that means that it's time to do another website traffic report. Since this site is celebrating it's three month anniversary this is also a special version of the monthly traffic report where I'll show you the first quarter results of the Ads Project.
Here is the August Traffic Report:
[download#6]
And here is the First Quarter Results:
[download#5]
This month's traffic increased about 35% from last month. Not …
Just in time for Labor Day weekend, another addition of my favorite links for the week.
Dosh Dosh
I found Dosh Dosh lately and have have been reading a lot on his site. This guy has great, detailed posts about how to make money online. It's a great blog.
Common SSH Commands
I use Linux from time to time and can never seem to remember all the commands. Here is a great list that has the common and not so common ones.
Mini Ajax
For the Ajax minded among us, here is a cool…
This past week, I realized that I take working at home for granted way too much. It's easy to fall into the daily drudgery of wake up, work, eat supper and work some more. So, I've come up with things to remember to keep the work at home woes at bay.
First of all remember that you are in a unique situation. While work at home jobs are on the rise we are still in the minority. Feel special for that, you're a rugged individual who plays by your own rules.
While your f…
If you've never heard of reseller hosting before, or want to learn how to make more out of your reseller hosting then this article is for you.
What is reseller hosting?
I guess the easiest way to explain reseller hosting is to compare it to a 'normal' hosting arrangement. Normally, when you buy a web hosting account you are buying web space for a single domain name. So, say you buy, example.com,you can go to any web host and buy space for that particular domain name, u…
Man, I think I've been more sick this year than I have in the past two combined. Since I work full time, run a web design business on the side, and write on this blog, there just isn't any time to write ahead of time to stack posts. I've been listening to the The 4-Hour Work Week, and I've really been thinking of what it would be like to hire a guest writer to write while I'm sick. Doesn't sound like too bad of an idea to me :) If you haven't read Tim Ferriss's book …
Ecommerce can be really confusing, especially when it is explained to you
by programmers and merchant banks. They speak a language that most of us just
don't understand. I'm a web designer who used to be completely befuddled by
the whole ecommerce thing. So, in this article, I want to demystify ecommerce
for you and tell you exactly how I do it from start to finish. This tutorial
is about my personal experience and therefore only covers one way to do ecommerce,…
If you are a blogger you'll hear or read the term 'great content' thrown around all over the place. They say, "If you want to have a great blog, simply write great content", or "If you want to make a ton of money with your blog, write great content", or "If you want to get tons of traffic write great content".
Well, what is great content? This posts aims to answer that question. Let's think about what makes a post great:
Great content is...
worth linking to
unique
w…
I've been reading about web automation with php and StumbleUpon this week.
Web AutomationI've been looking into web automation for a few projects I've been brainstorming. I've figured out that I know most of the methods to do this, and this resource helped me to put it all together.
A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUponFound Dosh Dosh this week. What a great blog! This is probably the best guide to StumbleUpon that I've found! I subscribed to this blogs feed because …
This is a video tutorial I created to showcase an online css formatter and optimizer. I'll apologize in advance for the poor audio quality towards the end of the video (I'm still learning how to do this), but I don't think it detracts from the overall message of the video. I'll see if I can't spend more time with camstudio to get it set up right. Can't wait for the next version to come out.
Anyway, if you are creating large CSS files it is a good idea to compress them o…
I recently had to create resizeable Flash animation that would play full screen. Here are the steps to creating a full screen flash animation:
First of all, the most important aspect of this is to create a flash animation with vectors only. If you create one with bitmap images, when you resize the animation your bitmaps will look bad.
Make sure your flash movie doesn't have a Stage.scaleMode set to "noScale". This property would be set in your actionscript somewhere…
Hey, it's already August :) Seems like things fly by so fast for me, probably because I do way to much stuff. Anyway, the traffic to the blog has more than tripled over the last month so that is really exciting. I hope to see continued traffic growth like this in the future. Here are my Google Analytics stats for this month:
[download#4]
Analytics is so great for a lot of reasons
you can compare previous months in these reports (check the box to compare previous month…
Online CSS Formatter: This CSS formatting tool tops the list of Trench Links this week because I've been looking for something like this for a long time. This tool will format your css for readability or compression and has lots more options than just that. This is a must see for people who style with css.
Socializer: If you can't tell by my recent posts I've been learning a lot about social bookmarking and increasing site traffic. I was happy to find Socializer :) …
I don't think it can be stressed enough how important social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc are when trying to get traffic to a new web site or blog. I just wanted to post some of the things I've been figuring out after hearing this advice from John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker.
Posting to any of these services is free traffic, and you are allowed to post your own stuff - just don't spam. What does that mean? Well, it seems fairly subjective to m…
I've been reading Shoemoney.com for the past week and I'm kind of embarrassed to say I'm obsessed. Jeremy seems like a cool midwest guy, something I can relate to (we both live in Nebraska, woohoo). It feels like I have a lot of catching up to do reading wise and I wanted to read all of Jeremy's old posts. However, it's been hard to read his old posts since shoemoney.com doesn't appear to have an archive. Well, I decided to make my own. This list makes it a ton easier…
Well, I finally made it to the Top Commentators list on JohnChow dot com a few days ago. The biggest plus so far has been that my blog on Technorati now has an Authority of 1. I know this probably sounds pathetic, especially since my current rating is 3,897,068, but hey, I know this blog is 2 months old and started at zero. I'll keep you posted if my rating goes up (or is it down?).
Getting on John's Top Commentators list has been a strategy of mine to get a pagerank…
Ok everyone, its time for a new segment on this blog: Links from the Trenches. I thought it would be helpful for me to recap some sites I've been surfing during the week that reflect the DEVTRENCH MO. This is going to be a regular weekly think that I'm going to do to help myself and you stay connected with what's going on out there on the Net.
Codesqueeze wrote a post about 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed and its great. In fact these are the kind o…
This is an annoying error that you can get in MODx when uploading new files via the FCK Image Browser, and I've only ever seen it in the Internet Explorer browser. The fix for it is quite simple though...
Open manager/media/browser/mcpuk/connectors/php/Commands/GetFileUploadProgress.php
After //Progresshandler not specified, return generic response (mine is line 46) insert:
header ("content-type: text/xml");
echo "< ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" ?>\n";
See i…
It's Free!
It's got an awesome desktop client for Windows, that sits in the taskbar
It checks my feeds every minute.
It alerts me with a taskbar popup when the feeds change
I can read the feed straight from the popup with images and everything
The interface is nice looking
The online beta interface uses AJAX - and it works well
It integrates with FireFox
There's lots of options to customize both the Firefox Addon and the Desktop Client
It makes me more productive, becaus…
I just wanted to make a quick strategy update:
Design changes to the main content area and sidebar
Adding Top Commentators to the sidebar
This is still to do. Will probably get done this week.
Adding MyBlogLog to the sidebar Done
Adding a rating system for posts
The rating system code I'm using doesn't seem to work with this version of WordPress. So, now there is another thing on the list.
Adding a view count for posts Done
Removing nofollow from comments Done!
So…
I'm releasing the first version of my new Meta Description Snippet for MODx tonight: DynamicDescription. I got this idea from the All-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress that creates a dynamic meta description for your blog posts. I just thought this would be a great addition to MODx since this is one of the hardest things to get my clients to do (no one wants to take the time to write meta data). Download the file and unzip to find the README file for instructions
Please …
Man, I had a rough debugging day. A client of mine called with a site down and my day pretty much sucked from there. I posted this on the MODx forums, but the problem is more MySQL related so I'll repost it here too:
"I got a call from my client saying that their website was down and that she'd called the host and they said they upgraded things. I called the host and they said they just upgraded their web server with the latest version of php (5.2.3) and latest versio…
I just read on the Postini website that Google will acquire them by the end of third quarter 2007. The price $625 million seemed low to me for such a great service, but they paid $100 million for FeedBurner so maybe it is a lot.
I've been using Postini now for about 6 months and can't believe how well it works. It is one of those tools that simply works, and is pretty much a 'set-and-forget' tool. The only issue I have with Postini is that it is kind of hard to get a…
DEVTRENCH got its second major theme overhaul tonight. The new look incorporates more of what I think looks like a professional blog design as well as strengthening the overall brand image. To help the design look more professional I've added the little details that really make a difference:
A customized search form design
Custom icons:
A more professional looking header and logo image
Better typography and layout
There are still some things to do, like, in the s…
June really seemed to fly by for me with all of the development that has been going on with this blog, and on all my other projects. I've already learned so much more about how blogs work and how to monetize a blog. In fact I know I've been doing a lot more reading than posting, but I figured as much.
Well, here are the results for June:
[download#2]
They are simply pathetic compared to other sites, but this site has really only been around a few months. I'm not alre…
I just read a post over at Problogger where Darren says that it is his son's first birthday. Well, today is my son's first birthday too! I have a wonderful wife and two kids and I just want to take the time to say that there is almost nothing more important in life than family. Someone once told me something that really struck a chord with me. It went something like this:
"A man who worked a major university took a walk through campus everyday on his way to get somet…
I wrote a post today about why I love MODx for a web development platform, but when I finished it I thought it would be more appropriate to post it in the MODx forums rather than here. It has all of the reasons why I use MODx, and a special thanks to the developers. Please check out the full post and read about why I think MODx is the best CMS to date.
If you want to try MODx out for yourself, then you can download it for free :)
It's the best thing I've ever done (wel…
One of the tactics for the Ads Project is to brand devtrench with a unique design and logo. That started today when I replaced the current theme with a new logo and color scheme. Future changes will happen to the layout, but this is what I could get done for now.
Future changes will incude:
Design changes to the main content area and sidebar
Adding Top Commentators to the sidebar
Adding MyBlogLog to the sidebar
Adding a rating system for posts
Adding a view count fo…
I've added the All in One SEO Pack plugin to my blog in hopes that it will help with SEO. This plugin allows you to rewrite the title tag for your posts, automagically add a meta description, change the title/description/keywords for your blog home page and use noindex for archives and categories (helps with duplicate content issues). This plugin superseded the Duplicate Content Cure plugin that I was using so I shut that off. Having an all-in-one seo plugin like this…
There have been two blogs that I've been reading lately that have really jump started my knowledge about blogs and blogging. I wanted to take the time to mention them here since I think they are great resources for anyone starting to blog on a regular basis. They have also been a really great resource and motivation for the Ads Project since they are focused on monetizing your blog.
The first is John Chow's blog at johnchow.com. I've been reading this one for about a m…
I get so tired of looking at my web statistics in Awstats and then going over to Google Analytics to see the actual traffic to my blog. Why is there such a big difference? One of the reasons is trackback spam, and it affects a lot of WordPress sites. This post isn't going to show you how to eliminate trackback spam, but it will show you how to live with it, and how to figure out your actual traffic (or at least eliminate the trackback.php visits).
If you don't know, Aw…
For the last three days I've been holed up in my room trying to get rid of one of the worst cases of stomach flu I've ever had. I can't remember the last time that it's felt like I've been wrung out and then ran over a few times. When my wife asked, "What in the world have you come down with?", the only answer I could muster was, "Death."
Well, now that Death has seemed to loosen it's grip on me and I'm beginning to feel better, I was feeling sorry for my countless r…
I just want to make sure I document my changes to the site so that everyone can benefit from them. Here is a list of changes I've made to WordPress since my last Ads post:
I've pruned old posts. Sorry, no more posts about guitar playing or art. Those are just going to have to wait for another blog. DEVTRENCH is all about Web Development, and this change should help to bring focus the blog.
I've forced the 'www' to be in front of my url. Google and other search engin…
Well, it's official, jamesehly.com has been moved to devtrench.com and rebranded as DEVTRENCH (well at least in name). You'll see a redesign of the header soon to incorporate the new DEVTRENCH logo along with some other graphical/layout changes that will suit the new site better. The site is now poised to grow into a web development hub for developers and designers that need great working solutions to their problems.
Switching the site turned out to be quite a proces…
A name is everything. A name can define who you are and what your purpose is. For that reason, part of the jamesehly.com Ads Project is going to be to change the name and domain name of the site. Don't get me wrong, I like my name, but I don't think it is right for the kind of site I need create in order to reach my goals.
This marks the first change in the strategy of the Ads Project, and it's a BIG one. I doubt the new name will have instant success seo-wize, but i…
While the main mission of this site is to provide quality content for its readers, the secondary goal is to be a money making website. I want to be open and honest about this business practice from the get go, because I want you to know why the ads are on this site.
The problem for me is that I don't generate a lot of traffic each month and I'm relatively new at the blogging game. Even though I've been in web development since 1997, have acted in various roles from des…
Just posted this over in the MODx forum and I wanted to cross post it here too. Just for fun :)
Here is the forum post: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,15225.0.html
I really like MODx I especially like how accessible the core code is when you want to make a modification. One of the things that really bugged me about MODx is how the Veriword Captcha is displayed - both the look of it and the default words used for the captcha. I really didn't want my clients…
I've been using the Postini spam protection solution through my great host for a while now and I really like. We just don't get any more spam and it's a breeze to use. Some of our clients want a sneak peek though before they sign up, or they want a feature tour to see what is available in the interface. This video shows off the Postini interface and what you can do in it. You'll learn how to login, how to set your junk email settings, how to add people to your Allowe…
I really needed a script that would work like a resource installer to install some basic templates, chunks, snippets, and categories that I always use when developing in MODx. This SQL script will install home page and inside page templates, a head, banner, content, and footer chunk to be used with those templates, some snippets, and some categories. This works with MODx 0.9.5. I plan on taking this basic SQL script and creating some kind of module with it in the futu…
I needed a script that would time some php I wrote to see if using an output buffer would speed it up. I used the php microtime() function to accomplish the timing feature, and combined that with sessions to capture an average execution time. This is the result:
LiteCommerce is a great online storefront to work with. However, while the egoods module offers a great way to sell downloadable files, it really doesn't offer a good, user friendly way to create a product with a free downloadable file. This situation recently happened where a customer wanted to offer free PDF articles on their site along with for-pay downloads as well.
The default method to do this requires that the user have an account with the correct membership leve…
How to Become an SEO Professional
I read this article today and it struck me as being great, down-to-earth advice about search engine professionals. It almost felt like I was reading my own story, aside from the fact that I've never had really high rankings on any of the the sites I've done SEO on for the hard to get keywords....yet. There are some key thoughts on how someone who is a web designer can suddenly turn into an SEO professional.
You suddenly realize that y…
If you are having CamStudio problems, then this is a great video on how to set up CamStudio. If you are having audio/video sync problems like I always have with this program, then watch this tutorial! He shows you how to set it up with the right settings so that you won't have problems anymore. A great tutorial for this already great program!
Hey, are you still, having problems with CamStudio? You might want to check out this version that promises to fix some of the…
WPA vs WEP: How your Choice Affects your Wireless Network Security
WPA is more secure than WEP, so I'll be moving to that if my card supports it. But again, I'll be moving to more secure application protocols. I think that is my safest bet. I'm probably just paranoid, but you never know who is parking outside your house (or what the neighbors are doing).
Organize cluttered Start Menu? Read this article today after being very frustrated with how long and unorganized my start menu has become. I get so mad when things that are this simple have evaded me for years. I spent a long time searching for some miracle program to do this for me, because I'd read that it was difficult to do. Well, it's not, and I feel pretty stupid for not figuring this one out on my own. Live and learn.
We'll at least it sounds more secure than WEP, but WPA can also be cracked as I learned in this article: http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10283/. I think the best advise that I've heard over and over is this:
"Use good application layer security. Use SSH, SSH tunnelling, SSL, HTTPS, and anything else to make sure your passwords and other sensitive data never travel in the clear on any part of the network."
I'll be trying to figure out how to use secure email protocols.…
This is a good read if you want to scare yourself out of using a wireless network. There is some really good info here on how an attacker can get into your wireless network (or how you could do it). I really think that most peope are very ignorant about this - heck, I was until a few weeks ago. I thought I had my wireless network as secure as could be, but low and behold it is actually pretty easy to get into it :(. This is not cool, but it is much better to be infor…
I found this free tool today to convert FLV to MOV for a rush project: "Can you download this youtube video and convert it to something i can play in powerpoint???" Some searching on the web led me to SUPER: http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html (scroll to the bottom of the page for a link to the setup file). Worked awesome!! To download the youtube vid I used the VideoDownloader plugin for firefox (http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php)
From the site:
SUPER © Simpli…
This is the coolest guitar site I've seen in a long time. Just goes to show that flash can do some really cool stuff if you've got some mega time on your hands. This site is truly amazing:
http://www.guitarshredshow.com/
It was surprising to me when I got out of school and went from one unfinished work to the next, constantly moving around, not making any progress, not being in any shows, not working on art, failure, failure, failure - for 5 years. But then I began to realize that a big part or art is working at failure.
Too much time is spent in art schools focusing on the best thing an artist ever made (which is an art historians point of view), but what an artist should spend her(is)…
Seems fitting that this site should go officially live on Friday the 13th. It will probably be another miserable failing to add to my other huge un-successes in life. As the baptismal first post of this site, it's bound to be boring and degrading. I hope I can write more enlightening stuff in the future. Don't count on it.
