I can’t remember where exactly I heard about this web host, but InsaneGB.com sounded like a great deal. You can read their website for more details, but in a nutshell they got PHP 5, MySQL 4, and everything (Databases, Add-on domains, etc) is unlimited except disk space and bandwidth. They give you 5GB for disk space and 20GB on bandwidth per month. Which is great for a free host, if you ask me; heck, they even offer cron jobs.

Testing Their Setup

So I decided to give them a shot. I put up my personal blog on their server. In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t such a great idea, but I did it anyway. At first everything was great. Stuff was fast and everything was popping up instantly. There were some things that most would consider acceptable for a free host.

• I couldn’t run any PHP ini_set commands

  So there’s no increasing running time for scripts. I guess I would live without that.

• You can’t open/download any files from outside servers

  This I came across when trying to use some of my Wordpress plugins that automatically install plugins and automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation. Oh, well.

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One thing that has plagued me as a designer for many years is the ability to test my designs in multiple web browsers. Back in the day, computers came with Internet Explorer 5.5 and that’s it. Installing a later version would always overwrite the previous one, so it became difficult to test my designs properly.

The Easy Guys - Netscape and Opera

Testing in Netscape is rather easy. You can download and install multiple versions of Netscape and they have no interaction with each other as long as you install them to different folders. That’s it.

Opera follows the same process.

A Bit Trickier - Firefox

Firefox is slightly more difficult, but still a piece of cake. Head over to Portable Apps and grab the latest version of Firefox Portable. While you’re there, look up the legacy versions that fit your fancy and expand each to a different folder.

These are self contained consolidations of the browsers. Rather than sticking their settings in Documents and Settings/Application Data/, they dump all their settings in their respective folders.

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Now if you’re into Web 2.0 and haven’t heard of the Lightbox script, then you must be living under a rock. If this is your first time crawling out from under that rock, you can get a quick sample of the Lightbox effect here. Just click on the first picture and watch the magic.

The Lightbox effect is used to pop up a larger image into the forefront of a web page. You start out with a link, usually a thumbnail of the large image. When the user clicks, the large image pops out and the rest of the web page is faded out.

The original Lightbox script uses the Prototype/script.aculo.us combo, so some may complain that it’s a bit code heavy. I would tend to agree, since I’m a fan of jQuery however, since CakePHP still uses Prototpye/script.aculo.us for their AJAX functionality, I’m not ready to jump ship just yet.

For those who are, here’s a light of the the Lightbox imitations.

There’s one called Thickbox, and another version (Slightly thickerbox), which use jQuery, however, it doesn’t have the same feel as the original Lightbox script that I’ve gotten used to.

Merry Christmas and Happy Scripting!

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Poll results for What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework are in:

Most of you prefer a framework that is Quick and Easy. Hey, I’m totally with you guys on that. When deciding on a web development framework, it has to be easy. It’s no fun if it takes hours to learn and saves you minutes. For me, CakePHP definitely fits this bill. The bake routines save me so much time during initial development.

Next on the list was a Less Code Needed and a Small Learning Curve. Again, that would definitely fit high on my list. I’m sorry, I’m just lazy that way.

That last result on the list is interesting, but expected. Not many people needed the framework to have a Small Footprint. With the type of processing that is required nowadays, sometimes the lite/light version doesn’t cut it. With that said, we also have a lot more processing power to push those heavy frameworks along. In my opinion, it’s less important that a back end framework be light as apposed to a JavaScript framework. The back end is handled strictly by the server, so the user doesn’t take the hit. With a JavaScript framework the user needs to download the entire thing. In this day and age it has become more cost effective to through some more CPU at the problem while saving weeks (or even months) in development time.

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By now you’ve all either heard or experienced first hand the blow dealt to the Page Rank of many websites by the mighty hand of Google. They are basically targeting any websites that serve links, which are not natural. This generally includes any links that have been sold on the website.

PayPerPost is one of the largest companies out there that pay bloggers to post about different things. They are generally instructed to keep their reviews relevant to their content, but sometimes bloggers stray a bit. Of course Google has made these blogs a prime target for the Page Rank drop.

The irony is that PayPerPost uses (used) the Google Page Rank as a way to quality a blog. Now that damn near all PayPerPost blogs are hit by Page Rank drop (with a lot of them dropping out right to 0). They’re going to implement their own method of blog ranking:

PayPerPost’s CEO, Ted Murphy, quickly came up with a solution — since PR is obsolete and no longer represents accurate data for both publishers and advertisers, they are going to develop their own trademark rank, called “RealRank”, based on:

• 70% - visitors per day

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The Problem

I've had this problem for a while, but it's become more of a problem since I started working heavily with CakePHP.

Here is my WAMP folder structure: D:\wamp\www\cake\[various app]

Under this folder, I would have baked all the different applications that I'm working on at the time (app1, app2, app3, etc). So I could have my DocumentRoot set to my cake folder and access the different apps in my browser by:

• http://localhost/app1/
• http://localhost/app2/
• http://localhost/app3/

That's a perfectly fine idea, except that 95% of the time, when I deploy an application for a client it's going to be installed on their root directory of that domain name. Even on my server, all my applications (CakePHP and otherwise) have their own domain or sub domain.

If we keep everything to relative paths and stress using CakePHP's $html->url() function, then everything should be fine. But sometimes I'm lazy and I want to do a quick href=/ and not have to try to figure out how many levels I've gone. Also, I want to confidence to upload my entire folder to the clients server and only have to change database configurations.

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Got The Cron

Web Cron is a great method of automating tasks on your server if you're not blessed with cron jobs. However, after writing this I stumbled onto something that may fit your needs a bit better; Remote Cron is that service. It's everything Web Cron is and more:

• It's Totally Free
• It's in English

What more can you ask for? Yeah, I know, my standards are really low.

Now On To The Backup

Previously, I used a script called backupDB for my MySQL PHP based backup solution. This package included a nice graphical management tool. It allowed you to pick different databases and different tables that you want to back up. It was also great for automated tasks also by calling it like this:

And it is this system of passing parameters that makes this tool extremely flexible. Using parameters you could choose to backup all the databases on the server or just the one you specify. You could also specify individual tables that you would want to backup:

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Introduction

It's no new news to us that images hurt a page's load time worst then anything out there. There are a lot of things you can do to try and alleviate some of the problem. You can use smaler images, you can reduce the quality on images, etc.

But consider this. You know that your website is going to a long one. Meaning that the user is going to have to scroll. This means that they don't see the entire page when they first load. Wouldn't it be nice to only load what they need? You could load only the images that are in view. This will give the user time to read the content about the fold on your page, then as he scrolls down, you can gradually load the rest of the images.

This is referred to as Lazy Loading. It's exactly the opposite of preloading images. We preload images for a lot of reasons. The classic example is in those old school JavaScript (and even CSS) rollovers, where we preload the rollover image so that there is no delay when they are needed.

Enter Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery

Lazyloader is inspired by YUI ImageLoader Utility by Matt Mlinac. It simply delays the loading of images on the web page until they are within view. This gives the page quicker initial load time.

This works out great if you have a page with a lot of heavy images lower down and a lot of navigation links at the top. If the user is trying to get to a specific page using this plugin would be a great help.

Popularity: 26%

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