server blogs

There's nothing worse than those long, ugly URLs with twenty variables in the query string. In recent years there have been a number of websites offering a free service where users can create shorter links to these complex URLs. While a short URL is great, the links provided by most of these sites are computer generated and impossible to remember. This weekend I programmed a simple tool to allow users to create their own links and normalize ugly URLs called normalurl.com. Just like other URL rewriting services, this website is completely free and allows anonymous users to easily create new URL redirects. However this ... (more...)

Here’s some free advice: don’t forget the cache-control tags on any server-side AJAX page. I was doing some Geodesic Solutions customization today. Anyone who has dealt with Geo will tell you it’s the biggest pain to customize, and that anyone who mentions Geo and best-practices in the same breath must be joking. Basically, the only way to customize it is through a series of patches, or by reworking the Geo class files (which will be overwritten in any upgrade). Geo doesn’t allow any mysql calls within the templates (I suppose it’s a good security measure), and since I didn’t need to do too much database work, I decided to do all the database stuff with AJAX. ... (more...)

Ok it's time to come clean...when I first started this website I signed up for hosting thru godaddy.com. Yes yes I know, ugh. Well I'd been too lazy to switch it over (that's how they get you!) until recently, as I have become interested in deploying Drupal®. Well I had Drupal® working fine when I found out that I couldn't clean up the long URLs since godaddy's "shared hosting" has mod_rewrite turned off and, big surprise, they don't allow you any shell access. It was pretty annoying because I had been planning on playing with those files to learn the Apache setup. But it turned out to be good news, since I have now switched my hosting to ... (more...)