Tips and Tutorials

The following is an honest review of Site5 web hosting. I signed up for a MultiSite Dynamite account with Site5 on October 14th, 2006. It was a stormy night and there was an ominous, eerie silence throughout the internet (just kidding).

I previously had an account with Godaddy before trying out Site5. After a couple months, I became fed up with their insanely slow servers. Perhaps Godaddy has improved since then, but at the time it was obvious that they were overcrowding their servers. Don't get me wrong, Godaddy is great for managing domain names, but there was no way a database driven site would work with their hosting due to the abysmally slow pageloads. I started shopping around and did some research on Site5. I was initially drawn in by their statement, "NO OVERLOADED SERVERS". After transferring a web site to Site5, I was quite pleased with how snappy the pageloads were. Exactly two months later a terrible thing happened.

I recently installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty on my Inspiron E1705/9400 laptop, which is my workhorse computer. I tried several different distros: PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE, Mepis, Fedora and KNOPPIX, before deciding on Ubuntu. At this point I am using nearly 100% open source software. There are a few Windows programs I can't live without, namely Quicken and Photoshop. WINE didn't work for me when I tried to install Photoshop CS2. Also, problems were reported running Quicken through WINE. There isn't any open source software that can compare to Quicken when it comes to accounting. The Gimp - although an excellent photo editing program - just doesn't have all the tools necessary for a web developer. One of the biggest drawbacks to using the Gimp as a replacement for Photoshop is the lack of Save for Web functionality. Photoshop does a much better job of optimizing/compressing images for use on the web.

The following guide provides a walk-through for setting up automatic backups of your mySQL databases using the AutoMySQLBackup file bash script. After reading the guide, it should be quick and easy to implement. This is an indispensable tool for webmasters. Once the backup system is in place you'll have daily, weekly and monthly backups of your mySQL databases neatly organized in a private folder on your web server. They are automatically rotated so that they don't eat up your storage space. Anytime you download a backup of your home directory all of the database backups will be included. This is much better than creating manual backups and can be a huge time saver if you have multiple databases.

ThemeBot has been off-line for the past couple days. It seems that a combination of modules that were installed Wednesday caused some file or database corruption. I am still working on pinpointing what the problem was.

If you are using a content management system to create a website, it is likely that you will eventually encounter a situation where you need to set up a Cron job. Cron is a program installed on Unix / Linux based servers that allows users to schedule tasks to be run automatically at specific dates or times. The name "Cron" is derived from the Greek word for time - chronos. Since most people use shared hosting, this guide will provide the basics for setting up your own crontab and automating tasks with your web hosting provider on a shared server...

When creating websites that only contain static HTML there are not a whole lot of security issues to be concerned about. But, once you start creating websites with dynamic content security becomes more important. Content Management Systems are complex beasts. Often the core components are very secure out of the box, needing little extra configuration to lock things down. It is more than likely you will be installing third-party modules to use with your CMS. That is when you should be more cautious and read the guidelines provided by the CMS you use.

I've compiled a list of security-related resources for each of the platforms on ThemeBot. If you haven't done so already, it would be a good idea to read through these articles. Of course, the best thing you can do to harden your website is hire a professional security consultant. However, there is a lot that can be done yourself to make your site more secure. This is not intended to make anyone paranoid it is just to increase awareness...

Drupal 5.0 has been officially released and it is time to start contributing some themes :) This article was written to provide an essentialized walk-through focusing on the actual process involved when submitting themes to Drupal.org. This is by no means a detailed guide and I am not a CVS expert. After spending days combing through the Drupal Handbook to piece it all together, I decided this would be useful as a reference.

It is highly recommended that you read the detailed CVS instructions in the Drupal Handbook at some point. This guide is for Windows users and a CVS client is used, so you don't have to use command-line. There are decent instructions already available for Linux users.

The assumption is that a stable release will be submitted, meaning that the theme has been fine-tuned, the PHP code has been checked for security vulnerabilities, the XHMTL and CSS have been validated etc, and the theme is ready to share with the Drupal community. Let's get started...