Jamie's blog

Last week the PHP team released version 5.2.14 and with that came this:

This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

This weekend I decided to make the move I had been debating for about a year. I did away with the old shared hosting that had done me well for so many years and moved everything over to a VPS at Linode.

I did spend some time looking at numerous VPS providers out there, but I always had a leaning towards Linode. I have never heard anyone really say anything bad about them and they have a very robust community behind them, which was the biggest selling factor.

I am going to be talking Drupal here pretty much, but the same logic applies to any development.

So there's  certain block or data on a page you want. You've developed a query that needs a lot of joins and resorts to all kinds of nastiness in MySQL (temporary tables, filesorts, large number of row returns, etc). One of the common cures it to cache the results of that query. This can be a life saver, but care should be taken to do it right.

Let's take a look at a common way of handling this:

Not being a graphic designer is hard when you want to make your own site. I can do all the inner stuff to make a site hum, but when it comes to the actual presentation...well with that I am color blind. So this has been a serious project I have been involved with for a couple of months. I can't even begin to tell you how many designs I have had and thrown away before finally coming up with this one.

I spent a large chunk of my day playing with Wordpress 3.0-beta. I must say that I am very impressed with the changes they have made. Doing a fresh install, I was very pleased with something I have wanted for years – the ability to chose your username and password at installation. I always considered the ‘admin’ username a security threat and would manually change the username in the database for any Wordpress sites I set up.

Take my love of web development, Drupal and politics. Now mix them into a story that I can't pass up. Today The Nation magazine, the oldest weekly published magazine in the U.S. has switched over to Drupal to power their web site. In a post the magazine did about the switch, they explain not only the power of Drupal, but also the power behind open source software:

In a rare move, Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted a 1,500 word blog post defending his companies decision to exclude Flash from their mobile devices. There are some serious misconceptions (lies?) in his claims and Jesse Warden has done an excellent take down of them. The first one is by far my favorite:

Lie  #1: “Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary.”

One of the heavier sides of blogging platforms is in comment management. Just sorting and rendering the comments can be heavy enough, but when you add in the extra overhead of services and systems to combat spam, you end up with a lot of your server power going to enabling your visitors to give feedback.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has just released a comprehensive report on the differences between the two sides of the political blogosphere and the approaches and technologies they embrace. The entire report is worth a read (58 page PDF), but this graph sums it up very nicely:

One thing that always bothered me when developing on Windows was the limits I had when it came to the hosts file. You can setup your local development and use localhost with subdirectories easy enough, but what if you want to setup your own domains? Out of the box the only option is to edit your hosts file for every new domain you want to add. That just seemed like such an unnecessary step to me.