Find the size of a directory

du -sh /dir

How to remove files older than 60 days

find * -mtime +60 -exec rm -R {} \;

Check if your server has GD support

http://www.tutorialadvisor.com/tutorials_view/Test_GD_support_on_your_server-1209.html

This script told me that I didn’t have GD support.

The following command worked for me.

apt-get install php5-gd

Installing Inocube

http://www.debiantutorials.net/installing-ioncube/

http://www.crucialp.com/resources/tutorials/server-administration/how-to-howto-ioncube-loader.php

Install Curl

apt-get install php5-curl

Install Zend Optimizer

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_apache2_ssl_php5_zendoptimizer_ioncubeloader

Mod_rewrite

This was not enabled. I couldn’t find anything useful online about installing this but thankfully there was an option in Webmin to enable the module.

Next

Testing using the Installs folder it turns out that some of the folders did not have the correct permissions – chmod 777

Problem

Also, there’s no GD Library enabled apparently.

Ok, this post resolved the GD library issues

http://drupal.org/node/134331#comment-1120427

The final piece of the puzzel

PHP didn’t recognize the MySQL functions to connect to the database. I then figured out that the php mysql extensions were not enabled. Thankfully this was as easy as using this command:

apt-get install php5-mysql

It works!

Final, final step

I ran into another problem on a different install. The site displayed Invaild Licence.

IN the table _tbsettings

Make sure the SITEPATH is set correctly.

http://forum.tradingeye.com/showthread.php?t=832&highlight=Invalid+License

The problem was with the login system that I built for an application. Everything was working fine  initially and suddenly for some unknown reason IE 8 decided it didn’t like something and wouldn’t allow people to log in.

After trawling through the CI forums and changing the ci_session to cisession and updating the session length in a vane attempt to resolve the issue I finally found a solution that worked for me.

http://www.philsbury.co.uk/blog/code-igniter-sessions

http://www.wrike.com/pricing.jsp
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/tutorials/
http://www.zoho.com/projects/zohoprojects-pricing.html
http://whodo.es/plans

After a quick search on project management tools here’s some that I like the look of.

http://whodo.es/plans

This looks like a slimline version of Active Collab. Simple too use but maybe a little to simple.

I’ve just found a new offering in thymer.com

Free to signup to the basic plan, and simple enough to get up and running with it in 5 minutes.

http://www.flisterz.com/2008/08/09/wordpress-show-latest-comments-for-each-post-on-main-page/

http://net.tutsplus.com/news/unraveling-the-secrets-of-wordpress-commentsphp-file/#comment-template-tags

XHTML2 is dead as of July 2009. Chances are as a web developer you’ve been using XHTML for sometime, making use of stricter validation rules: lowercase tags, double quoted attributes, self-closing tags etc. Here’s a list of 9 rules:

http://personalweb.about.com/od/basichtml/a/409xhtml.htm

If you’re like me you probably implement web standards but maybe you’re a bit hazy on the specifics. Before we dive into HTML5 maybe now is a good time to refresh your understanding of the Doc Type Definition and why we use it:

http://webdesign.about.com/od/dtds/qt/tipdoctype.htm

Even though you are probably using XHTML you are probably not serving true XHTML because IE doesn’t recognise the xhtml+xml mime type. Ok, so what does this mean?

Well, for a refresher on mime types visit: http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/definitions/mimetype.html

For the official line about the xhtml+xml mime type you should read: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/

I’ll be honest, I don’t completely understand about mime types and doc types.

Here’s another good resource: http://www.webstandards.org/learn/articles/askw3c/sep2003/

A good discussion about it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4395945

Ok, finally we’re getting somewhere, here’s a more common sense explaination of mime types and DTD’s: http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/xhtml/

So, from all that it seems that using real XHTML, application/xhtml+xml, results in IE wanting to download your page as an XML file or to display your source code. If you have access to your web server config files you can test browser capabilities and server the correct mime type accordingly.

Essentially it’s recommended to use HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict doc types.

XHTML 1.1 requires the mime type application/xhtml+xml but as previously mentioned this can cause problems with older browsers.

HTML 5

How do you get your markup to validate in HTML5? Change your DOTYPE from whatever it is tothe following:

<!DOCTYPE html>

What’s new?

We have new tags to help use to structure our web page instead of using multiple div tags.

These include, header, footer, aside, article, nav and section. Have a look at the following page to see what this looks like:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5/

HTML5 will also have support for multimedia elements, video, audio with the browser providing a default player to deliver the content rather than using a plugin.

Summary

I’m convinced that HTML5 is the future. But how do I start using it? Do all the browsers support it? Like most things web, we’ll have to start by experimenting and making sure our current site builds don’t break in IE6. As long as our work passes that test then I’m sure we’ll start to see a bigger up take of HTML5. Getting past the basics the future looks promising. There’s lots of new shiney toys to play with including HTML5 Javascript API’s to get to grips with.

Disable phpMyAdmin :
chmod 000 /var/www/html/phpMyAdmin
enable:
chmod 755 /var/www/html/phpMyAdmin

Rootkits
Here’s an step by step guide to checking your server for rootkits:
http://www.howtoforge.com/scan_linux_for_rootkits

After running chkrootkit I also ran rootkit hunter by using this:
apt-get install rkhunter
rkhunter

To run a check type: rkhunter -c

There’s a server security checklist at:
http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/unix_configuration_guidelines.html

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html

This week I’ve had a couple of questions about the use of correct English.

As I looking at Web Accessibility I came across the Plain English Campaign and this very amusing page about confusing communications.
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/examples/before_and_after.html

Enquiry or inquiry?

Today I’ve caused debate in the office about the difference between enquiry and inquiry. Apparently, there’s not much difference just one of those American/English complications.

For a more detailed explaination check out:
http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/grammar-tip-enquiry-inquiry.asp

I’m looking for new programs that can help me with my wireframes.
This website provided some good ideas.
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/featured-articles/web-design-top-5-wireframing-tools-002922.php

here’s the ones I’m looking at a bit closer.
http://www.axure.com
http://hello.hotgloo.com/
http://www.jumpchart.com/tour/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8487

This is an unusual one. In the e-commerce system I use, Trading Eye, it’s always bugged me that we had to input the Post & Packaging less VAT. The system then adds VAT on at the check out. When someone pointed out this may be illegal I’ve been tasked with finding out if that is the case.

Here’s my findings:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=432573
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=47787
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=21157
http://www.your-book.co.uk/comments.htm

Summary: Adding VAT to P&P is standard practice as it’s classed as a service and is therefore VAT-able.