By Yang Yang on February 9, 2010
When you need to include or require a php file that is in the same directory as the currently running one, most people come up with this simple line in the current script:
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Posted in PHP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on January 24, 2010
That is, to host all static content such as ready-made images, scripts, style sheets on a different domain rather than the primary one that hosts the page of the current URL. For example, if you intend to add static images to the web page located at http://www.example.com/page.html, you should not place the images on www.example.com, instead, put them somewhere else such as example-static.com or static.example.com.
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Posted in Domains, HTTP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on December 28, 2009
Assuming you’ve logged in as root in Debian 5.0, to install the Go programming language by Google, Continue the reading »
Posted in Go Tutorials & Tips
By Yang Yang on December 23, 2009
By Rackspace I mean Rackspace.com the managed dedicated hosting service, not RackspaceCloud.com the cloud hosting. I’ve been talking a lot lately about Rackspace Cloud so I thought I’d make it clear. ;)
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Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on December 12, 2009
Here’s a quick tip for those who have encountered this very same problem that all regular expression functions of PHP such as preg_match() and preg_replace() stop working when the input string (subject string to be searched or matched) is too long or large. If you believe your regular expressions should work but didn’t and the string to be searched is perhaps over 100kB in length, you have hit the match string length limit or PCRE’s backtracking limit set by configuration variable pcre.backtrack_limit.
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Posted in PHP Tips & Tutorials, Regular Expression Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on December 10, 2009
It’s also a free one and a rather easy one too. You should be able to do it yourself. To create a working contact form, you need the front end and the back end. The front end presents the form to the website user and the back end accepts the data sent from the form by the user and take any necessary actions such as relaying the message to your email. Continue the reading »
Posted in Free PHP Classes & Library, PHP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on November 30, 2009
As the entrenched leader in cloud hosting, Rackspace Cloud is the cloud products division of Rackspace, the world renowned managed dedicated hosting provider. To make a long story short, cloud hosting is simply multiple servers (a pool of servers) simultaneously hosting for your websites and web applications. It’s the base of SaaS hosting. With the Rackspace Cloud promo code: Continue the reading »
Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on November 24, 2009
With all the good ones taken, branding the common keywords / keyphrases may be a better approach in this era of web. Below is a list of short but sweet prefixes and suffixes that I have come up with and that you can use to brand the generic keywords to have an available domain name for registration:
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Posted in Domains
By Yang Yang on November 21, 2009
This question has been asked a thousand times on the web and Commission Junction has apparently decided to make it harder for the affiliate publishers to find out how to change the password of their account.
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Posted in Affiliate Programs, Make Money Online
By Yang Yang on November 12, 2009
IE records all bookmarks or favorite web shortcuts in a folder named Favorites, but where does Firefox store all the bookmarks?
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Posted in 3rd Party Scripts and Softwares
By Yang Yang on November 12, 2009
Bloated! Simply bloated to a point that’s not geeky any more.
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Posted in 3rd Party Scripts and Softwares
By Yang Yang on November 8, 2009
I have a few tips for you:
- Stick to simple white design.
- Use no more than 4 colors other than grey scale (white, black, grey). Actually 2 would be perfectly enough for text information intensive sites.
- Design the site as if it’s a chapter in a print book.
- Plan blank areas.
- Be goal oriented and GET RID of EVERYTHING that’s not closely contributing to the goal. You achieve perfect by having nothing to peel off instead of the other way around.
Posted in Web Design Tips and Insights
By Yang Yang on November 6, 2009
Jointly Hosted Forum is now open for forum applications. Please follow the steps outlined in this post to get your own forums.
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Posted in 3rd Party Scripts and Softwares, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on November 4, 2009
Update: I finally decided to move the whole vbulletin installation over from jointlyhosted.com to kavoir.com. It’s called Kavoir Backyard.
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Posted in Oh My Ramblings
By Yang Yang on November 3, 2009
vBulletin allows all newly registered users to create and edit signatures by default, which potentially increases the spam in user registrations. Someone would just sign up and put a few spamming backlinks in the signature and leave, without contributing a little bit to the community, probably writing 1 or 2 spamming posts as well. Therefore, allowing signature / signature links does no good to the forum.
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Posted in 3rd Party Scripts and Softwares
By Yang Yang on October 31, 2009
Posted in Oh My Ramblings
By Yang Yang on October 29, 2009
Jointly Hosted is one of our latest ventures. Basically it’s a non-profit shared dedicated hosting service that provides dedicated hosting at shared hosting price tag, yet much better in terms of server performance than other shared solution providers. How do we do that? Continue the reading »
Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on October 28, 2009
By default the homepage of all freshly installed vBulletin forum will have a title trailing of “ – Powered by vBulletin”. While it’s forbidden to remove the copyright notice from the footer if you haven’t bought the anonymous license, you are allowed to wipe out this title trailing.
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Posted in 3rd Party Scripts and Softwares
By Yang Yang on October 27, 2009
Why haven’t Google integrated their toolbar into Chrome yet? Firefox 3 absolutely sucks in the loading time and browsing speed. Scrolling through a heavy web page with lots of visual elements such as images is just a pain in the ass and on average, I have to restart the so-called most advanced modern browser 3 times everyday. Plus, it’s everything but fun when I have typed a thousand words in WordPress that the browser suddenly freezes itself.
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Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on October 10, 2009
As far as fellow bloggers and affiliate marketers are concerned, there’s an update of new rules to the FTC guidance of how to give endorsements and testimonials in advertisements and affiliate promotions.
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Posted in Oh My Ramblings
By Yang Yang on October 8, 2009
I’m a fan of Linode and recently as I was able to acquire 2 moderately decent domains for a free HTML hosting service, I decided to start offering free static website hosting on one of my Linode VPS servers.
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on October 7, 2009
For every free Dropbox plan, it comes with 2GB online backup storage that has a public folder in which you can publish HTML web page files that are publicly accessible around the Web. It will give you a URL that you can hand out to your friends so they can view the page on the Web anywhere anytime.
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Posted in Computer & Internet Literacy, Hosting Tips & Deals, Internet Tools, Reviews
By Yang Yang on October 1, 2009
Make A Website was moved to Hawk host a few days ago and here’s my initial review of them. If you have been to their official site, you may have noticed the hosting coupon code for 40% discount off the initial payment you make to them, which seems to be only valid throughout the month. However, I have a better deal, more precisely, a better promo code that discounts 50% off your initial payment.
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Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on September 30, 2009
It’s the first time I move kavoir.com to another host from Dreamhost (the last move to Linode was about some of my other sites). The entire move was great except that I was not quite familiar with cPanel and choked a little bit on the transfer and setup of all the interconnected files and database that had been spawned for the last 2 years.
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals, Reviews
By Yang Yang on September 23, 2009
I’ve tried quite a few online backup services to back up my valuable website data – you just can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be to lose all the files that you’ve been working on for the last half year – I even created my own backup programs that automatically syncs and stores designated files across multiple hosts, however, Dropbox has been the most intuitive application so far. Continue the reading »
Posted in Internet Tools, Reviews
By Yang Yang on September 21, 2009
Which seems quite new to me as I have never used any percentage values on them before. Took some tests and I found out that all major modern browsers supported percentage values for padding and margin very well, even IE6.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on September 19, 2009
Funny I should use “zipped” for an RAR compressed package. Anyway, you can easily zip or unzip a zip file or tar compress a package, but how does one do it with an RAR file? WinRAR is well distributed across all Windows systems. But on Linux, you have to first install the command package rar.
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals, Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on September 19, 2009
One may first think of using JavaScript to do this by dynamically changing the windows status bar URL, but unfortunately this trick doesn’t work across Firefox browsers.
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Posted in Affiliate Programs, Make Money Online, PHP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on September 18, 2009
Chances are you have a bunch of different hosts that are housing your website files, for the sake of data safety (never put all eggs in a single basket) and possibly some SEO advantage. If that is the case, you will infrequently come to the need to move some files from one host server to another. How does one do that?
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Posted in HTTP Tips & Tutorials, Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on September 11, 2009
The Planet seems to be running quite a series of promotional discounts off their dedicated server hosting plans recently. After the release of this promo code which I can’t possibly find anywhere on their official website now, here’s yet another one for you: Continue the reading »
Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on September 9, 2009
There are millions of websites online, each of which has its own unique web address or domain. It’s what the visitors, us, use to type in the browser address bar and go to the site. It universally identifies a website on the web. And it’s something EVERYONE can have.
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Posted in Computer & Internet Literacy, Domains
By Yang Yang on September 9, 2009
One of the utility commands of Linux that you should know in the first day of your Linux learning seminar is find.
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Posted in Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on September 5, 2009
When you have a VPS or dedicated server to manage, typically you’d have a bunch of different mysql users granted the privileges of every particular database for the sake of security. While this works well in segregating the privileges and preventing hackers from gaining access to all databases upon the compromise of only one mysql user account, it means much more work when you are backing up all those databases on the server.
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals, SQL and MySQL Tips and Tutorials
By Yang Yang on September 5, 2009
I was with RackSpace Cloud Servers which is owned by RackSpace along with Slicehost where my servers are actually placed. So you can also say I’m moving from Slicehost to Linode. However, the fact that I’m leaving them doesn’t mean they are not good. To the opposite, they are absolutely one of the best VPS hosting providers – the pricing, the uptime, the proprietary control panel and 24/7 live chat support are all their pros. The only downside is that unmanaged VPS hosting can be daunting to those who find Linux a labyrinth. Other than that, they are both fantastic hosting companies to go with.
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on September 5, 2009
cd is the command in Linux to change the current working directory. While you can change to your home directory by cd ~, you can change to the previous directory or last directory you were in by:
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals, Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on September 3, 2009
To show all MySQL databases, you can simply type SHOW DATABASES; or SHOW TABLES; to show all tables of the current database. However, if you want to list and display all the MySQL users, SHOW USERS; won’t work.
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Posted in SQL and MySQL Tips and Tutorials
By Yang Yang on September 3, 2009
It’s really weird that one would like to do this but perhaps you are running some private website dedicated to just an intimate group. Anyway, you can stop search engines indexing your web pages by putting a meta tag in the header section of them:
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on September 3, 2009
This is one of the most common tasks in website development and also one of the most frequently asked question according to some of the keyword research tools. Well, you have 3 ways to achieve a web page redirection.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips, JavaScript Tips & Tutorials, PHP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on September 2, 2009
Overture: Apply this Rackspace Cloud promo code to get $25 rebate / refund discount of the Rackspace Cloud managed hosting. Read some reviews of them.
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Posted in Coupons and Promo Codes, Hosting Tips & Deals
By Yang Yang on September 2, 2009
The Linux command du stands for disk usage which is used to check the amount of disk storage any particular directory or file is using. By default, the simple command:
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Posted in Hosting Tips & Deals, Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on September 2, 2009
After we have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of MyISAM and InnoDB, you might want to convert them back and forth and see the performance differences yourself. For small website, the difference may be minor but for a large popular application,
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Posted in SQL and MySQL Tips and Tutorials
By Yang Yang on September 2, 2009
The 2 major types of table storage engines for MySQL databases are InnoDB and MyISAM. To summarize the differences of features and performance,
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Posted in SQL and MySQL Tips and Tutorials
By Yang Yang on August 30, 2009
Though it does increase traffic and the pageviews, it doesn’t feel quite good with someone who’s loading your website or page as a part of theirs in the form of a <frame> or <iframe>, leeching your content as part of theirs. To prevent them from loading your pages this way, and make the visitor browser to load the entire window with your site on the "_top" level, you need some javascript:
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Posted in JavaScript Tips & Tutorials, PHP Tips & Tutorials
By Yang Yang on August 29, 2009
The common HTML form input controls of checkbox (<input type=”checkbox”>) and radio (<input type=”radio”>) can be tricky to be aligned correctly in the same line with the text or image across all modern browsers. Without any CSS styling, they usually place themselves 3 or more pixels above or below the normal text flow which look anything but nice.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on August 29, 2009
No matter how fairy or pretty your design / template is, never use overflow:hidden for content containers.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips, Web Design Tips and Insights
By Yang Yang on August 28, 2009
With display:block elements we can freely set the hard width of them. However for inline elements, width:200px simply won’t work at all. One approach is to float the element which usually causes other problems and isn’t handy at all.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on August 28, 2009
In CSS3, border-radius is the rule you would use to achieve curved corner borderlines, but for now, IE and Opera doesn’t support this trick. With a little script help in the form of a .htc, you can make a cross browser compatible rounded corner box such as a <div> or an <img>.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on August 27, 2009
At Linux command line, to find a particular text string in all the files from the current directory recursively (that is, including all those files from the child or grandchild directories), use something like this via SSH:
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Posted in Linux Server Administration Tips
By Yang Yang on August 27, 2009
HTML 5 comes with a bunch of new tags that IE6 cries that it doesn’t know them, thus refusing to style them according to the CSS. To baby-sit this stupid browser one last time, adding these JavaScript lines in the <head> of your web page that utilizes HTML 5 tags:
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips
By Yang Yang on August 27, 2009
Firefox 3.5 has been released with full support for the current stage of HTML 5. Although the rest of the browsers haven’t explicitly adopted the new tags and new features of HTML 5 yet, you can safely use HTML 5 tags in your web page and style them in CSS just as if they are a traditional HTML 4 tag, no problem.
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Posted in CSS & HTML Tips