Three very annoying things I never, ever want to forget (again) about running PHP via the command line using cron: Cron has strange paths so, include (‘./common.php’); will not work! You have to use (‘common.php’); If you have blank lines in your output file, check for blank lines before and after your PHP tags Remember to specify the full path to your script Tip: Remember to redirect error output 2>1& when using php via cron, and also don’t forget to append to your log file with >> operator.

Apt-get is broken! Perhaps due to being on ComCast. Nothing has worked to resolve it yet… hrrrm.

I haven’t been able to get my Ubuntu laptop on Windows network for years. This is the best walk through I’ve found. Unfortunately, my apt-get is broken… so I couldn’t do apt-get install win-bind. But, one of the other steps solved the problem. smbtree returns: cli_start_connection: failed to connect to JANES (0.0.0.0). Error NT_STATUS_UNSUCCESSFUL Walk through that hasn’t resolved the problem yet: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1169149 sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart does not work in Ubuntu 10.04!

I was recently asked how I would generate thumb nails in WordPress. WP has gone through ALOT of changes around images and thumbnails since I first started using WordPress. The current best practice for thumbnails in WordPress is described here: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/new-in-wordpress-2-9-post-thumbnail-images/

The content on Ask Ubuntu is licensed CC attribution required. However, the content isn’t licensed by the people who WRITE the content, but by the owners of the website who host the content. Evil? Probably. Update: Chris points out in the comments that Stack Exchange gives users with 2000 reputation points do follow links to their home page. That means when someone borrows an author’s content to answer a stack exchange question, the person who copies gets a reward and the author does not.

The short list of Plugins I’m excited about: Google Analytics by Yoast loads your Google analytics asynchronously to speed up your page loads. Yoast’s Best WordPress SEO plugin recommended by Hobo SEO Amazon Affiliate Linker adds your Amazon Affiliate code to all amazon links on your site. I’ll keep adding to this list as I find more plugins to play with.

Today I was asked the question, “Should I separate the Apache server from mySQL server?” This brings up a great question. What’s the best way to configure a small set of servers for multiple high-traffic websites? Once you outgrow a single dedicated server, where do you go? Do you buy a big expensive dedicated server? What happens when that one is maxed out, do you buy two? If you buy two servers, do you split Apache and mySQL?

I’m moving to a new web host. Apache, mySQL, Drupal, etc… Virtual web sites. How do I test virtual web sites before changing the DNS? For example, there is a virtual site http://www.example.com, but http://www.example.com is still pointing to the old server. How do I test it on the new server? Apache will respond to a visitor according to it’s Virtual Host file. So, when you visit a server by it’s IP address(123.123.123.123) , you won’t see your website.

Today I was programming a PHP client that uses an XML-RPC web service. One of the fields the service requires is a date/time field as an AllXsd value. When you give the field a date in any other format it returns the error: Not a valid AllXsd value. What the heck is that?? How did anyone program before search engines and the Internet? The format it requires is: yyyymmddThh:mm:ss 20100209T11:30:32

The theme I use for this website creates a blog by using a separate category in WordPress for blog posts. Normally I prefer to use static pages for non-blog pages, and rely on posts for the blogging feature. This method is easy to set up and creates an easy to manage, less confusing installation. However, category-based blogging came built into the theme, and tearing it out would be a lot of wasted effort.