I learned something new today

Create subdomains in PHP

When I started receiving more and more requests for installing Pritlog on my server for different folks, I wanted to think of a better solution than just installing a separate Pritlog copy to each individual and put them in separate sub directories. This can cause any modification or updations to all these different installations to be a very time consuming task.

This is when I started thinking about the possibility of modifying Pritlog in such a way that a single installation could handle multiple blogs and these blogs can be in separate subdomains - similar to how it works in Blogspot and few other sites.

First task was to create sub domains dynamically using PHP. Usually, sub domains can be created from the control panel provided by your hosting provider. But, this is a manual task. I did some searching through the net and came across some articles that talked about using a XML API provided by cPanel (hosting control panel) that could be used. My delicious link below has the bookmarks I made during my research.

http://delicious.com/prithish/subdomain

But, none of the API solutions worked for me. I was trying this on my hosting account with Hostmonster. Finally, the below solution worked for me.
The original discussion link:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/8746.htm

The steps that actually helped me.

Step 1: First you need to set your main domain to act as a catch-all subdomain. its like putting ServerAlias * so that each subdomain which is requested
to the main domain reaches the same place. I mean if your main domain root is

/home/admin/abc.com/htdocs/

then your catch-all setup shall send all sub-domain requests to that same directory

/home/admin/abc.com/htdocs/

Initially, I could not figure out how to do it in Hostmonster. Finally, I found the solution somewhere that said, we could add a subdomain called '*' and make it direct to the root of the domain. This way, my domain became a catch all domain.

Step 2: You'd add this code to very top of your index page right after ""

$domain = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$domain_parts = explode('.',$domain);
if (count($domain_parts) == 3 && $domain_parts[0]!= "www") {
   // make sure a subdomain is called
   $user = $domain_parts[0];
   $loc = "http://domain.tld/whateverpage.ext?varname=$user";
   @header("Location:$loc");
}

What this step is basically saying is when the domain is a catch all domain, all requests to any subdomains will come to the index files of the root domain. You can add this code to parse the data in the requested url and figure out what subdomain was requested and use "header" function from within your index script to handle the redirection.

I am now using this to provide hosted Pritlog. Here are some links to check this out.
http://mathew.pritlog.com/
http://tania.pritlog.com/
http://blakley.pritlog.com/

If anything on this post is not clear, please feel free to post a comment requesting clarification.

Template engine for Pritlog

In developing the latest release of Pritlog, one major ingredient I wanted to add was a template engine. I searched far and wide on the web and came up with a big list of probably solutions. Keep in mind that I was more interested in very simple and light weight solutions and not in any full fledged template engines. This requirement is because I want Pritlog to be a lightweight blogging solution.

If you want to see the complete list of templating solutions I bookmarked, here they are:
http://delicious.com/prithish/templateengine

The below two fascinated me:

1 - Using PHP as your template engine: The author explains how the extract command in PHP can be used to create an easy solution for templating with pure PHP.

2 - The one line template engine: The author gives the solution mentioned below. I ended up using this for Pritlog and was pretty satisfied with this approach. Pritlog is still under 350 KB uncompressed with templating and plugin functionality.

I apologize if the code does not look very clean. I will see if I can get a good code highlighter gadget to use on my Pritlog. The engine itself:
Format of template.tpl file:
If you're not comfortable with pulling variables out of the global scope, define them as

Website hosting with Godaddy

First fact - I don't get any money or sponsorship for this blog and hence this is an honest account from experience.

Its amazing how when looking for hosting deals, you come across lots of websites claiming that they give web hosting reviews. But looking through many such sites, I found that they all talked about the same companies over and over again and usually Godaddy and Yahoo hosting rated very poor on these review sites.

Also, its shocking to know that many major hosting companies are infact part of the same group. We might think they are competitors, but they are just a big group working with each other. This is one reason we can see good reviews about all these sites always together in the same place. I am not going to mention any names. Please do your research.

3IX Hosting:

I was with a hosting company called 3ix for a year before switching to Godaddy. I must say that 3iX did an excellent job for the price. I paid around $33 for hosting for a year for 3 websites and the sites have been down for only a couple of days in a whole year. Because my requirements were low, I really did not get affected by this. All other times, it has been very stable and fast. I could get the live chat support anytime instantly. If someone is looking for extremely cheap hosting with excellent support, then 3ix would be a great choice.

Godaddy:

I switched to Godaddy seeking more stability. I have been with them for over a year now and have been very happy. The sites have rarely went down and I could do all the things I needed using the hosting. The support has been great and friendly.

There are minor glitches like
- htaccess takes around 1 hour to get activated
- Its not cpanel and its their own control panel software
- There are no logging apps like awstats
- Very limited MySQL Databases
- Setting new things like new ftp user, new database, new domains can take couple of hours

Positives:
- Friendly and good support
- Fast - I have never had speed or bandwidth problems
- Stable - The server has been very stable and my sites have hardly gone down

Pritdeals - Faster and Smarter

PritDeals website has been around for atleast over a year now. It used to be a sub domain of hardkap. Last week, I moved this to its own domain at http://pritdeals.com.

This is how PritDeals worked till before last week:

- Every time someone visits the page or refreshes the page, it would go and read and parse the feeds from these other deal sites. This backend operation happens at the server in a PHP script and then it sends it to the client browser. The searches are done completely using the client browser. Hence it is faster to perform searches.

The disadvantage of this approach was that the initial time to load was not pleasant. Hence I started working on a better solution.

This is how PritDeals works now:

- A cron job on the server runs a PHP script to get the feeds from these deal sites and upload it to a database.
- Every time someone visits or refreshes the page, it just goes and reads from the database and sends it to the client browser.

This approach has made significant improvements in the initial load times.

While I was at it, I also changed the way the search was being done. Now it handles multiple words very well. The order of the words does not matter when searching with multiple keywords.

What is planned for PritDeals?

- I want to add a deal watch feature where anybody can give a list of keywords, an expected price and their email id to get automatic notification when there is a deal that matches their criteria and price.

Login to cPanel without the port

I don't know if this rule can be generalized as it depends on the hosting company and how they are setup.

I have been using Hostmonster from last month for hosting websites. One major drawback for me was that it was not possible to connect to the control panel (cpanel) from everywhere. In some locations, the special ports are blocked and cpanel uses a special port 2083. Hence I could not connect to the Hostmonster control panel.

I was googling and searching for a solution and somebody on the hostmonster forum had an answer to this.

Login using this link - http://login.hostmonster.com and your cpanel id and password. This worked for me in hostmonster and I also checked on a friends account at bluehost and it worked there too. Hope this helps someone.

CSS Sprites

When working on Pritlog 0.8, I wanted to make it perform better. Hence, using the Firefox addon Yslow, I did some analysis and found that there were around 28 HTTP requests being made on every page refresh of Pritlog.

Continue reading

CSS Frameworks

This would be my first post on this blog after moving to Pritlog 0.8. This is the first version of Pritlog using Sqlite as backend instead of flat files.

When working on Pritlog, it was my constant search to find a suitable css framework that included a decent CSS reset and a layout system. Resets are used so that the website looks the same across different web browsers.

Continue reading

Google insights - see trends

I saw this google product that can be very helpful for businesses and creating products.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

You can see what people are searching, what regions are searching for a particular search term. You can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Continue reading

Align div in Internet Explorer

The trick to center a div in IE.

Body selector: text-align: center;
Div/Container: margin: 0 auto;
Div/Container: text-align: left; on the container to counter the center align for body

Htaccess Tricks

htaccess files are optional configuration files used in Apache web servers that can be used to control the directories they are placed in and also the sub directories.

If your host allows .htaccess files, you may want to read the below articles and use the powerful techniques explained.

Continue reading

Read apache logs using grep

Some tips from the below link to read your apache log files using the simple grep command.
http://immike.net/blog/2007/07/12/grepping-your-web-logs/

Here are some quotes from the article:

Continue reading

Scrolling text on webpage

I usually use the below code to add scrolling text on a webpage. You can see this on http://macpup.org.

Put this in your head section







Add the below to your body section, wherever you feel appropriate:





Change your body section:

To Write

Just noting down some topics to add. Need to collect more information to add these.
- Basics: Register, host and run a website
- Recipes from my wife's notes
- Rexx: Main code, panels, skeletons and everything in a single module
- Protecting your site from bad spiders
- Awstats and how to configure GeoIP
- Adding a count down on the download page
- Learnings from creating Pritlog
- Things to remember when dealing with files in PHP
- Measure your site hits and statistics (awstats, analytics)
- Simple photography tips
- Interesting websites you may/may not know
- What to expect after having a baby
- What to do when your 1 year old doesnt eat
- How to program keyless entry remote for a Camry
- Learning from a project in crisis
- Plugins for Pritlog

- George Foreman's grill
- Read between lines - self service car wash ...
- Learning about sessions and other things from 0.412

Is the Google generation smart?

I came across this wonderful and thought provoking article today. Really made me think.

Here is the link to the article. I would recommend reading the full article on this link.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4362950.ece

This might be a long post as I am trying to quote the important statements from the article.

In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can�t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker�s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year.

Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn�t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in �gossip and social banter�.

Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin � the very essence of friendship and love � will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

They have all noted � either in themselves or in others � diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. �I can�t read War and Peace any more,� confessed one of Carr�s friends. �I�ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.�

So what is the solution?

The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

- Enjoy the simple things in life
- Read books once in a while
- Avoid multi tasking
- Stop listening to your ipod always

Website directory list

The default behavior of websites is that if you dont have index.html, index.php or a similar index page, then it just displays a list of files in the directory on the website.

There are some hosting companies that disable this for security reasons, which is good. But in some cases, you just want to give the list of files to visitors for download or viewing.�

Continue reading

Opensource - Try before you install

Many may not know about this wonderful website. I dont remember how I came across this one either. The site is:
http://opensourcecms.com/

This site has demo installations of various open source packages/applications. Before we try installing any on our own site, we get to try out these packages on this website.

Continue reading

Add lightbox to your site

I have noticed that nowadays many websites use ajax to show enlarged images. When you click on an image, instead of the image opening in a new browser window, it opens using animation and zoom. This can be used to view multiple images on a website like a gallery.

Started searching for this. I did know about lightbox javascript library. But the one that impressed me finally is called prettyPhoto. This is a lightbox clone using jQuery. jQuery is a very powerful javascript library that I am very familiar with. I love this because of its simpilcity and because of all the plugins available to extend this.

Here is the link to the prettyPhoto library.
http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyPhoto/

It is very simple to add to your website. You can see this working on my website below: (Try clicking an image on the website)
http://macpup.org/

Need live support for your site?

I had never heard of a free application for providing live support / live chat on a website.

One of my friends (Eric) mentioned this the other day. It is called Crafty Syntax and I am posting the link below:
http://www.craftysyntax.com/�

Continue reading

How to build a shopping site

Once when I was asked by a friend to do their shopping site, I suggested ready made paid solutions like Godaddy.com, Amazon or even sell it through ebay. There are packages available from Godaddy and from few other websites that are paid and that give you the complete shopping cart funtionality. �

Continue reading

Youtube - Fullscreen Playlists

We started finding videos on youtube and creating playlists out of them. But when playing from Youtube, the videos do not play in fullscreen continuously.

Searching on the web, I came across this code:

Continue reading