Thingy Ma Jig

My iPhone Theme

30 April 2008
mac iphone free design

I treated myself to a nice new iPhone last week and am LOVING it!

My phone is jailbroken and unlocked now (using PwnageTool). This means I can run all kinda of funky apps and games. I decided recently to design my own theme to make my phone feel more like "mine". Here are some screenshots. I'm working with a friend on how to release this theme along with some he has done too…

Getting Lighttpd working with AWStats

21 April 2008
linux lighttpd How to geek Drupal bash

Following my previous post about configuring Lighttpd on this VPS Webserver to replace Apache I bring you a guide to configuring AWStats under Lighttpd. This process is differs to Apache as control of directories and aliasing is handled differently. There can also be complications if you have previously enabled the Drupal LUA Magnet script on your site for clean URL handling!

How to batch rename files

19 April 2008
mac linux geek bash

This afternoon I needed to rename a bunch of files from one form to another in a command shell… Well technically I didn't need to do it in a shell - but, as sure as there is a hole in my ass, I wasn't gonna go through renaming them all manually!

They needed to go from, for example, add.png to add_32.png. After a little research into commands like printf, awk, bison and so on - I suddenly realized that 'cut' held the key!

Powered by Lighttpd

16 April 2008
linux lighttpd Drupal

This blog is now no longer powered by Apache (the feature filled but slightly bloated beast), instead I have decided to give Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) a whirl.

What convinced me? Ages ago I read an article by Dries Buytaert comparing webserver configurations. It was shocked to see that Lighttpd appeared to be able to serve almost twice as many pages per second as Apache. There is also the advantage that a static file will only cost you substantially less memory to serve in Lighty than it will in Apache due to Apache bundling ALL the mods into every process.

So what is Lighttpd? The inventors describe it perfectly…

Node Quick Find

06 April 2008
programming Drupal announcement

I've just committed another module - Node Quick Find. That brings my projects to a nice round 10!

This module is a pretty basic one though. It simply provides a block which has an autocomplete field. This field is linked to the Node Title field. You start typing the Node Title and it will start suggesting possible nodes you might be interested in - sort of like a primitive search box.

It features primitive configuration, allowing an administrator to easil configure the title of the prompt, the size and the types of nodes returned in the autocomplete list (eg, you may want to limit the list to blogs only).

Accessing the Fragment from PHP - is it possible?

22 March 2008
programming How to Drupal

peashoter has raised a good point in an issue report for GlobalRedirect. What happens to a URL which has a fragment in it - such as:

http://www.example.com/node/100#comments

I have done a google and cant find any answer to this. It appears that the fragment is not passed to PHP. This makes it a LOT harder to fix!

Every blog needs a facebook page!

17 March 2008
websites SEO geek Drupal

Every blog worth its weight needs a Facebook page!

Lets see how many fans I get! This is also a test in a way. I wanna see if Facebook could provice any kind of useful traffic.

Drupal and SEO: A comparison

04 February 2008
SEO review geek Drupal

I've recently been noticing a trend in how other websites are handling Clean URLs and it isn't good! Most websites don't appear to have the same luxury we have with Drupal (a concrete URL Alias system provided by the Path module). Although the URL Aliases can sometimes be a bit of a burden on larger sites, as the table can easily enter the tens or evey hundreds of thousands of entries, it provides (if used correctly) a very effective 1:1 relationship.

What is JFGI?

21 January 2008
humour geek bash

I am a BIG fan of the Bash.org IRC Quote Database and on of todays quotes was a particularly good one.

A2B2 launch shared hosting service

07 January 2008
technology miscellaneous announcement

I currently host this Drupal blog using a VPS with a company called A2B2 (they have a new website coming soon) and in the past 12 months have been nothing but impressed by them… so impressed, in fact, that I've given out many personal recommendations and I've even recommended a friend who has transferred all his main sites over!

To add to their arsenal, A2B2 launched a sister company a few months back called CheapVPS.co.uk which aims at a slightly lower-end market to that targeted by A2B2. Basically A2B2 use slightly higher-end hardware whereas CheapVPS offer lower prices - but on marginally less-capable hardware.

On top of A2B2's VPS server & CheapVPS offering a more budget VPS, A2B2 have now launched A2B2XS - a Shared Hosting service. They currently offer 1Gb space + 25Gb Bandwidth for under £20 per year - that's less than £1.70 a month!