Uh Oh, our server was spa-ghetto
Due to a failed power supply as a group we have decided to update our server. We now run Ubuntu Server on a significantly faster custom built machine hosted in the same co-lo. Really sorry for the downtime and lack of updates as it was a really dramatic experience due to SCSI incompatibility issues. Expect more interesting articles real soon.
Free PHP PageRank Checker
A while back i linked you all to the small little PHP script i made to check the pagerank of a website. Well now a year has gone by, and i figure i might as well share it with the rest of ya. So here it is, all you have to do is unzip and upload it to a server that supports PHP and you are set!
View Live Demo - Download Free PHP PageRank Checker
New Windows Mobile Website
Just finished the basic version of my new windows mobile software website. PHP/MySQL basically, took probably around 10 hours, but that includes a lot of functions which are just going to make expanding the site easier. Check it out!
Grid Wars 2
Sometimes it’s nice to kick it and play a few simple games. I was trying to do that earlier today and realized i don’t have anything worth playing on this Ubuntu machine. After a bit of Googling, I’ve stumbled upon a rather addicting game that you can download absolutely free. It’s called Grid Wars 2, check it out and download it.
Easy Targeted Traffic and Links
A lot of people have a hard time getting their blog rolling, but with a few minutes of extra work on top of each published article you can increase your traffic several folds. One of my favorite techniques goes as follows. Write an article on whatever topic you want, make sure the content is unique and quality, things people actually will want to read (this on it’s own over time will definitely make your blog a success). Go to Google and search for the keywords you’re aiming for with your article. In the results you will most surely find some sort of blog or page with comments that will allow you to post. So do just that, post a comment or remark on that page with a link back to your freshly written article. The search engines will pick up on the new content quicker, plus you’ll have a nice authoritative link back to yourself from an article that already has a good rank on the search engine for the specified keyword. If you really want you can do this on several sites to really bump up your results. From person experience and practice of this method i can say that it has probably increased my traffic 3-4 times.
Ubuntu 8.04
The update destroyed my computer. Broke my networking, nfs shares, display drivers and configuration, and a boat load of other things i don’t have time to fix. Looks like it’s time for a fresh install. Good luck if you’re about to make the move, hopefully it goes better for you then it did for me. Technorati Profile.
Ubuntu HDR Tutorial
HDR or High Dynamic Range photos are a great way of making something look twice as good as it really is. The camera part is easy, you basically need to take at least 3 (or more) photos with different exposure settings. You want to get both the dark and light aspects of the image, so try doing a show with an exposure of -2, then a 0, then a 2. You can mess around with this until you find a setting you like best. Keep in mind you have to keep the camera as still as possible, as the 3 images are going to be blended together to form the HDR image. So basically this is useless without a tri-pod and a fairly still scene.
Once you have captured the photos get on your ubuntu computer and open up a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install qtpfsgui
Once installed, you should be able to click the Ubuntu logo in the top left corner, go to the Graphics menu and then click on Qtpfsgui. Once the program opens, you can select the images you took at different exposure settings, and then create your HDR image. Qtpfsgui is a very agile program with many different options, so after a little experimenting you should have no problem making HDR images to suit your needs.
Here’s an HDR image i made, notice the accented sky and colors.
Website Screenshot Generation in Linux
I’ve been looking for an easy way to generate thumbnail screen shots of web pages on the fly. This could have several interesting implementations, such as showing users a screen shot of the page they are going to, dynamically generating images for your site, etc, etc. This has actually become a popular service across, the internet. Either way the point i’m getting at is why not do it yourself. The best one i have found and implemented has been Webthumb, just a few dependencies and really quick setup.
PHP Email Validation
I recently posted about an email library i was very fond off, but for my implementation of it i need a quality email validator. Here’s the best PHP Email Validator i found, it’ll return true or false based on whether the email is valid or not. A quick example of how to use it:
if(validate_email($email_address_to_validate)) {
// Email is valid, so do whatever you need to
} else {
// Email is invalid, don't bother trying to send it
}
Internet Explorer in Linux
Most web designers know, a site is worthless if it only works in Firefox. As nice as it would be to have a Firefox only internet, the reality of the matter is your site needs to look nice across all browsers. For most, this isn’t a problem, but for us Windows-Free folk, this is kind of an issue. Luckily for us, the nice people over at IEs4Linux have made it extremely easy to install Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, and 6 in your Linux environment. So here we go, the guide to get and install IEs4Linux. Easy as 1-2-3. The only prerequisites are cabextract and Wine (easily installable and configurable in all Linux environments).