The best approach I have come across to manage multiple web projects is to use subdomains. Subdomains are pretty, clean and easy to manage. This how-to article is about my simple and effective method of hosting multiple web projects on nstation using subdomains. We will create two projects ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ with http://foo.nstation/ and http://bar.nstation/ as their URLs to explain the whole process. Please note that the technique described here is based on the Microsoft Windows platform. However, it is possible to do the same on other platforms with minor adjustments.

Prerequisites

• XAMPP or a compatible web server software
  More info: What is XAMPP, XAMPP FAQ
• Notepad or compatible text editor
  Hint: drag-and-drop a file onto a Notepad window to open the file.

Step 1 – create folders

Create the folder structure as shown below.

It doesn’t have to be the C: drive. But for simplicity it is always recommended that you create the Webroot folder in a drive root. Refrain from using path names with spaces like C:\Program Files\Webroot.

A short description on each folder is given below.

Webroot\projects

This folder contains individual project folders. In our case the two sub folders foo and bar reside here.

Webroot\public

This is where you put all the default stuff. For example, you can copy the Apache htdocs folder content here. This folder hosts the main site (http://nstation) content.

Webroot\xampp

Contains XAMPP files – Apache, PHP, MySql, phpMyAdmin, perl and other server related components are stored here.

Step 2 – install XAMPP

Install XAMPP on Webroot\xampp folder. I recommend you use the self-extracting 7-ZIP archive. Run the setup and chose C:\Webroot as the Extract to folder as it will anyway extract the content to a folder by the name xampp.

Run setup_xampp.bat to finish the setup process. You will get a console output similar to the following screenshot.

Press any key to finish the setup. To run the XAMPP Control Panel Application, double click xampp-control.exe. Click the start button in front of both Apache and MySql modules to start the server. Since we haven’t done any modifications yet, XAMPP runs on its default settings. See screenshot below.

Step 3 – configure Apache

Now we need to change the default Apache configuration to match the directory structure. Apache configuration is distributed among several text files. All of these files reside in the xampp\apache\conf folder. We need to edit two files: conf\httpd.conf and conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf.

Step 3.1 – edit httpd.conf

Go to xampp\apache\conf and open the httpd.conf file. Locate <Directory “C:/Webroot/xampp/htdocs”> and change it to <Directory “C:/Webroot/public”> . Scroll down a few lines and locate the closing directive </Directory> and add the following at a new line.

<Directory "C:/Webroot/projects">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Step 3.2 – edit httpd-vhosts.conf

Go to xampp\apache\conf\extra and open the httpd-vhosts.conf file. Uncomment NameVirtualHost *:80 by removing all hash signs (#) at the beginning of the line. (By now you would have noticed that any line starting with a hash sign is indeed a comment.)

Add the following text at the end of the file on a new line.

# Default site: http://nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/public"
ServerName nstation
ServerAlias nstation
</VirtualHost>

# Foo sub domain: http://foo.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/foo"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

# Bar sub domain: http://bar.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName bar.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/bar"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

Step 4 – edit the hosts file

The host file is the system file that matches hostnames to IPs. This file resides in the system folder %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc and on most computers this would be C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Open the hosts file (yes, the file doesn’t have an extension) and add the following two lines to the end of the file at a new line.

127.0.0.1              foo.nstation
127.0.0.1              bar.nstation

This tells the system to direct requests for foo.nstation and bar.nstation to the IP address 127.0.0.1.

Step 5 – test the setup

Restart Apache and MySql by stopping and starting them using the XAMPP Control Panel. If you did not run these in step 2, just start both modules to see whether our configuration is in effect. If everything went accordingly, you should get the green Running status on both Apache and MySql.

Point your web browser to http://nstation to see the content served on Webroot\public folder. If you have nothing to start with, I suggest you copy everything in xampp\apache\htdocs folder to this location. You should get the XAMPP default web site with all the bells and whistles.

Put your Foo project files to Webroot\projects\foo folder and Bar project files to Webroot\projects\bar folders respectively. Point your browser to http://foo.nstation and http://bar.nstation to see them in action. Put the following code in an index.php file and save the file in both locations if you have nothing to start with.

<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p><?php echo "My location: " . dirname(__FILE__); ?></p>

You should get different location details depending on the URL.

Add more projects (optional)

Follow step 3.2 and step 4 to add more projects to your setup. Given below are the skeletons that can be used for this task.

Step 3.2 – httpd-vhosts.conf file entry

# vhost entry for new_project sub domain: http://new_project.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName new_project.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/new_project"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

Step 4 – hosts file entry

127.0.0.1              new_project.nstation

Done

That’s it. It’s easier than you would’ve imagined it to be. Hope this article helps and makes your web development experience a fun.

Disclaimer: Cover photo courtesy Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL.

A respectable member of the society will never attempt to steal a teddy bear from a department store although he may be well pirating software over the internet at home. But there must be reasons for this dualistic human-behavior for the same type of action; the same type of misbehavior. Read through my analysis as to why people steal software but not teddy bears in the modern society.

Tangible vs. intangible

The concept of stealing has a strong association to the tangible nature of an item. Software is intangible; you do not feel it. It is just an arrangement of bits and bytes on your hard disk or other type of media. You would feel wrong to steal a teddy bear from a department store but not to illegally download a copy of a software title over the internet. This intangible nature is also the reason for most other reasons why software is pirated.

A Replica

People do not feel wrong about replicating. On this forum post at Mininova.org the user has posted an interesting argument on stealing a cow versus replicating the same: if you steal a cow, then the owner of the cow will suffer from the los of it; if you replicate the cow instead, then you don’t actually take away anything from the rightful owner. It’s the notion ‘I’m just replicating – not stealing’.

Who gets hurt?

It is the software giants that get hurt with pirating and they already have ample amount of money in their pockets. People often think ‘the 50 dollars I do not give them are negligible in sight of their current wealth’. Even for tangible items, if the party is in concern is filthily rich; people assume that the items stolen will go unnoticed due to the ample amount of resources the wealthy claim. Remember Robin Hood?

I pay for my internet connection

Most software pirating is domestic and people often download software using their own internet connection. For this reason the notion ‘I pay for my internet connection’ renders a thought of justification in downloading software. This holds the same for duplicating software titles on removable media such as CD or DVD as the recipient has already purchased the blank media himself.

Readily available

Pirating is readily available and can be done from home. An internet connection, a mechanism to pirate (such as BitTorrent) and the knowledge on completing the process is all it takes for the completion of a successful pirating cycle. The flip side of this is that unlike other commodities, a software title cannot be evaluated at a store because of its intangible nature. People prefer to first try it at home and then but it legitimately; which to the most part end up remaining ‘evaluating indefinitely’.

Lack of pricing model

Software doesn’t have a proper pricing model. Often people believe that software titles are pricy. The same kind of software comes in various price bands. Since there is no proper gauge to measure the value of a software title, people recent to pay the right amount of money the developer deserve.

Disclaimer: cover pic by jesus_leon

This is where www.delorie.com comes in to the rescue. This website provides a handful of tools for SEO related work. You can use its online lynx viewer to view a web page in text-only format. Use the Search Engine Simulator to view a web page in different summarized forms based on the content and structure. There is also a purifier, header viewer, request viewer and backward compatibility viewer. All these tools provide you easy SEO while keeping it all in the cloud; and keeping off you hand from sweating too.

When I started designing this theme, I didn’t have any expertise on WordPress. The principles of blogging were completely new to me. I looked into many other blogs to figure out the essentials of theming. Ironically most themes were structurally the same except they looked different in presentation. But is this commonly accepted structure really usable? This is what I discovered.

File Away

Some details presented on blogs are unwanted or rarely used. The archive for example has no significance to an average user. Since majority of users end up in a blog post by getting referred by a search engine, there is very little chance that someone visiting to read a certain blog post would drill down the archive to read other posts.

Attention to Detail

Only posts matter. Everything else is inferior. Even static pages have less significance unless information presented on static pages can draw more interest than posts. Having a mechanism to list and summarize the most recent posts can be beneficial.

No one dare to spare time on the archive. Give it less attention. Have a page that list all post titles that is groped monthly or yearly. This actually depends on how much you write; but reduces confusion and the hap-hazard nature of the archive.

Prevent making countless categories. Use a small number of categories to group different areas of interests. Make use of the new WordPress tags to brief your visitor about the post. By the way, that tag cloud makes no sense to many people. But it’s a good way of showing your intents. So use it judiciously, don’t throw it on the face.

Least but not last, avoid the top ten design mistakes when creating your blog. Remember, usability guidelines applicable to a regular websites are applicable to blogs too.

1 – current theme as at 20^th November, 2007

1. Log on to your Gmail account.
2. An RSS icon appears on the address bar. (This screenshot is given in Mozilla Thunderbird)
   
3. Select ‘Add Gmail Atom Feed as Live Bookmark’ from the context menu.
   
4. Copy the URL from the address bar.
   
5. Go to your email client and subscribe to the URL copied in step 4.
   For Mozilla Thunderbird, right-click on News & Blogs and select ‘Subscribe’ from the context menu.
   
6. You will be prompted for the user name and password for your Gmail account.
7. That’s it! Now you are ready to receive new mail notifications via RSS.

On many occasions I heard Loe recommending the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee. I never got the chance to add it to my library for some reason. So I thought of adding it to my collection today. Guess what, according to Audible, my geographic location prevents me from listening to this great book (see screenshot). My question is, if I can buy and listen to other audiobooks from Audible, why not this? I find the notice ‘We are not authorized to sell this title to your geographic location’ somewhat a feeble excuse.

As I mentioned earlier the site is poorly designed and you have to dig deeper to find useful information. For instance the weather forecast for today is two-levels deep from the home page; which is in my opinion should be on the first page itself. However the website provides useful weather related information on Sri Lanka which is not readily available from other online weather sites. What’s more interesting is that some of the vital information is posted in Sinhalese (as an image though).

It’s a pity that this website isn’t popular and wide spread in the society. Undoubtedly many Sri Lankans and foreigners can equally benefit from this service and the authoritys should leverage and promote this website to enhance its quality.

Some useful links from the Department of Meteorology website

• Weather Forecast for Today (Island and Sea)
• City Forecast for the Next 36 Hours
• Weekly Weather Review
• Weather Data for the Last 24 Hours
• Latest Satellite Images

Photo by xion

Prerequisite

The prerequisite is Firefox. No need to install any fancy third-party plug-ins although there are many to automate this task. We’ll be using a great feature already built into Firefox called ‘View Selection Source’.

Step 1

Go to the Flickr page that has the photo you want. Usually it’s in the format http://flickr.com/photos/<user>/<photoid>/
Ex: http://flickr.com/photos/enteelk/629074618/

Step 2

Select the photo by clicking just out the left-side of the image and dragging your mouse to the right-side of the image and releasing.

Notice how the photo is now selected with the selection color overlay.

Step 3

Now right-click on the selection and select View Selection Source.

Step 4

A window with the title ‘Dom Source of Selection‘ will pop up with the selection source code.

Step 5

Select the source attribute text (img src="<text>") of the image tag without the ?v=0 portion which is the path to the photo.
(Ex: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1405/629074618_20f6542a03.jpg)

Step 6

Copy and paste the text on the address field and press enter. Select Save As from the File menu or right-click on the picture to save it.

Done!

Please note that even if a photo is made public, you have to obtain license for commercial use. This post is about making your life easier and not about stealing other people’s intellectual property.

But why 404? Doesn’t its odd symmetry and appearance make you wonder? Doesn’t it bare the characteristics of a hidden story behind the code? Perhaps there is; or perhaps it could have been just inadvertently coined. I Googled to find out.

According to Room 404 website, the number was named after a room at CERN, where the concepts of the WWW (or Internet in this regard) were originally made. The central database was situated in an office on the fourth floor at CERN which was numbered as Room 404. A request for a file was sent to this room and an operator manually located the file and sent it to the person over the network. If the file could not be located then the request was given the response: “Room 404: file not found”. Read the full story at Room 404 for the fulfillment of inspiration. Sounds convincing isn’t it?

However the 404 Research Lab website page on the History of 404 disagree with the Room 404 story with a quote from someone who has actually been to CERN. According to the quote, there is no Room 404 in CERN – it simply doesn’t exist, and certainly hasn’t been preserved as “the place where the web began”. Awe, disappointing indeed!

As much as the story of Room 404 at CERN sounded persuasive, its integrity is doubtful as it cannot be confirmed. Nevertheless many websites have come up with pretty alternatives to the boring 404 status message. Area 404 has a list of some of the best 404 web pages on the Internet. Even if there is no behind the code story, the inspiration of artists is worth mentioning.