Web Development & Tech.

I recently ran into a frustrating issue when WordPress (2.8.4) started acting bad once the server was updated to the latest php 5.3.0. The main issue is pretty well documented if you search Google, and is not a WordPress code problem rather a php bug. My issue was that my “General Settings” screen stopped loading, and hung with a mostly blank page. This was nothing more than a pain. I’ll wait to update my php for a real fix, rather than rolling back to 5.2.

Here’s what I did to make the problem go away.

Open your /wp-admin/options-general.php file and look for this:

I seem to be building numerous websites lately that clients want to be able to manage themselves, and I’ve been using WordPress to power them. For years WordPress was considered a blogging tool only, but within the past few releases it’s definitely proving itself as a very capable, light-weight Content Management System (CMS). In fact, aside from a more advanced permissions model, there really isn’t anything I can think of that WordPress can’t be configured to do right out of the box.

If you currently use Google Analytics for website statistics, but want to get even more details on what your visitors are doing on your site – you may want to implement custom event tracking. Using this method, you can track nearly every action a user takes on your site. External link clicks, email link clicks, file downloads and more can all be tracked and recorded. Any webmaster will tell you; the more details you can get about your visitors – the better you can cater to them and increase your return on investment.

It’s been about two weeks since I updated my home network with a file server and backup drive. So far, the performance is fast and the backup has been flawless. I didn’t have a ton of cash to spend on setting it up, so I went on the “frugal side”. Here is an outline of the set up if anyone is thinking of doing this.

Need

Web Developers continue to argue whether it’s really that important to validate every website using the “Strict DOCTYPE”, or if valid website markup code is really even that important. While this is a discussion for another time, I try to publish every site I author in valid, Strict xHTML. I believe standards are made for a reason, and if you wish to write good code – just follow the standards.