Category: Software development

Apache Crashes on Windows – Check Your Ports 1

Apache Crashes on Windows – Check Your Ports

Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the market today. It usually runs on Linux-based machines but lately there are more and more deployments, for development as well as other reasons, of Apache on Windows. Nowadays, running Apache web server on Windows is very common for PHP developers. Many developers develop their PHP application on their home windows or Mac and deploy to a remote Linux server.

Effective Development Environments – Development, Test,  Staging/Pre-prod and Production Environments. 12

Effective Development Environments – Development, Test, Staging/Pre-prod and Production Environments.

The following happens in many software projects –
At start, it seems you only need one environment for your web application, well, at most two:
One development environment (AKA your PC) and one server.

But as time pass, you find you need additional environments:
The clients might want their own testing environment, sometimes you need to have a pre-production environment or a staging environment, so business managers can approve the ongoing content as well as look & feel.

Do you really need these environments? What are these environment good for?

Here is a short description of some of the more popular environments and their purpose.

How much should a web site really cost? 1

How much should a web site really cost?

Lately I have been asked by many people how much should they pay for a personal or small business website. It seems that these are good times to get some extra cash from a web initiative.

The problem is that, for most people, building and hosting a website is somewhat of a mystery. And when people treat something as a mystery they tend to over complicate it and over pay for it. Some people I talked to spent 20-100$ on simple basic hosting alone! That is, in most cases, more than what they need to pay.

How to do cross browser sanity testing in less than 5 minutes for free 1

How to do cross browser sanity testing in less than 5 minutes for free

Cross browser, cross operating system testing is a costly and tedious task. Most often we test our web application on the Internet Explorer and Fire Fox installed on our machine and hope for the best. In big projects with rigid compliance requirements we test the major operating systems (Apple, Windows and sometimes a popular Linux distribution) with the major Browsers. The underline assumption is that this covers 99.x% of the population and we are happy with that. But what if we could, without additional cost, see how our web site looks like in many operating systems and multiple browsers?

10 ways to spot a good software consultant 0

10 ways to spot a good software consultant


How do you spot a good software consultant? A good software consultant could be the key for your business success and bad consultants could be very damaging and counterproductive. Here are 10 cummulative ways to spot a good software consultant (can also be read as – 10 tips for the good software consultant)

He == he | she

1) He will listen to you very carefully

A good consultant knows that we were born to this world with one mouth and two ears and there is a good reason for that ratio.

10 things every software architect should consider (AKA – 10 key architectural concepts) 2

10 things every software architect should consider (AKA – 10 key architectural concepts)

After a session I gave about Scalability in Wellington NZ, one of developers asked me what are the things software architect should consider. I have gathered and compiled this list:

1. Security

Application security encompasses measures taken throughout the application’s life-cycle to prevent exceptions in the security policy of an application or the underlying system (vulnerabilities) through flaws in the design, development, deployment, upgradation, or maintenance of the application. [1]

How to: Adding wildcard pages to robots.txt 0

How to: Adding wildcard pages to robots.txt

Sometimes we want to exclude a page from search engines. For example, repetitive pages that might lead to page rank penalties.

If you want to exclude pages with a specific name from several locations in your site – for example you might have a comments.php or a help.php in multiple parts of your site, and you want to hide it from search engines, you need to modify robots.txt.

Here is how you do it:
1) Create or edit robots.txt in the root of your site

Generate and Format Last Updated in PHP 0

Generate and Format Last Updated in PHP

As a reader of many on line product reviews, I am always interested in the time this review is relevant for. As time pass things change and review get stale.

If you have this need as a webmaster and your review is file based (as appose to DB) you can use the filemtime function to automatically generate the last updated:


$LAST_UPDATED = date ("F d Y", filemtime('review.php'));

Where review.php is the file that holds the product review for example.