Category Archives: Tips

Save Money on Your Web Host with HostMate

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The cost of common shared hosting starts at 3$-10$ per month. While this is a cost many can afford, there are many out there that find it hard to spend 120$/year. Well, in the past 4 years I have used the idea of hostMates very successfully, saving money and learning from my mates.

Please note: HostMate is an idea, best practice if you want. It is not a product or a service, although someone might want to provide this service.

The simple idea of HostMate

Share the same host account with other people (preferably friends) in the same manner we use to have a roommate in the university.
Most hosting accounts support multiple domain names, MySQLs, email addresses and FTP accounts.
Why not share the cost and enjoy this multitenancy with a few ‘virtual roommates’?

A very similar set of rules should apply both for roommates and for hostMates:

  1. Respect the other mates privacy
  2. Keep the file system/ living room clean
  3. Don’t do anything that will bring the police
  4. Do not abuse common resources
  5. If you bring a date back to the room hang a ‘do not disturb sign’ on the door knob – I guess this is more relevant for roommates than for hostMates

At some stage, very similar to roommates, you will outgrow your hostMate arrangement and move out of this deal into a new, posh hosting all by yourself.

Good luck.
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Make money blogging by making blogging a part of your job description

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I have been making money blogging. A lot of money blogging. In the last 5 years I have calculated that I have earned above 70,000 USD in blogging alone. And I have managed to do so very easily and without marketing or any other related costs. The money was guaranteed every month and I got free editing and proofing services.

Here is my simple secret.

I have made Blogging a part of my job description. In the last 5 years I have been working for an open source company with only 20 employees, and for the one of the biggest and most profitable hi-tech companies in the world, with more than 80,000 employees worldwide. And they both paid me to blog as part of my job.

And you can do it too:
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Will Oracle kill Java and MySQL?

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Oracle is going to buy Sun and control Java and MYSQL.1
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In an interesting post in ZDNET ,Mr Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu is claimed to state that:

“.. he doesn’t seem too worried that the proprietary software company will kill Sun’s open source Java, OpenSolaris and MySQL jewels, in spite of Oracle’s hold on the database market.”

I am not sure I completely share his optimism. I am not so much worried about Java, there is no competition there. But think of it -If you were Oracle’s CEO, You just got the chance to kill the number one competitor product- Wouldn’t you want to kill MySQL?

Even if you do not do it immediately, would you want to invest in two competitive technologies? It just doesn’t make any sense business-wise.

Additionally, I don’t buy the “so what? Open source products can be forked” story. I do not think Java and MySQL would have been so successful without a solid company backing them up. I really hope that Oracle will provide this solid support and investment in the future of Java and MySQL.

My hope it that Oracle cares about its public image in the open source community and that this will drive Oracle to keep MySQL and Java open and alive.

No Dolphins were hurt in the making of this post.

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

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

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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?
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How to: Adding wildcard pages to robots.txt

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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
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Generate and Format Last Updated in PHP

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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.
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How to: Redirect 404 (page not found) pages in PHP and Apache – Internet Explorer problem

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Sometimes you want your client to see a different page then the default 404 (page not found)
To do this you just need to add and entry to .htaccess file on your web folder:

ErrorDocument 404 /404err.php

404err.php is an example of the PHP page you want the Apache to serve instead of the apache default.
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