I was looking for a simple solution to backup my newly constructed server to an off-site location in case something were to happen. I don’t mean I lost a file… more like catastrophic hardware failure, fire, water damage, physical damage, and even theft!. Local backups really are best, and I don’t plan on abandoning them …
Category Archives: Tutorials
Adding the Fedora Install DVD to Your Yum Repo List
I recently performed a major upgrade on my file server this week. It was a lot harder than it should have been, but that’s only because my Linux Foo can only go this far. Two to three re-installs later on the new hardware it was getting old, so I told the Fedora installer to just …
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Nasty WordPress Worms
I just ran across a nasty worm in one of my WordPress blogs (not the most current install). Not only did it overwrite a ton of files, inserting spam links and malware into the pages, but it was sneaky enough to go into my wp-admin/.svn/prop-base/ directory and re-write those files as well. It’s fairly ingenious …
Fixing a Broken TimeMachine Backup
I had the unfortunate event of having to send my MacBook Pro into Apple for some repairs. The machine came back working fine, however there was something odd going on with TimeMachine – it wanted to do a full backup of my disk. Odd, considering I keep it plugged-in all the time when I’m at …
CakePHP: Storing Configs in your DB
There are many situations in web apps where site-wide configurations need to be accessible to users through admin interfaces, rather than configuration files residing on the server. It is a practical method of storing configuration values that may need changing from time to time, but without access to the core configuration file. UPDATE (2008-10-22): This …
HABTM Unit Testing in CakePHP
I use this blog quite a bit for documenting little quirks, bugs, work-arounds, neat things, and tutorials so that I know where I can find the solution in the future. At the same time, you benefit by hopefully not having to go through some of the same messes I did just to get to this …
Zend Framework – Getting Started
Working with a new client project this week that requires the Zend Framework. It’s not my choice of frameworks, but I’m still eager to get going on it. As I’m a bit more familiar with CakePHP, I thought it would be wise to watch a screencast or two about getting started on ZF to see what …
Unchecked checkbox values
Working with form check boxes can be a bit of a pain on sites with dynamic content. Saving the checked data is easy, but how do you easily save the unchecked value without manually adding it to an array from inside your code? Keep reading. revealCMS is working great – I’m really starting to see …
SMARTY: Assigning variables to the header from the body
The problem recently presented itself to me when writing some new functionality for revealCMS: I needed to set some variables to load in the page head, but could only be set after a portion of the body had completed rendering. I wrote a plugin that essentially loads a different stylesheet depending on the input of …
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Replacing Substrings using SQL, not PHP
Let’s say you have a problem: A recent DB migration has escaped a lot of quote marks within your fields and now your app is acting funny. Your task is to fix the problem, and do it FAST. Enter the replace() function in MySQL (assumed other RDBMs as well, such as Postgres and MSSQL) UPDATE …