I am trying to keep this going with new things that I do every so often. Along with helpful tidbits that I run into.

So here is a list of upcoming articles.

1. Alternative Hosting Solutions / Website Hosting Solutions.
2. Alternative HTTP Servers (Other than Apache and Tomcat.)
3. CSS3 Animations with JavaScript
4. GDFonts... Converting text to an image. (I use this on the side bar of the site.)
5. Social Network Plugins
6. Voting Systems (The good the bad and the ugly...) "This one will probably be December before I get to it."
7. And so much more than  I can recall at the moment also!

One of the things I love to do is learning various API's and new technologies. One of my many side projects is a Dance Dictionary that will contain step names, how to's, definitions, videos and pictures. I started writing up the tech specs and a scope for the project and start to think about utilizing a search engine to power parts of it.

Out of my research the two engines that came to mind were Google and Bing. Now my scope of the project will rely heavily on two things. 1) Images 2) Videos. Later on ill probably utilize more items such as question and answers and such but that cant wait.

Recently I got curious and adventurous into setting up a Virtual Environment on my Mac's VMware Fusion with Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP. As a Web Developer I often find little need to be a Sysadmin and spend WAY more time developing. It may come as a shocker but its often not a required effort to need to have the knowledge now days of how to setup the environment I work in! An analogy behind this is a mechanic doesn't necessarily build cars, but rather fixes them. While they may understand the details behind it they may have never put a car together from start to finish, but if they had to they could...

So I figured I would post a little bit about what I did to get it going. Because this was my first run of doing this it took a little longer than it should have. But now that I have gone through it I could probably do it as fast as my machine can download.

So I realize its been a few days sense I last posted. But I promise Ill have something to post soon. I am currently working on a entry/vote contest for GetMarried.com. Once I am done with this ill have some more to write about. It is utilizing some CSS3 tricks along with JavaScript to animate portions of it.

Along with this I am working on a small side project that will create sitemaps and even give detailed reports on your site. I have built the crawler portion, but thinking I am going to minimize the sitemaping element so I can make it for free. While I will make the reporting parts a paid element.

Recently I ran into an issue with IE 8, but all the other versions of IE and Firefox, Chrome, and Safari looked just fine! Some of the sites I work on happen to get extremely large and the CSS, HTML portions get split up over several files. Because of this often times its easy to miss something. Especially when there has been 5-6 developers in that section over time.

When dealing with Cross Browser support I find that HTML validation is a must. It may not resolve every issue that comes up to bat, but it will certainly help on some crazy pesky issues.

Lately I have had "caching" on the brain and have been working on a decent way of caching.

So far I have found that caching is obviously faster and in XML format makes it really easy to iterate through in Object format.

My methods so far are

1. Checking a database table for current cached item information.
2. If it has an expiration date or does not exist the feed needs to be cached.
3. If needs to be cached - Caching will grab the feed via curl, fopen, or file_get_contents()
4. Feed will then be stored in a file in a specific directory on the server. 
5. Database will either be updated or inserted with feed information.

Something I have been saying for a long time now is how the Web World is a guessing game. The same thing can be applied to many other occupations. Facebook, Twitter, and so many other "start ups" that have succeeded in becoming a house hold name in the beginning had no idea if they would be viral.

Facebook had a humble beginning that lead to a insanely addicting social network that allows you to connect with everyone you know and their trash cans. Twitter provides us with a 140 characters or less thoughts. Which is nice as Facebook friends to give us WAY to many details about their lives.

Suddenly with these two start ups they created a new fad. Status updates!

What does this all mean? Basically they chimed in on what they thought to be a "hole" in the market. This hole they filled or rather created.