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.

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.

Recently I did a post about website loading. Which had me thinking... Paginiation! Its a lovely device that allows you to not have to display all the content on the same page. There are so many forms of pagination and pagination theories. One of which is a newer method called. "Auto Pagination." It is seen on many sites such as local pages on google and several others.

It basically detects the "windows" scroll and once a certain position on the page has been achieved it loads more content into the page. Some other neat useages of this window scroll is on mashable.com when reading an article if you scroll far enough down it will display the next article on the list. But this is about pagination...

Recently I was given a great link that gives ten great ways to optimize MySQL. With its may open ended methods that leave you crossed which direction to go. I found this article extremely helpful.

20Bits By Jesse Farmer

Shaunware is ran on its very own content management system (CMS). It uses PHP/PHP5, MySQL, Javascript (Jquery), CSS/CSS3, HTML/HTML5 and more.

Here is a small list of features:

• Unlimited number of sites to hook into.
• Targeting content / tagging content to pages/tags.
• Unlimited varations of content types. Ex: Articles, Banners, and more...
• Records impressions and clicks on specific content types.
• Email Campaigns - Send HTML emails to a list of registered members.
• User/Member Handling - Allows extensive registration details for membership base sites.
• Read more...

Hacking seems to be a common occurance now days. While it seems to be a somewhat complicated process in reality it is mostly simple hacks that result in tremeduous damage, costs, and lose of data.

Two Types of Web Hacks

XSS and SQL Injections. There are obviously more such as DDOS attacks, but those are short term.

What are they?

XSS is simply inserting Javascript into a page. An example of this is a simple alert.

<script>alert("Hi!");</script>

SQL Injections are a wider range of possibilities. They allow you to delete an entire database, to outputting important information. Or even logging in as an adminstrator.

Finally I have recreated my website. It is using a content system I created from the ground up. I will be writing more on this system in the future. A small list of features this system can do:

• Manage Multiple Sites in one.
• Member Registration
• Banners
• Page Control / SEO
• And so much more...

Dance Informa
aus.danceinforma.com
usa.danceinforma.com

• Custom Frame Work
• CMS that controls both sites.
• Banner System
• Email Campaigns
• Content Types to breakup page types.
• Membership System

Scenic Rentals
www.scenicrentals.com

• Autocomplete for homepage search.
• Query to search database for autocomplete results.
• Created resulting search page query that lists out search results.

Sugar Snap Photography
www.sugarsnapin.com

• Custom Gallery System with CMS.
• Previewing Gallery for customers.
• Front page uses JQuery Gallery from: http://tympanus.net
• Tons of JQuery affects and plugins.
• Blog is powered by Wordpress
• Utilizes Font Face for fancy font changes.
• Branding done by Marco Suarez