Information You Can Use
Your source for easy and fun reading about the myriad of technologies available for web development. There are tutorials, howtos and guides for lots of stuff, written with common sense and regular people in mind, but also useful for more advanced users.
Here's Some Tutorials
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Regular Expressions
For real people. You may wonder how you ever lived without them.
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Ubuntu Server Guide
Get an Ubuntu 10.10 server set up in no time with apache, vhosts, git repos and user accounts.
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Email Server Guide
How to understand postfix and get an email server up and running quickly.
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HTML/CSS Quick Start
How to properly use HTML and CSS together to start laying out web pages.
Here's a More Complete List
Awesome Sauce ZSH Prompt
First of all, zsh, unlike bash, doesn’t let you perform tab completion after an equals sign based argument, for example: rake spec SPEC=./spec/accep<TAB> to enable this, simply add the following to your ~/.zshrc file: setopt magicequalsubst Lastly, here is a … Continue reading
A Beginner’s Guide to PostgreSQL Web Development
Installing PostgreSQL On Ubuntu, just run this command, it’s very simple short and easy. sudo apt-get install postgresql This will install both the latest PostgreSQL server and the latest PostgreSQL client for you automagically. PostgreSQL Basics Logging in to your … Continue reading
PHP in a Jiffy – A beginner’s quickstart tutorial guide
Getting Set Up for the PHP Quickstart Who Is This For? This tutorial is for people who haven’t ever really programmed before but know some basic HTML and want to see what PHP can offer. If you’re new to programming … Continue reading
Firewall Basics – An iptables Howto
Disclaimer This is an in depth subject. There really is no quick fix for being a Firewall wizard overnight, it requires a very intimate knowlege of TCP/IP (and more) from the ground up. The best way for you to get … Continue reading
Apache Setup made Easy
Note that you’ll need to be root for this stuff. Go have a look in your /etc/apache2/sites-available folder on Ubuntu. On other distros you’ll want /etc/httpd/sites-available. This is where you add new websites, or at least it’s where you put … Continue reading
Setting up a LAMP style PHP web server quickly
Dear friends, I have come to you today to get you up and running “super good” style with PHP so you can start playing with websites on your own computer, no internet required. Ok, well you still probably might want … Continue reading
Rails with RVM Quickstart Howto
What Is RVM? RVM is the Ruby Version Manager and it lets you install many different versions of Ruby all at the same time, and select which one you want to use. It also lets you install different ruby gems … Continue reading
Regular Expressions for The Busy
Replacing is Power Think you got no time for regular expressions? I’d like to express that I think you’ll find you do when you see what they can do for you. Have a look: Search and replace with regular expressions … Continue reading
Ubuntu 10.10 Server In A Box – One Click Quick Install
For The Impatient Just run this command, however, I would highly recommend you read this full blog post before you do so. bash < <( curl https://github.com/rocksolidwebdesign/Ubuntu-Server-In-A-Box/raw/master/download-install ) && cd Ubuntu-Server-In-A-Box/maverick_cloud && fab setup Remember from like 3rd grade when … Continue reading
Give E-Mail accounts to your average joe with Postfix and Dovecot
So you need a mail server… You have a domain name, you have your web server. But what about emails? So common, yet so often overlooked. How do you get up and running fast, but with a decently powerful configuration? … Continue reading
Fun with find – power commands in bash for mere mortals
Table of Contents Actually Finding Stuff Doing Stuff With What You Find Command Glue Some Common Examples Many people bemoan the command line. Many people bemoan the GUI. I understand both sides and I say, right tool for the right … Continue reading
Awesome Sauce Bash Prompt Howto
Let’s get busy! Put the following lines in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile and next time you open a terminal it should just work. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 black=$(tput -Txterm setaf … Continue reading
Setting up “no password” server access with SSH public keys
When logging in with SSH, normally you are asked for your password. This is insecure for a number of reasons that are explained in depth else where and that may bore you. There is another option for login that is … Continue reading
Setting up clean rooms for python with virtualenv
Virtualenv is a handy python utility that lets you run separate applications with their own versions of things. In other words you can run one project on Django 1.1 and another on Django 1.2. This means you can develop your … Continue reading
Forrays into Django CMS
First off I highly suggest always running every project in its own virtual environment. You can read my quick start howto with instructions on installing virtualenv and using virtualenvwrapper. Secondly you’ll need to install dev headers for mysql and friends … Continue reading
Learn HTML in a jiffy – a quickstart guide for beginners
Here it is: The Beginner’s Guide to HTML – A Quick Start Tutorial Well I went and done it again – I done wrote some more. I figured the internets could use an up to date standards compliant quickstart for … Continue reading
Learn Programming With PHP
So I done gone and wrote a book. Oops. I was dissatisfied with the current state of the freely available tutorials for learning PHP. I constantly see people asking for help with PHP when they don’t actually understand programming – … Continue reading
Practical usage of the Zend Tool zf.sh or zf.bat
Zend Framework comes with a handy command line program that you can use to quickly build your applications. It even has support for creating models and modules. This program is shipped with the Zend Framework – perhaps not the library … Continue reading
A Zen Guide to Getting Help for Newbies
The Setup So you’ve gone and got it in to your head that you want to make a website, or maybe you want to pump out one of those wicked cool iPhone Apps that are all the rage with the … Continue reading
How To apt-get Yourself a Web Server
You might think of this as a companion tutorial guide to my Ubuntu Server In A Box – One Click Installer or maybe you want to think of that as the companion installer to this guide. Either way I hope … Continue reading
Vim Configuration
Here’s my ~/.vimrc file with all the extra settings I use and some nice macros for writing PHP code. GeSHi is broken because Benny Baumann aka BenBE the creator of GeSHi doesn’t like vim or emacs and so I can’t … Continue reading
Setting up the Doctrine 2 CLI with Zend Framework
Doctrine isn’t much use right now without being able to use the command line, so in addition to setting up your Zend Framework application to use Doctrine 2 you’ll want to set up the doctrine command line utility to work … Continue reading
Converting the Zend Framework application.ini to a PHP array
It’s really easy These are the same foo.bar.baz = "bing" <?php $myCongif[’foo’][’bar’][’baz’] = "bing"; ?> So, if you called the above PHP file config.php, then to load it, just tweak your index.php a little bit, like this <?php require_once APPLICATION_PATH … Continue reading
Doctrine 2 Resource for Zend Framework
Here’s an easy to use, already configured basic setup for Doctrine 2 that you should be able to simply drop in to a Zend Framework application To use this code, simply drop it into either a method in your bootstrap … Continue reading
