After I bought my Mac Book Pro in March, one of the software I installed instantly was Yahoo! Messenger. I use it to talk to my parents everyday, who are in Bangladesh at the moment. Besides that fact, most of my open source community friends are on Yahoo! Messenger, not to mention few of my friends also.
When I installed YIM, it was kind of disappointing. It didn’t have the voice support and, therefore, I had carry my office laptop everyday with me. As Tithi uses her laptop to work on her course works, I needed to bring in office laptop so that I could talk to my parents back home. I used to constantly check Yahoo! Messenger’s blog and kept my eyes open. Finally about couple of weeks ago I found out that they have released a new build for Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 (BETA). I (literally) started jumping in joy and finally when I talked to my parents later that night, I was really happy. Hope YIM will port all the other fancy features available on Windows version, but I guess I can live with the features offered on the current version. Thank you guys (YIM Team) for making it happen. Keep up the good work.
When I work on my local machine on a website, I usually setup the virtual host on a sub-domain setup on the localhost. I feel comfortable using a sub-domain rather than setting up an Alias. I’ve seen many people know about it, but there are many who don’t, and this is for them.
So what do you have to do to setup a sub-domain on the localhost? It is not a rocket science but one must know where to do it, especially on a Windows box.
On Windows OS browse to {Drive on which your Windows OS is installed}:/{WINDOWS/WINNT}/system32/drivers/etc/. Open “hosts” file into a text editor, and you will see something similar to this:
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost
The last line represents the hop any request to http://localhost/ will go through. The IP 127.0.0.1 is used (usually) for you localhost, and going to http://localhost/ will access the files under the root of directory setup for it. Now if you want to setup a sub-domain called “myself”, i.e. http://myself.localhost/, then you add the following line at the end of the file.
127.0.0.1 myself.localhost
On a Linux box, “hosts” file is located under /etc/. You will require “root” access to edit this file or the user access who has priviledge to edit this file. Similar to Windows system, add the following line into the file:
127.0.0.1 myself.localhost
You don’t have to restart your web server for this change to take effect. But you will have to setup the virtual host to point to this sub-domain, which will require you to restart the web server.
Ever wanted to redirect users from one domain to other or one sub-domain to other without compromising the the file path or query string variables? I’ve come across the requirement when I published my WordPress blog.
For testing, I initially installed WordPress on a testing sub-domain, where I imported all the blog entries and added blog-roll links. After doing so, PHPClasses.org picked up my entries for Grab Yahoo, LinkMeIn and MySpace profile updater as track-back links. Later when I switched to my main sub-domain, I’d to find a way to keep the track-back links as is, and redirect users to the proper locations. The trick was done by .htaccess file.
After reading the apache’s documentation on mod_rewrite module, I’ve successfully implemented it. If you want people accessing http://sub1.yourdomain.com/2/12/some-post-of-yours/ to go to http://sub2.yourdomain.com/2/12/some-post-of-yours/ then in the root of sub1 (first sub-domain) create a .htaccess file and add the following lines:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://sub2.yourdomain.com/$1
I have not read much and not sure if there’s any other option to do this more efficiently; but this trick has served my purpose.
My blog is now powered by WordPress. Since I launched my website, since 2000, I’ve always maintained my own design; even I’ve developed a blog so that I can shape it the way I want. But these days I don’t even have time to write something on my blog and to come up with a new design is something that is kind of IMPOSSIBLE.
So, the thing I’ve decided to do is what you see now. I’ve installed WordPress on my server and just finished importing all my blog entries, setup the pages and, of course, choose the theme. Choosing theme was one of the biggest and time consuming part of this whole process. I always like simple but eye catching design. I don’t know if this design is eye catching to you (the reader) but I really liked it. First time I saw this theme on Lokesh Dhakar’s website, developer of Lightbox script used to overlay images.
After installing WordPress, I’ve been trying to explore different things it offers; different plug-ins, themes, widgets etc. I’ve never used WordPress but the experience so far is good. It has some nice features, which I’ve always wanted to implement on my custom made blog. Now that I’ve decided to use WordPress, it will make my life easier, I hope. I know to add a new page or post is going to be smooth but not sure about choosing new theme. I don’t like to hang around with a single design for a long time. I hope that will be smooth as well
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