Posts tagged ‘Website’

Yesterday was CSS Naked Day. CSS Naked Day was thought up by Dustin Diaz. The purpose of CSS Naked Day is to to promote Web Standards; including proper use of XHTML, semantic markup, and a good hierarchy structure. In other words it disables your CSS for for a 24 hour period in order to promote web standards.

I forgot that yesterday was CSS Naked Day. So when I went to my site, I was pissed that my site was jacked up. My first thought was that my site was hacked. The styling was gone but all of the content was there. Which didn’t make sense why a hacker would do that. That I realized what happened.

That was my first CSS Naked Day that I participated in. It was pretty cool. Click on the image to see a screenshot of my site during CSS Naked Day. Also, a “thank you” goes to Aja Lupas for creating the Wordpress CSS Naked Day plugin that I used.

This took me three days to figure out so hopefully this saves someone else a little bit of time.

The most common use of .htaccess files is removing file extensions, such as index.php, from a website URL. They are much ore powerful than that though. I’m not going to go into the details about what .htaccess files can do, shouldn’t be used for, best practices, or anything else like that. I’m going to show you how to get .htaccess files set up and working with MAMP.

The only requirements are that you have a Mac (that’s the first ‘M’ in MAMP) and the MAMP software already installed. I am using the latest version. MAMP will install everything else you need (Apache, MySQL, and PHP which is ‘AMP’ in MAMP) to get up and running so you can start making your own sites locally.

First and foremost, the location of your website files in MAMP need to go in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ That may sound like common sense but that’s what took the longest for me to figure out. I had my files in /Applications/MAMP/bin/mamp/ which is where all of the files for the start page is located. I just made a folder inside there and was going to the site at http://localhost:8888/MAMP/myfolder No matter what I did, the .htaccess file would not work at all from within that directory. So make sure your websites files are in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ or a folder within.

The next thing you need to know is ‘htaccess’ isn’t the file extension and there isn’t a file name on the file. The dot at the front typically means it is a hidden file on Unix based operating systems (which the Mac is). So you will need to show the hidden files on your machine. There are a few ways to do this. One of the easiest ways is to use a Dashboard widget. Hidden Files Widget is a great widget for this. If the hidden files are hidden, the button will say ‘Show’. If the hidden files are visible, the button will say ‘Hide’. It can’t get any more simple that that. Install the widget then click the ‘Show’ button. Sometimes the desktop icons won’t come back automatically. If they don’t come back after a minute, click on the Finder icon in the dock and they should come back. Now, go to wherever your website files are located. If there is a .htaccess file in the folder, skip the next paragraph. If it is not there, read the next paragraph.

Here is the catch. It’s tough to create a .htaccess file because the Mac thinks ‘htaccess’ is the file extension but you didn’t give the file a name. So it won’t just let you do it. Wordpress creates a .htaccess file for you when you set up a blog locally. I believe Drupal does the same thing but I’m not 100% positive on that. Other applications possibly do as well. If you aren’t installing a CMS like that, you can always create a custom one and download it. Below is a very basic example of a .htaccess file that I typically use. Once you have a .htaccess file, put it in the root of where your website will live.

The .htaccess file can be opened with TextEdit. You can open it with Dreamweaver or almost anything you want. Here is an example of a typical .htaccess file

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

# BEGIN My_Website
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteEngine On
	#RewriteBase /
	RewriteBase /mywebsite/
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
	#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
# END My_Website

The hash marks (#) are comments. I’ll talk a little about the second and third commenta in a second.

If you are developing a site locally, your files may not be in the root of the /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ folder since you may be working on more than one website. That is what the RewriteBase is for. It specifies where the root of your website is in accordance with the root of the domain or local root. In this example, my website and it’s files are in a folder called mywebsite which is inside my /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ folder. Since /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ is my root folder, I don’t have to put that in the path. I just have to put the path from the root folder. If you notice, on the line above that (line 4), I have commented out that line with a hash. When you upload the files to your website, uncomment this line (line 4) and comment out the line after it (line 5). That way the .htaccess file works when you get it on the actual site. If you are not uploading the files to the root of your website, set the path accordingly.

The third comment (line 9) is a variation of the line above it (line 8). Both work pretty much the same. You don’t have to have the first and last comment lines. You can delete them and it won’t effect anything.

That is literally all I had to do to get the site working. I saw sites that wanted me to edit httpd.conf files and php.ini files and all kinds of files under the sun. I didn’t have to though. If you do need to mess with those files, there are a couple pretty good walkthroughs to help you out here and here.

It’s official. I have moved to WordPress. I used to be on Mango Blog but decided to switch over to WordPress when I decided to start learning PHP. I’ll be migrating all of the Mango Blog posts over to WordPress. If what you are looking for isn’t here yet, come back tomorrow and it may be back up by then.

[Update] I am adding in some of my previous posts (manually of course), and for some reason Mango Blog had a bunch of my posts in May. I’d say 3/4 of my posts were in May. Which isn’t right. Mango Blog went screwy somewhere.

I decided to shut down my site and start from the ground up. The site was about 4 years old and was in need of a redesign. So I decided to make it a blog. In the blog I cold put all my source code and everything else I wanted to do.

My site was on a Coldfusion 7 server. So I requested that my host, CrystalTech, move it to a Coldfusion 8 server. I submitted the form and it said it would take up to 24 hours. After I woke up the next day I was excited to start working on the site. The problem was, after 31 hours, they still hadn’t moved it to the new server. So I submitted a ticket asking what the issue was. Apparently they never got the request. I have trouble believing this because I got the confirmation email that the request was submitted. So I had to resubmit the request and wait another 24 hours in order to start working on the site.

Ever since CrystalTech got bought up by Newtek, their server has really gone downhill. Every time I request something to be done, I have to stay on them to make sure they do it. Otherwise they mess it up somehow.

Welcome to v4 of my blog! Sort of. The first version I made myself. After 5 years of using it, it became weak and sloppy. So I moved to CFBloggy. The person that wrote that pissed me off by not answering my questions. So then I moved to BlogCFC. I hadn’t even released the BlogCFC version when someone told me about the greatness that is Mango Blog. It’s only about a year old but it seems like features for it are going to be coming down for it left and right. So I decided to jump on the bandwagon now. My biggest problem with it is code blocks. You have to disable Javascript in order to add a block of code so it colors it. Once you have submitted the post you can re-enable Javascript. What a hassle!

I started on a new blog, as you can see. The old blog I wrote myself and it was more irritating and clunky than useful. This one is using a ColdFusion blog application called CFBloggy. So far I am happy with it. So be patient with me while I get everything up and running. The old blog posts, more than likely, will not be ported over to this one. They are lost forever. By the way, this is the new address to my blog. Eventually the old one will redirect you here. That will happen when I get v3 of the site up. This is step one towards v3 of my site.