Yesterday I picked up three PDFs for less than half of the regular price of just one hard copy book. Each day there will be a different deal, so make sure to check back daily for the titles that may interest you. Subjects include ASP.net, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, PHP, MySQL, Photoshop, Ruby on Rails and more.

I already own half a dozen SitePoint titles in hard-copy format and thought to give the electronic formats a whirl. I’m reading the PDF versions of my books, but you may like to use the EPUB or MOBI format that is also in the downloadable epacks.

Yet another good reason to upgrade your browser is to take advantage of newer features. Caching of images and other often-used files can be controlled by your browser.

IE 9 apparently has caching defaulted to ON. Firefox 5 does not.

Here’s how to enable caching in Firefox.

• Type “about:config” in the address bar and hit enter.
• Accept the warning by clicking on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
• Scroll down to ‘browser.cache.disk.enable’ and double click. You will see the value in the fourth column toggle from false to true, if caching was not enabled already.
• Scroll down to ‘browser.cache.memory.enable’ and double click to enable by setting it to true.

That’s it! The performance of your Firefox browser will speed up, noticeably so. After enabling caching, the time to download pages from a client’s site went from 6-10 seconds to 2-3 seconds!

Making the content appear quickly in front of site visitors should be a goal for all site developers. And besides, reducing the load on your server is always a good idea, don’t you think?

To cache a header image, or other images for that matter, or to make sure that files aren’t downloaded too often, use an Expires Header in your .htaccess file.

#Expire Header
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months"
</FilesMatch>

Note that all types of image files, as well as stylesheets, javascript, flash and other file types, can be cached with this Expire Header.

Perlfect Search is an open source solution that was easy to upload, install and configure. Except for one small detail.

A dreaded 500 Internal Server Error appeared upon running a search for the first time. Aaack! It took a while to find the problem and my web host came to the rescue. The first line in the search script and indexer script both had a trailing slash and that made the files ‘not found’ on this particular web host.

The first line of the perl scripts at my host (your host or server may have things set up differently) should be this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

not this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl/ -w

Check the Perlfect FAQs for more help. The README file that comes in the script zip package will help immensely for installing and indexing via SSH.

WordPress Database Backup is a plugin that I’d relied on in the past to keep a randomly backed up copy of a WordPress site. Unfortunately, that’s not a complete solution as the images or uploads folder, as well as any modified theme pages, won’t be saved during the database backup. Nor will the blog links! Keep an archive copy of everything you put on your website, so everything can be reconstructed in the case of a disaster or even a host switch. In case a website is made up of more than one database, you’d need a different backup solution than what a WordPress plugin can provide.

Use CRON jobs to automate the task of backing up all your hard work. It might take a while to figure things out, but once you do you’ll be secure in the knowledge that you did it and your data is safe.

At first I didn’t have the command part right for the cron job to work. After the time elements you need to indicate the path to sh, any flags (none used here), and the path to the shell script. In this case the command was -

/bin/sh /home/owner/backup/automysqlbackup.sh

where “owner” is the CPanel login name, and “backup” is an empty directory or folder that you create above the public_html directory. Some hosts will have a folder called “etc” already created for you. Check with your host!

In this case the /bin/sh directory was already created at the server level, in other words, I didn’t have to create it. The corresponding first line in the .sh file was -

#!/bin/sh

Originally, the .sh file had an opening #!/bin/bash, but that didn’t work on this particular host.

• A great explanation of CRON commands is found in the rainbow. Nice touch, guys!
• Best explanation of setting up automysqlbackup shell script.
• Get the open source database backup script from sourceforge, automysqlbackup.

The host tells me the script is running successfully, so I know the lack of output is my fault – somewhere. Checks the paths…found it! An error in the path for the configuration file lead to the script trying to run with default parameters, some of them blank. The script ran as far as it could so there was no error reported by the cron daemon to my email address. When the output is successful a log file is sent to that address.

When I finally got the paths straightened out, the backup files were zipped and in their proper places and an email log was sent to the proper address at the time the cron job was to run. It worked! Now I’ll go back and set up a couple of other cron jobs to back up other databases. I’ll use the same script, modified to back up different sets of databases on different schedules.

• If you’re looking for a simple script to make one database backup and save that on your server, check out DaniWeb’s CRON job for backup.
• Backing up your home directory is just as easy!

Once you have your sites backed up automatically, you can do away with any backup plugins that you may have relied on in the past. When at all possible, automate the task of backing up a database. It’ll make your life easier!

As with any kind of software, there are free and open source alternatives to paid versions. The one pay-software for site stats worth mentioning here is called Mint and is found at haveamint.com. It’s a totally configurable way to look at your site stats. If you don’t have many web properties, the $30 per site license isn’t too bad.

Let’s take a look at the software that doesn’t cost anything but an investment of time….

Site statistics are included in CPanel which comes with most hosting packages. Once you sign in to CPanel, look under the Logs section for Awstats or Webalizer Stats. More people seem to talk about using Awstats, but if you go to Webalizer Stats and click on any month name under the summary you’ll get all the same data that is provided by Awstats. Pick one whose layout is easy to read and you’ll have your site statistics at your fingertips.

Google Analytics (GA) is geared towards marketers and can easily be integrated with an Adwords or Adsense account, both from Google. If you want to formulate a plan for meeting sales goals or increasing conversions, the big G can help you when you link your existing accounts. Some folks have written that they don’t trust Google and don’t want Big Brother knowing their every move online, so they shy away from using a GA account.

Instead, you could rely on a free alternative called statcounter. Visit statcounter.com and click on the features page. You’ll see many of the same items listed that occur in your CPanel stats options. The downside to using statcounter or GA is that you’ll have to dig into the page code and insert a few lines of code. It’s not that hard, but it does take a little time to set up. You only have to set it up once, though.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, try the stats plugin found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/ for a pretty look at your site stats.

I couldn’t get this plug-in to work until I changed “.php” to “*.*” in the ‘include files of type’ box. When I tried that it took mere seconds for the software to replace 180 instances of a single change across all my files in the designated folder.

Fantastic savings of time and effort! Thanks Chami!

Learn more about the best open source alternative to expensive image editing programs. Lots of screen shots will help you learn tricks of the GIMP.

I considered writing my own php script where I would have separate pull-down boxes for the day, month and year to assure that there was no mistake as to the actual dates. That would take a little extra format massaging to create the date in MySQL format, so I looked for scripts that others had already written. Who wouldn’t?

Formatting dates can drive a person crazy. Does ’06-08-2000′ mean June 8th or the 6th of August? Writing for the Web should be universal. The month-day format that we tend to use in the U.S. is confusing to everybody else who uses the day-month format, and vice-versa.

Writing by hand I like to use this format ’12-Mar-2000′ so there is no ambiguity, but that format needs to be converted to ‘YYYY-MM-DD’ format when sending dates to MySQL.

So, what are my requirements for such a Date-Picker Script?

• easy, intuitive for the user
• easy for me with output in MySQL format (YYYY-MM-DD)
• unrestricted license would be nice

I tried a few different date picker scripts and decided upon SpiffyCalendar because it’s the most advanced, yet easily modified to suit my purposes. Also, there is an established support system via a Yahoo! user group. That’s really nice, and unexpected.

Here’s the scripts I tried and the pros and cons for each…most weren’t as user-friendly as SpiffyCalendar.

PHP Calendar

PROS
• I like the look of this calendar, but it’s difficult to determine how to modify the calendar other than for css of calendar appearance.
• Date output is already in MySQL format: YYYY-MM-DD

CONS
• Can’t select year from calendar unless you click back or forward to the actual month.
• Ugly and excessively long query strings in links.

DatePick

PROS
• I like the little calendar icon.

CONS
• Can’t select year from calendar unless you click back or forward to the actual month.
• Timestamp is included. Don’t need it.
• Relies on javascript and pop-up window to select date.
• Calendar doesn’t update well when moving from month to month. Part of the calendar doesn’t get loaded in so all days are not selectable. Have to manually widen window to see all days.
• Can’t select year directly, have to click through months to get to next year.
• No directions on how to modify output.

DateTimePick

PROS
• I like the little calendar icon.
• Can modify output via provided directions.

CONS
• Can’t select year from calendar unless you click back or forward to the actual month.
• Relies on javascript and pop-up window to select date.
• Calendar doesn’t update well when moving from month to month. Part of the calendar doesn’t get loaded in so all days are not selectable. Have to manually widen window to see all days.
• Can select year directly, but calendar doesn’t update well.

SpiffyCalendar

Sign up to the Yahoo! Group to download the script. Script used to be offered at the now defunct GeoCities. The above link is the first place I found it posted afterwards.

PROS
• Calendar pops into page, not a separate window.
• Can modify output via provided directions.
• Can get help at Yahoo! Groups.
• Unrestricted license.
• Can refresh page containing calendars as link is not modified after picking a date or two.
• Highlights holidays, although will have to remove Dec 1st developer’s birthday. (OK, modified holiday array in script on lines 86-87.)

CONS
• Format of date will have to be modified for MySQL. (OK, Added "cal1.dateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd"; after instantiation in header for calendar named ‘cal1′.)
• Relies on javascript.
• Had to modify the images folder location in the .js file to an absolute address, although things worked fine on my local server with a relative address.

I’m sure there are plenty of these date-picker scripts floating around the Web. Do you have a different one to share with us? Leave a comment!

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