Gerard McGarry

I can't blog right now, which is ironic considering that's exactly what I'm doing.

I think I have the cursed writer's block, brought on by a general malaise about blogging in general, the quality of news reporting and the full-on futility of blogging for money.

Mozilla FireFox and Opera both have a nifty bookmarks feature which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut, sort of like speed-dial for websites.

Here’s how it works: Browse to a website you visit often, say this one. Bookmark the site by either pressing CTRL+D or going to Bookmarks / Bookmark this page.

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

I’m throwing in the towel with Dreamhost. The downtime problems that started in the summer and seem to be intermittently reappearing have caused me to completely lose hope in DreamHost.

I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server (affiliate link) account a few weeks back and have been gradually porting my blogs across one-by-one. With other people following suit, I thought I’d share my notes for moving a WordPress install over to Media Temple.

Any SEO worth his (or her) salt, knows that Google Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages that are available on your site. Using a sitemap, you can basically pass Google an inventory of your content and let wee Googlebot crawl your pages without having to rely on your shaky navigational system!

As you know, I’ve been getting to grips with CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Another little foible that CentOS inherits from Red Hat Enterprise is that it doesn’t include native support for MP3 playback. Again, down to legality/licensing issues. Damn those lawyers!

Just upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Kubuntu Linux yesterday, the Dapper Drake edition. Such a smooth upgrade path - just modify your /etc/apt/sources.list file, replacing every instance of breezy with dapper (back the file up first, of course), then you simply run the following commands:

I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently where I’ve had to retain legacy databases and integrate them into new websites.

In order to do this without damaging the original tables, I find it useful to make a copy of the original database table and use that for the development work. Since I do all of my bespoke CMS development on hosted Microsoft SQL Server databases, I had to hunt down a quick method to copy an existing database table into a new one.

WordPress‘ default theme (Kubrick) is great, but I’ve always had a problem with the title tags that the Kubrick theme generates. They could be so much more search engine friendly, don’t you think?

<title>

	<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

This usually results in the title reading like Interweb World » Perfecting WordPress Title Tags, which is fine.

Because I develop sites using both ASP.NET and PHP, I’m tied to a Windows setup for the foreseeable future. However, I’ve been doing more and more work recently with LAMP-type applications which normally require a working Linux server installation.

Although I currently dual-boot with Kubuntu (because KDE’s pretty), I don’t have the Linux know-how to set up and run Apache/MySQL/PHP. XAMPP is a fantastic alternative, because it runs a fully configured LAMP setup on a Windows machine.