Following on from our last step in setting up an Nginx server, we need a database to store our CMS data in. What's a good database to install on an Ubuntu server? Oh yeah, MySQL!

MySQL is a doddle to install - you simply connect via your SSH client and run the following command:

I've become obsessed in the last few weeks with improving web performance. The more I've looked into optimization techniques, the more Nginx - pronounced "Engine X" - keeps coming up. It's an open source web server that's steadily gaining a name as a companion technology/replacement for Apache. Nginx can be used in two ways

I have a couple of dormant domains at the moment that I'm always threatening to do something with. For the moment though, they serve nicely as testing sandbox for various Drupal-y things I'm working on.

Aptana Studio is free web development software which runs on Linux and Windows alike. I switched to it a few years ago to break my dependence on outdated versions of Dreamweaver.

Lisa and I have been talking quite a bit lately about the impact of Facebook and Twitter on other areas of the internet - specifically forums and blogs.

If you're working on developing websites, it's handy to have a development server to test your designs and code against. If you're running Ubuntu, it's fairly easy to install a LAMP stack - I use mine for running test versions of WordPress and Drupal for themeing, but you can use this setup for all kinds of web development.

In this post, I'm going to show you how to quickly install Apache, MySQL and PHP to give yourself a fully-functioning development server. By the way, I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 to carry out this tutorial.

If you've ever moved your WordPress site to another location, you'll find that all your images end up broken because they all point to the old domain.

The problem is, all the image paths stored in the database are static, so you've got to update them to the new location.

I test out a lot of content management/publishing systems. A lot.

As someone who runs a couple of websites, I make it my business to check out different publishing systems and see how they're cobbled together. Some systems are pretty straightforward to set up and conducive to publishing straight out of the box.

Ever been stuck with a single, wired internet connection, but needing to connect more than one computer to the internet?

You'll be glad to know that with Ubuntu, it's easy to share an internet connection by creating an ad-hoc wireless network. It happened us recently on holiday - we had a single wired network connection, but two laptops. Both machines were wireless enabled.

Here's how to set up the connection:

We maintain a couple of Facebook fan pages for Unreality TV and its sister site, Unreality Shout.