Changes Ahead For DEVTRENCH

I’ve been running this blog in earnest for about 2 years and in that time I’ve hopefully put out some useful posts. However, my vision for this site has never been completely realized. I’ve always wanted this site to become a staple resource for web developers of all skill levels but haven’t really worked very had at that goal. During the next year I plan to work more towards that vision and develop some tutorials for beginners and intermediates. These tutorials will be in depth instructions on how to do various web development tasks starting with how to set up your first website, all the way to starting to learn PHP.

Since I don’t have a ton of time on my hands this also means that the blog portion of this site will have to take on a different voice. Blog posts are most likely going to be shorter from now on and be more about web development theory and ideas than actual how-tos.

Hopefully this change will bring more consistency to the site and help me to finish a goal I set out to accomplish over 2 years ago. Thanks to everyone who subscribes to this site and reads when I post, I really appreciate it!

PS. A new design has been in the works for some time and will be released sometime this summer, so look for that too!

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Category: Announcements | Comment Here » | 301 views | Posted: April 19th 2009 08:06 pm

Two Easy Website Traffic Tips

I’ve been developing this website in earnest for almost 2 years now and during those 2 years I’ve learned easy traffic tips that never fail. These might seem easy, and they are, but some do it better than others (and a lot do it better than me). But, no matter how good you do it, these two tips will help you get off the ground traffic wise if you are missing the basics.

Tip #1: Write Content and Wait

That’s right, just write content and wait. It doesn’t even have to be really good content to generate traffic - it just has to be something people want. I couldn’t have guessed the most popular posts on this blog a 2 years ago, and you can’t guess that for your site either. So just write content and wait - some content will do much better than others. A post that gets 10 visits a day now, might get 100 visits a day next year, and that is where the power of this technique lies. This should give you hope if you are just starting out and seeing really weak traffic numbers. Just be patient. Google freaks: Don’t be worried about your pagerank either. This site lost it’s PR 4 months ago. I’d be concerned, but traffic numbers continue to climb. PR is bullshit.

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Category: General | Comment Here » | 342 views | Posted: April 15th 2009 01:10 pm

Simple Email Logger Using cPanel’s Pipe Forwarder

I needed a way to easily log all email being sent from my websites so I devised this solution where I just have to bcc the emails to a single email address and they get placed in a database.

First, add a forwarder in cPanel. Enter a super secret address to forward. I recommend a random string of 20-30 chars. Just make it something someone can’t guess, otherwise your database could be filled with spam. Then select Pipe to a Program and enter the location of where you will put your script. I recommend placing it outside of the web root (public_html in my case). See the screenshot for information on how to enter it. The path to my file is:

/home/my_username/cron/email.php

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Category: Programming | Comment Here (2) » | 731 views | Posted: March 31st 2009 04:44 pm

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