Web Development Blog

Well, I finally made it to the Top Commentators list on JohnChow dot com a few days ago. The biggest plus so far has been that my blog on Technorati now has an Authority of 1. I know this probably sounds pathetic, especially since my current rating is 3,897,068, but hey, I know this blog is 2 months old and started at zero. I’ll keep you posted if my rating goes up (or is it down?).

Getting on John’s Top Commentators list has been a strategy of mine to get a pagerank for this site, and to get more traffic to this blog. I guess in that sense it has failed since devtrench.com still has a big fat 0 for a pagerank, and I haven’t seen a spike in traffic since being on the list. However, I have seen a gradual increase in traffic from commenting regularly, and it’s nice to see some of the faces on John’s myBlogLog widget on mine. Hi everyone

It hasn’t been too hard to make a large amount of comments on John’s site. My secret method, which I’m letting you in on for free, is that I keep track of them in an excel spreadsheet that automatically tells me how many comments I’ve made in the last 5 days. There’s some high tech strategy for ya . Since hitting the list, I haven’t been keeping track because now I can see the numbers on his site. John allows you to comment on posts for the last 20 days, so I’ve found that using his Archive is very helpful. I hope that people don’t think I’m spamming John’s blog since I try to make good comments there. In fact, his is the first blog that I’ve ever commented this much on, and now I kind of feel a part of it. I really like John’s writing and all of the tips and tricks he gives out, so I find it really easy to comment there. John wrote a great post about how to comment on websites, and that is what inspired me to start commenting.

Well, as I dredge through the trenches I’ll post this as my first big milestone for this blog. Remember that I have 2 goals for this blog:

• First and foremost, to shed some light on techniques that work for developing websites - like use MODx and WordPress.
• And secondly to increase traffic to this site so I can make some money doing that.

Really, those goals go hand in hand: I want to increase traffic to bring awareness about how it doesn’t have to too hard to make a website work, and that increased traffic should bring in revenue so that I can continue to write. John has already brought so much awareness about how to make WordPress work for you, and I hope to do the same with MODx and other web development techniques.

A big thanks to John for all the info and a big thanks to anyone reading my blog regularly!

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Ok everyone, its time for a new segment on this blog: Links from the Trenches. I thought it would be helpful for me to recap some sites I’ve been surfing during the week that reflect the DEVTRENCH MO. This is going to be a regular weekly think that I’m going to do to help myself and you stay connected with what’s going on out there on the Net.

• Codesqueeze wrote a post about 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed and its great. In fact these are the kind of development scenarios that got me thinking that we work on the front lines in the first place. As some of you know I worked at a University for 3 years, and much of the activity that went on there is reflected in this list. This is a must read for any programmer. Oh yeah, and it’s hilarious.
• Bearskinrug is the web site of illustrator Kevin Cornell. I’m not sure how I found this site, but I know I spent about an hour on it looking at all of the artwork there. This guy is simply an awesome illustrator and cartoonist. Particularly funny is the “The Bear” flash widget found on his portfolio page. Check it out.
• On the more technical side of things, I’ve been trying to figure out how to use Ethereal for quite some time and this website has the top ten Ethereal tips and tricks. It told me some stuff I didn’t know so I thought I’d post it here in case I have any novice network security/packet sniffer people reading this blog. I’ve been interested in packet sniffing and network security more and more over the years, especially since I found out how insecure wireless networks are.

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This is an annoying error that you can get in MODx when uploading new files via the FCK Image Browser, and I’ve only ever seen it in the Internet Explorer browser. The fix for it is quite simple though…

1. Open manager/media/browser/mcpuk/connectors/php/Commands/GetFileUploadProgress.php
2. After //Progresshandler not specified, return generic response (mine is line 46) insert:

   header ("content-type: text/xml");
   echo "< ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" ?>\n";

3. See if that works

If that doesn’t work then here is the MODx forum post that goes into more detail. A variety of problems can cause this issue (like the file being larger than the allowed max size).

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