edmann.com 2.0.1 alpha

I have to say that the new Firefox 3 Beta 2 release is awesome. I just got it installed on my machine, and i do visibly notice that things load allot faster. I use FCKeditor on the back-end of my blog, and it does not have a choppy load. It loaded just like a page would. Heck this could just be me and my machines, but it is noticeable. 

There are several improvements in the Beta 2, and i am looking forward to the final product. When you open new tabs there is no noticeable lag.  Like i said before the form items take the look of the current theme that you are using on Linux. The form fields look so much better then they do in FF2.x.

I need to go spend some time playing around with it more, but this release is awesome. Whenever i get on a persons machine the first thing i do is look for FF. If i don't find it i download it and install it on there machine. I tell them to use it and not the other browser. Most the time i am on there machine to fix something, so when i tell them to use FF they listen. If i did not know what i was doing or talking about they would not have asked me to work on there machine in the first place. I recommend FF to everyone that uses a computer. But that's just me. :-)

This is my first post to the new blog system that i am working on. There are allot of things left to do, but i now have it so that i can post to it. I need to get the comment system working, i should have that done sometime this week. And there are several items in the Admin console that i need to work on.

I had to close the comments because they have not been fully tested. It should not take me that long to get it done.

I am just happy to have this thing working. It did not take me long to write the code to port from my old b2evolution blog system that was on mysql. Now it all runs under postgresql and the framework that i have been working on for other projects.

I need to get the pingback stuff working so i can ping the syndication sites.

Now that i have the template for the site, i can integrate the gallery more into the site. I have lot's of work ahead of me on this, however i am happy at the progress that i have made in a few weekends.
Just allot of progress for this system and it's going very well.

Ok here are some docs on how to do virtual hosts. I do this allot on Unix machines, but found that windows has a little different setup.
I have learned that in the httpd.conf file you need to look for /conf/extra/httpd-xampp.conf. This is the start of the extra config files that you can include in apache. What i would recommend is that you create a new directory under extra called sites or enabled_sites. Then add a new line to the httpd.conf file as such.
Include conf/extra/sites/*.conf

After saving the file make or change into the extra/sites directory. We are going to make a new config file naming it dev1.conf. You can change the name to something that will work for you, i however will use the dev1 name in this post.

The dev1 file should contain the following code more config options can be added, but what is posted will get you started.

Note: You will need to change the DocumentRoot before you restart Apache
Note2: Also wrap your Document Root path in double quotes and don't include a trailing slash.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName dev1.edmann.com
DocumentRoot "C:\Documents and Settings\ed_mann\workspace\dev1"
ErrorLog logs/dev1-error.log
CustomLog logs/dev1-access.log common
<Directory />
Order deny,allow
Deny from none
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Edit the httpd-vhosts.conf file in the extra directory and uncomment the NameVirtualHost *:80 line.
I like to keep my logs for each project separate. This helps trouble shoot problems... At least for me it does.
Now you need to edit your etc/hosts file. Windows has one and it is found in the following directory.

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

We need to add a new host for our dev1 Virtual host. Something like the following will work: 127.0.0.1 dev1.mysite.com
or just 127.0.0.1 dev1
Create a index.php file in the directory of you new dev1 site. You can put the following content. <? php phpinfo(); ?>
Now start or restart apache and try to go to the dev1 website. You can just type in dev1 and it should take you to the index page and display the php info.
Let me know if you have any problems. Once you have one dev project working, just copy the dev1.conf file to dev2.conf change the path and restart apache. Edit your hosts file, and you should be good to go.

Trying out Firefox 3.0b1, and i have to say that i can see the difference between this version and FF 2.0.0.9. The speed improvements are there, but i am not sure if that's just me thinking that it's faster. The forms look like they are picking up the Gnome theme settings. The fonts look better. This may because i am using Fedora 7 and FF2 just did not pick them up correct. I checked some of my websites and they all still work, and don't look like they need any modifications. This was not the case when IE7 came out. Heck i still have some sites that need major work because IE7 does not render them correct. I still need to check some of the new applications that i am working on to insure that they are still working. But so far this looks very nice. I think i will keep it as my default for a while just to get a better feel for it. In other news the DlzSync tool for bind that i have been working on is almost complete enough for me to use full time. I still need to edit the code and use cursors, but i don't think this will take long. "Famous last words". Also we have a new domain for dlzSync, it will be online in a few more weeks. Documentation should be coming soon as well. This is for the people that want to role there own. Just use our java version as a reference. I can do one in php, perl, and maybe python. I won't have time for it anytime soon, but it can be done.