Apex81

I can’t believe it.  It’s been a bad month for Canadians.  Rogers is  testing a system that lets them embed content on any website they want, that is being navigated to on their network.  Essentially users will get a nice little box of goodies telling them they’ve almost reached their bandwidth limit.  Great, right? WRONG!  What’s next? Ads for rogers, ad campaigns based on statistics gathered from this embedded code?  Who the hell do they think they are?  I can’t wait to get the hell away from rogers.  As soon as my plan is done for my cellphone I’m getting the hell out of there. I hope you all do the same. Rogers can go to hell.

From a web designers perspective, I’m screwed.  I’m going to be getting calls non stop from clients asking me why this is on their website, and how I can remove it.  Great.  They won’t  take no for an answer, and I’ll be left with a big freakin headache that can’t be rectified.  Dear god, please someone with money sue them out of this practice. Google? Microsoft? Apple? ANYONE?  We need some real politicians with balls that will stand up against this shit.  Yeah, I’m looking at you Mr. Minister, if you want my vote in the next election grow a set of balls. You can read the article here

I’ve been done classes for a week now, and I officially have the burnout!  I can’t focus on anything at all, and any time I try to accomplish something my motivation fails me.  I guess it doesn’t help that I am waiting on a number of projects to get started. When I have work to do I can get back into the swing of things super-quickly, but if I have a lull it’s game over.  I seriously hope this week doesn’t go down the tubes.  I have 2 sites to get started on, but I’m waiting on clients.  I have 2 sites in the finishing up phase, and one of the clients has gone MIA, coincidental? I think not.  I also have 4 potential sites on the horizon.  I’m hoping those potentials work out because they’re for fields I’ve never worked in before.  That’s one of the things that I love about web design, it affords me the ability to learn about all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t normally get involved in.  Fun stuff.  I’m also trying to think of creative ways to advertise on the cheap… anyone have any good ideas?  It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s that I have a hard time spending money on things that don’t guarantee results.  I plan on looking into advertising on the metro system here tomorrow, but out side of that I’m at a loss. Help a brotha out!  Drop me a comment and let me know if you have any ideas.

I thought that I should probably update you all since I’m going to be super swamped in the upcoming month.  Things have been moving really quickly over the last 2 months for me and I’ve been struggling to find the time to update all of you.  Readership for this blog has hit an all time high, but for some reason I am not completely sure that I trust my stats software that is running right now…  But, here is to hopping that it is… Cheers!

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One of the first things I get asked when doing a website for a new company is if I know a great place around town to get business cards, and advertisements printed.  Unfortunately, I don’t know anywhere around town, but I do know of some great resources online.  It turns out that most of these companies offer affordable printing for most your needs. By affordable, I really mean, a hell of a lot cheaper than anything in my neck of the woods.  I’m in the process of  moving all of my needs to one of these companies, but I have heard great things about all of them around the internet.  Check them out if you’re in need of some new business cards. Read the rest of this entry »

In my quest to use VNC less I’ve come across as pretty helpful command line application to check the health of my server’s disk drives. It’s pretty handy and works well with both OS X Server, and regular OS X 10.4.10. Most of the problems I seem to encounter have to do with messed up file permissions in OS X Tiger, so this comes in really handy for me. Hopefully it will help you out as much as it did for me. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty simple, but for some reason it hasn’t been articulately written on the internet. Creating a database for content management systems from the command line is really simple. Essentially. You create a database, create a user and give him permission to use the database. Viola. Step follow after the jump

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A number of sites in the pipes are coming up to their deadlines, and I’ve reached a bottleneck on a number of them. I usually try to design my sites around a content management system, so that these companies employees will be able to update their own sections, but the more I seem to work with these CMS’s the more I hate them. I’m currently creating a multiple user site, that lets a number of users maintain their own sections of the website simultaneously. I chose wordpress mu, for the backend. It does what it’s designed for really well, but it is not very customizable. I mean, god forbid if I want to create extra fields on a couple pages. It’s a whole song and dance for every new field. A major pain in the ass if you ask me. I’ve been considering writing my own CMS system. One for basic websites to begin with. I will be building all my websites on top of it, and a fee will be included in the design prices. I think it will be worth it in the long run. I’ll still use wordpress for my blog, but i think that it’s a little too complicated for average joe user. What kind of price tag do you guys put on the ability to change the content on your website, removing the need to pay for updates? Anyone?

So, I’ve been trying for the last day to I’ve been trying to get permalinks (pretty urls) working with wordpress and Apache on OS X Server (Tiger 10.4.10).  I have to say, I’m an idiot.  I edited all the proper files, but still couldn’t get the permalinks working. Simply, I forgot to create a .htaccess file in the proper location. Here are the steps: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been really annoyed with VNC access to my webserver. So, I’ve vowed to use ssh to administer that server from the command line. It’s a lot quicker, and I should probably have carried over this technique from my Linux days, but somehow I got caught up in all the pretty graphics that OS X server offers. Anyway, here’s a quick ‘how to’ on how to edit the Apache config files on OS X server in a virtual hosting environment. If you familiar with Unix it’s a walk in the park.

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I’ve decided to write a couple tips for administering OS X Server 10.4.10 (Tiger Server) from the command line both locally and remotely. This first one will help you reboot your server, and shutdown your server. Read the rest of this entry »