Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

Interesting Analytics

I thought this would be fun to show everyone.

Accident Analytics

The amount of visitors coming to karlherrick.com is fairly consistent, so I was surprised to see such a spike when I was in a car accident recently. There must be some correlation to draw here.

I am thinking of breaking my leg next week to drive the traffic back up. ;-)

Just kidding.

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 19th, 2010 in Web Development | No Comments »

Switching MySQL Databases on 1and1

After wanting to test Wordpress 3.0 on a 1and1 hosting account, I ran into the following issue… the particular setup I was dealing with had only one database available, and it wasn’t MySQL 5, but instead MySQL 4… furthermore, it was a version lower than 4.1.2, which more recent versions of Wordpress require as a minimum.

So after doing a bit of research on what others had done, I went about fixing the problem. Interestingly enough, 1and1 could have made some money in this situation if they would allow customers to simply purchase another database to add to their packages, but no, they want an entire upgrade to be purchased.

The first step was to backup the website and database. I ssh’ed into the web host:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

Then I backed up the database. The command below will dump all of the databases on the host (in this case, only one MySQL 4.x database) into a dated bzip file, in the home directory.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysqldump -C -A -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword | bzip2 -cq9 > ~/`date +%F-%I-%M-%p`-db-backup.sql.bz2

Now to backup the site itself (not only in case disaster struck, but this would get a local copy of the sql dump I just made as well). On a local OS X workstation (or Ubuntu, if that suits your tastes) I ran something similar to the following:

username@localhostname:~$ mkdir ~/website_backups
username@localhostname:~$ rsync -avz –exclude="logs" $username@example.com: ~/website_backups/

From there, I was able to log into the 1and1 control panel and delete the existing database. This allowed me to setup a new one, and in particular, choose MySQL 4 or 5 as the type.

Back to the 1and1 hosting account:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

I uncompressed the sql dump:

username@remotehostname:~$ bunzip2 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql.bz2

and was greeted with the raw sql in the file, “2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql”. From here it was only a hop skip and a jump away to restoration. It was necessary to edit the sql file in order to have it restore properly to the newly created database that was just created:

username@remotehostname:~$ nano -w 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

And I changed the $oldDatabaseName to $newDatabaseName.

–
– Current Database: `$oldDatabaseName`
–

CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ `$oldDatabaseName`;

USE `$oldDatabaseName`;

ctrl+o, enter, and ctrl+x, to save the file and exit nano. The sql dump was now ready to restore to the new database.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysql -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword $databaseName < 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

The only other things to do were to update any existing applications that needed the new database name, username, hostname, and password.

As a note, if you are updating a Wordpress install to point to a new database, this info can be changed in the file, wp-config.php.

Posted by Karl Herrick on January 14th, 2010 in Wordpress, Backups, Apple, Linux, Hosting, Web Development, Bash | No Comments »

Portfolio

I have gathered some of the better work that I have done over the years, took some screenshots, and posted them to a running instance of MooFlow. Hopefully it can serve as a portfolio for others to view and discuss.

See it at the following url: http://karlherrick.com/portfolio/

Posted by Karl Herrick on October 11th, 2009 in Wordpress, Javascript, PHP, XML, Web Development, Firefox, Hosting | No Comments »

Magic vs. iUI

I wonder how Magic Framework stacks up against iUI: iPhone User Interface Framework. I have used the latter with great results… maybe next time I will give Magic a try. ;-)

Posted by Karl Herrick on August 6th, 2009 in Javascript, Apple, Web Development | No Comments »

Watching MooFlow

karlherrickcom-mooflow-demo-480×231.jpg

I’ve been hacking around with and watching the development of MooFlow over the last few days. It looks and works pretty nice in most browsers and has quite a few options to play with. In this MooFlow demo posted, most options are enabled and the images are imported from page.html.

Other examples at the MooFlow site showcase some of the other features, like images that have external links attached to special buttons, drop down descriptions that float over the image, and the ability to get your images via JSON.

The development version still has a few noticeable bugs:

In Firefox 2.0.0.12: When resizing the stage (bottom right button), the quicklook button shows. When pressed, the image appears under the stage. The user may not realize this until the stage is restored to it’s normal size.

In IE7: When clicking the quicklook button, the image is not zoomed to full size.

Even though there are a few bugs to be worked out, MooFlow already looks great. Not to mention all of the ways it could be used. It even accepts keyboard and mouse scroll input. What’s not to like?

Posted by Karl Herrick on March 29th, 2008 in Javascript, Web Development | No Comments »