If you all the sudden get database errors (select, cannot login, cannot write, etc) - and everything looks ok (from the database end of things) check to make sure you have not run out of disk space. How do I know? Well - let’s say last night I had to do a major fall clean-up. If you know me and my monitoring habits, this will sound a bit confusing because one of the many things I monitor is disk space, but when your hosting company accidentally halves your disk space - trouble can occur, and quickly. I have not had many issues at all with Liquid Web - but this was major…and handled a little slower than I would have liked.

What do you do when you have thousands of lines of CSS and probably have hundreds of lines within the thousands that are no longer used…but you have no idea because multiple people have contributed? You use the CSS Redundancy Checker.

I have been doing a lot of work recently on a remote server and have needed to use a text editor - so I decided to use the ever-so-easy nano. Problem is - the files I am working on are very long and editing them is not fun. I finally decided to look through the man pages (I am an emacs person myself) and found something that ended up saving me tons of time..."go to line number". If you are editing a file and know you need to edit something on line 1245, you would type in:

and it would open the file to line 1245 so you do not need to scroll down. Thank you man pages!

I have been working on a project with a few clients where they are moving all their static content (as well as creating some dynamic content) into a CMS. They have about fifty pages done and wanted to check the links on their site to see what was broken so I directed them to the W3C link checker. I had not thought about that W3C tool in awhile, but I wanted to mention it here because it is a great free way to check the links on your site. When using this tool, make sure to check the check the "Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth" to make sure it follows all your links.

If you ever are not sure of the path to one of your scripts of files (.htpasswd), you can easily find out by creating a new PHP file, and then copying the following code into the file:

[php][/php] After you save the file, view it in your browser and you will see the location of your file. No more guessing if it is /home/username/public_html/ or some other naming convention that your host might use.

Over the past few months I have had the chance to look at a number of hosting companies and their "control panels" by working with a number of clients. It seems as a number of people flock to godaddy.com because of it's price (really cheap), but I have learned - once again - that you get what you pay for. If you want to have a very simple 1-5 page static web site, go for it - use whatever host you want. If you want anything else, after working with over 20 hosting companies, I can easily say that I would not go with godaddy.com. Why?

The admin area (control panel) is horrible in general. Not intuitive at all.
No backup on demand (or scheduled) available
Working with .htaccess files is a pain - as they do not work right away, there is a "wait time".
The admin area (control panel) is slow and sometimes even times out
Free support is almost non-existent
Creating a database is not instantaneous
Paid support (talk to someone) is a joke (at least in my experience)
I am not alone in my recommendation

I could go on, but I have a busy day ahead of me. ... [more]

If there is one thing I cannot stand more than anything when it comes to computer support - it is failure to have a backup strategy. If you have pictures, email, documents, music, videos, etc that you consider valuable - do something about it. There are many ways to easily backup your personal data and I wanted to throw out another option if you are not using a remote backup system: Jungle Disk.

With Jungle Disk, you can easily, cheaply (15¢ per gigabyte), and securely transfer and store your data using Amazon.com's S3 ™ Storage Service. I have all my data backed up to a 500 gigabyte FireWire external drive every night, but if something were to happen to my house, or my computer/drive was stolen - I am left with nothing. Knowing all my pictures, documents, music, and anything else I really need or want is available off site makes me sleep easier - and it will for you too.

Never had a drive failure or any data loss? You will - so you might as well prepare now.