How long as it been since you updated the copyright date on your website? I don’t know about you but I see this as one of those little things that is important. Same as a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Did you know that you can keep the copyright date on your site up-to-date with just one simple line of code?

Yep, all you have to do is use the following code:
<?php print date('Y'); ?>

That’s all it takes for your site to display an up-to-date copyright date. Blogging isn’t quite so easy but you should really get rid of the blog if you’re not going to post anything to it. You’re probably losing sales because people wonder if you’re still around. Neglected blogs make me wonder what else you neglect.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

It’s the Little Things

Want a quick hack to boost speed of your pages? There are two ways to accomplish this.

• Login to your server as root or normal with sudo privileges.
  • open your php.ini with vi (command may vary depending on where your php.ini file is located)

  vi /etc/php.ini

  • Find and uncomment (default is disabled), or add the following line:

  zlib.output_compression = On

• This method enhances every site/page using php on the server by sending compressed files to clients that support it.
• The second method will affect only a single site and requires only access to your .htacess file.
  • open your .htacces file
  • add the following line

  php_flag zlib.output_compression On

Update: I plan to do some testing on performance to see if this really does help. Just simple visual and file download tests show that it does to me but more data is needed, coming soon!
image credit

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Enhancing PHP speeds (Drupal and Wordpress too)

So I really dig Alex King’s Popularity plugin but I’m disappointed that he’s not updated it for WP 2.5 yet. So since it took me forever to find the information on fixing it I’ll post it here. WARNING if you break it, its not my fault! Also FYI this is a temporary fix until the actual plugin is upgraded, this just gets things working, its not perfect.

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

If you get an error (most likely with a new installation) about a Table not existing, the following code should be run in phpmyadmin or any other SQL database access program (usually the wordpress table prefix is wp_ make sure you change this to reflect your local settings):

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS <wordpresstableprefixhere>ak_popularity (
post_id int(11) NOT NULL,
total int(11) NOT NULL,
feed_views int(11) NOT NULL,
home_views int(11) NOT NULL,
archive_views int(11) NOT NULL,
category_views int(11) NOT NULL,
single_views int(11) NOT NULL,
comments int(11) NOT NULL,
pingbacks int(11) NOT NULL,
trackbacks int(11) NOT NULL,
last_modified datetime,
KEY post_id (post_id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS <wordpresstableprefixhere>ak_popularity_options (
option_name varchar(50) NOT NULL,
option_value varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Alex’s post regarding his plugins Wp 2.5 issues.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

How to Fix Alex King’s Popularity Plugin

I’m not really happy with my theme but after spending several hours poking around in the CSS I decided that I’ve got more important things to work on As for everything else, all the posts appear to be showing up from Google with redirects so there shouldn’t be any broken links. Now to migrate the project pages over! Suggestions on the theme would be greatly welcomed. Comment here or drop me a line on IM/email.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get around to making the changes I really want to see before too long here. Did I mention that Buckcherry is awesome? Well now you know!

P.S. For all of you that read this in your Feed Reader, please take an extra few seconds to drop by and let me know what you think in the comments!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Upgrade Complete! (for now)