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my digital life by gregory tomlinson


Blog Optimization - Enabling Mod DeflateJanuary 1

Getting started with Apache Mod Deflate was fairly simple. Like mod concat from the first piece in the Blog Optimization series, it’s just a matter of compiling and installing mod deflate. Mod deflate comes with Apache 2.2, the first step is locating it.

prompt:$ find / -name mod_deflate.c # change directory (cd) to the location of mod_deflate.c prompt:$ apxs -i -a -c mod_deflate.c prompt:$ apachectl configtest # make sure the syntax is okay prompt:$ apachectl graceful # restart the server

Now that mod_deflate is enabled, it’s time to configure it. I couldn’t find much information during the research phase on configuring the module. I knew from previous experience that I wanted to gzip, or deflate, all static files. Eventually, I found this post on configuring mod_deflate with cPanel. It was helpful, I modified it slightly to include a few other file types

<Location /> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text
Blog Optimization - Getting Started with Mod ConcatDecember 27 2008

Following my post on Blog Bloat, I have finally gotten around to installing mod_concat. I asked my hosting provider ServInt to handle the upgrade to Apache 2.2.x, they did it in about 20 mins - thanks guys, you rock!

The actual installation of mod_concat was fairly simple thanks to the included instructions, though it lacked a few of the finer points, like needing to install the module into the Apache modules directory and modifying httpd.conf to include mod_concat, this is easily handled by adding the -i and -a flag. First grab the project out of SVN, then you can compile it.

prompt:$ svn checkout http://modconcat.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ modconcat-read-only prompt:$ cd modconcat-read-only/mod_concat prompt:$ apxs -i -a -c mod_concat.c #Make sure the config file is working okay prompt:$ apachectl configtest #Then it's safe to restart and use the concat module prompt:$ apachectl -k graceful

That’s all it takes to get the module working with Apache 2.2.x. I setup a super simple test here to ensure mod_concat is working.

Optimiz

Installing SVN on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4December 26 2008

This couldn’t be easier, all I did was run the following, once I figured out what flavor of Red Hat the IT team had installed on my machine.

prompt:$ rpm -i http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/bin/subversion-1.3.2-1.rhel4.i386.rpm

You can find SVN for your operating system here. Many thanks to Wijaya for helping me quickly determine my flavor of Red Hat in the blog post here.

My 10 Favorite WordPress 2.7 PluginsDecember 25 2008

WordPress is pretty great out-of-the-box, but sometimes you just need a little more. This is a quick list of my 10 favorite WordPress 2.7 plugins. I have used all of these and I can’t live without most of them.

  • WP-Cache - A nice little caching plugin, avoid outages from the ‘Digg effect’ a.k.a. the Slashdot effect.
  • WPtouch iPhone Theme - A nice little iPhone theme that enhances performance and navigation on the iPhone and iTouch.
  • WP-Syntax - Syntax Highlighting for most popular languages.
  • Ultimate Google Analytics - A plugin that places the Google Analytics code on your blog and removes the code when logged-in users are above a certain level.
  • Disqus Commenting System - Disqus is the hottest new commenting system on the block, its developers and staff are very friendly. Lots of other pluses - check it out.
  • WordPress.com Stats - At a glance statistics. This one isn’t perfect and the Google plugin is much more accurate, I enjoy this mostly because I can see the traffic numbers f
JavaScript Array MergeDecember 25 2008

For a project, I needed the ability to merge an array from a remote source with an array living in memory in the browser. JavaScript doesn’t have an explicit function that handles this outright, so I cooked up a little prototype that I am sharing today.

The specific issue I was concerned with was the original array could possibly have thousands of items, so I didn’t want to use a for or while loop for this very reason. Also, I wanted to have a single method that handled adding elements at the front of the array, end of the array or replacing any items in the array. Finally, it was important to my project that the original array is not modified.

Let’s start by looking at the final prototype product.

Array.prototype.smoothInsert = function( newArray, start, howMany ) { /* This code takes an array and replaces a section of an array with the values found in the new array   * howMany is optional */ var al = howMany || newArray.length; if( start < this.length ) { var begin = this.slice(0, start); var end = this.slice(