One of my fun little side projects officially launched last night. It’s called wpzipper.com and it makes it incredibly easy to generate a fresh WordPress zip file with all the plugins you want already in the right place.
If you’ve ever installed WordPress plugins, you know that you have to download them all one by one and then upload them all to your plugins folder on the server. I’ve thought for a while now that it would be so much simpler if I could just download the WordPress zip file with all the specific plugins I wanted already in place. Well, I finally got some time to put together some tests and it all seemed to work perfectly. So, I’ve put it all together in a new, free website so everyone can benefit.
At first, I was going to just make it an extension of wpstar.com. However, as it all started to come together and I began envisioning features that would make it even more useful (like adding themes in the same way), I decided it deserved it’s own home.
This started out as a simple tool that would help make my life a little easier. If others find it useful, I’ll be adding a few more features I have in mind that will make it even more so.
What are you waiting for? Go check it out at wpzipper.com and let me know what you think! I appreciate any feedback you might have.
With USB thumb/jump drive prices as low as they are, it is more and more common for people to have one or more laying around. I had one I wasn’t using very often and wanted to put it to good use. A friend of mind had been telling me how he was able to run Firefox and several other programs off of his drive. I hadn’t tried it yet, but it sounded pretty cool.
I thought about all the time I spend on half a dozen different web projects and how sometimes files get scattered across different computers and laptops that I use. I also don’t have a formal development environment set up because most of my projects aren’t large enough to really rate the time investment in setting one up. So, I usually find myself developing sites on old domains I own or in subfolders, which can get confusing. What I needed was a fully-fledged web server on a usb drive that I could take everywhere I go and use on any computer.
Well… that’s exactly what I found. Without much searching, I came across an amazing project called XAMPP from Apache Friends. XAMPP is an “easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl. [It's] very easy to install and use - just download, extract and start.”
It really is as easy as they say. Below are the steps I took to get my own “pocket server” running:
- Download XAMPP Lite (the lite version is smaller and doesn’t have as many “extras”).
- UnZip the archive to the root of your USB drive.
- Open up the xampp folder and run the xampp-control.exe file.
- Click the “Start” buttons next to Apache and MySql to get things running. For me, at least, this control panel is a big sluggish, so be patient as the services get started. A “running” label will appear next to each service once they are running. Click the “Admin…” buttons, respectively, to access more information about your new web server (links to PHPMySQL and other tools).
Bam! That’s pretty much it. If you navigate to http://localhost/ you will see your server running. Place your website files inside the xampp/htdocs folder. Use PHPMySQL to create databases. I love using this to create new WordPress themes as I have a full copy of WordPress running on mine.
If you want to be a little slicker, you can create an autorun file like I did to make starting up your webserver even easier. Here’s a quick look at how I have mine set up:
So, now when I plug-in my USB drive, this window pops up:
Clicking OK launches the control panel mentioned above. There is a lot more to this than I’ve posted here, but this should get you started. I love this because I can use it to develop themes and plugins for WordPress in a production-like environment and then easily push them to a “real” web server when I’m done.
Excellent font author. Check out these reasonably-priced fonts for some inspiration.
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This week, my wife will be out of state for about 4 days of training. Other than going to work each day and assuring the dogs and cat survive, I am pretty much only responsible for myself during that time. Because of this, I’m planning to spend all my extra time on some intensive web development projects that are always being put off for other things (not because of my wife, mind you, just stuff I never have time for).
So, I find myself digging through the good ol’ idea bucket looking for a few projects (old and new) I might want to either knock-out or put a big dent in. Here are a few of the ideas I’m considering working on next week:
blogINDIANA was originally created to be a directory of local bloggers as well as to compile recent posts and display them in interesting ways (by city/region, topic, etc.). It did that–for a while–so in a sense, it was successful. The site went through a couple redesigns and I eventually started playing with WordPress MU and offered people the ability to create their own blog on the site. A handful of bloggers eventually did so with only 3-4 posting regularly.
Unfortunately, spam blogs (or splogs) started growing at an intense rate. There are hundreds and hundreds of splogs on blogINDIANA right now–most from China for some reason. So, there is a lot of housecleaning that needs to be done.
I’m still trying to decide if I want to continue offering blog hosting. I thought it would be more popular than it was. At a minimum, I’d like to restore blogINDIANA’s directory of local bloggers since that always seemed to be a popular part of the site. This time, I want to include more meta information about each blog such as city and zip code, subject tags, etc.
Here’s a fun idea that I had to create a web service that sent me an email if any of my websites went down. It’s definitely been done before. However, I just wanted a simple service (without tons of useless features) that would let me know about my client’s site being down before my client did.
It just so happens that I found an auction for the domain name SitePing.com at TDNAM.com (which I’m addicted to). I won the darn thing for $10 (plus 1-year’s registration @ ~$9) and felt warm and fuzzy all over. I’ve put a little bit of time into the site and it’s even “open” for business. It currently pings your website about once every 20 minutes and if it fails enough times to trip the threshold you’ve set, you get a friendly warning email.
I recently had the idea to track SEO-related stats for each website such as Google PageRank, backlinks, Alexa rank, etc. I don’t have this feature finished, although most of these stats are currently being recorded in the database on a daily basis for all sites (so when I add it, my dozen or so users will have some back-data to look at). I’ve even experimented with a teaser interface that lets you grab all that SEO data on the fly from the front page (check it out here–this link isn’t published anywhere else). I’ve had problems getting it to reliably work–I even thought I’d been blocked by Google for a time, but it seems to work most of the time as of now.
So… SitePing needs some major refinement and perhaps narrowing of focus (perhaps I should skip “site monitoring” and go for “seo monitoring” instead). Plenty of sites offer SEO stats, but I don’t know of any that let you track those stats over time like SitePing does/will.
This is actually quite an exciting prospect of a website. I can go into how I came to run this site another time, but it’s a big ball of potential. It’s basically an online community of local dads that provides interesting articles written by other local dads, resources, discussion, etc. It’s a small community now, but with some care I hope to grow it quite a bit.
Other than some regular advertising (which it badly needs), I have a laundry list of features and improvements to make. Some examples are a robust events calendar, possibly a classifieds system, and I have a few interesting ideas on mashing-up some publicly available data from the State of Indiana that local fathers might find interesting.
Right now, the best part of this slow-but-steadily growing site are the quality contributors I’ve managed to get on-board. Really, check out some of the writing on the site. There are some great articles and, so far, content is really king on IndyDads.
A surprise
If you’ve read this far, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve already been working on another great idea and will be ready to make it public in the next couple days. All I’ll say is that it relates to WordPress and I’m hoping that the WordPress community will find it very useful. More on this very soon. Shoot me an email and I’ll give ya the scoop before I unveil it.
That’s all for now. Apart from some client work and perhaps another idea at the bottom of the bucket I’m too tired to think about right now, I should be quite busy this week. Hopefully, I’ll be very productive and actually finish some of these ideas I keep having.
Boy, oh, boy. I’ve never been accused of trademark infringement before today. A year or so ago, a buddy of mine and I decided to register nascargang.com and nascargangs.com for an idea he/we had. I say he/we because he’s the racing fan–not me. We had planned to investigate what it took to become a licensed affiliate. Their website is of no help at all to this end. It was put on the back burner as other things in life came along (as they tend to do).
Recently, since we weren’t doing much with the domains, I decided to list them on The Domain Name Aftermarket through GoDaddy.com. I guess I wasn’t expecting much to happen, but if someone wanted to purchase the domain, they’d be able to start a dialog with us about doing so. Nothing did happen until today. The domains were delisted from the auction service after GoDaddy received a trademark infringement letter from a law firm (apparently) representing NASCAR. Even though our domain names weren’t mentioned specifically in the letter, I believe GoDaddy just swept through and dropped anything with “nascar” in it. So, now, I’m not really sure what use the domain name is to us.
Here is the letter sent to GoDaddy.
It brings up issues I may have to face with other domain names I own. I currently own two domain names for local sports teams. Without saying what the names are, they both have the word “colts” or “pacers” in them. My reason for registering these domains was to someday create a fan-site related to the teams. There are many fan-sites out there that operate freely because they only seek to support the team and increase the fanbase. My hope is that any actions I take on these domains will be perceived similarly. I’ve even made a few requests of the Colts organization about their rules for fan-sites and what is/isn’t allowed.
Unfortunately, I have received no response (and this was well before all the superbowl hysteria).
A sweet little tool to overlay a pixel grid over any web page to easily measure widths and heights
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