Technology

In case you don't know, I have this website hosted on a 1&1 shared hosting account.  It's not the best, but it's cheap and it works.

Anyway, one of the main problems people run into with Drupal on most shared hosting accounts is Clean URLs not working.  Why does this matter?  Without Clean URLs, there will be a ?q= in the URL for each page, which looks weird and is not quite as friendly with search engines.

Thankfully, there is usually a simple fix.  On 1&1 just two things need to change.

1 - Drupal needs to use PHP5, not PHP4.  You can rename all the PHP files, if you want, or you can just add this to you .htaccess file.

#Use PHP5. AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

You can add this on any new line in the file.

2 - Drupal needs to know how to handle URLs correctly, which means this:

# RewriteBase /

needs to be this:

RewriteBase /

Yes, so just delete the # character in front of RewriteBase /, that's all.  It is probably located towards the bottom of the file.

Like I said, a simple fix, but it stumps a lot of people.

I recently discovered the website Tips4Linux.com.  If you are a Linux user, or are considering using Linux, it is worth bookmarking.

One of the recent tips is how to create an image of any directory, which can be used to help in backing up your files.

"If you want to make a quick backup of a certain directory, ready to be burned on a CD or DVD, you can use

mkisofs -V LABEL -r directory | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz"

In this case replace "LABEL" with whatever you want the CD label to be (what shows up when you insert the disk or mount the image).  Also, replace "directory" with the location of the data you want to make the image from.  So if you wanted to make an image of the /home/user/documents folder and give it the label "Documents," the command is

mkisofs -V Documents -r /home/user/documents | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz

This will create the gzipped file cdrom.iso.gz in the /home/user directory.  Alternatively, you can create the .iso file without being gzipped by removing the section after the |, and adding "-o filename."  So to make an image of the folder /home/user/stuff named image.iso with the label "Stuff," the command is

mkisofs -V Stuff -r -o image.iso /home/user/stuff

You can read more about this command here.

I ran across this video the other day.  It's pretty funny.

I like the ending. "Ubuntu?"