Gzip (or on Apache 2, Deflate) compression is a godsend. Rather than try to deal with changing content headers in code, with a few simple httpd.conf settings you can get nearly all the advantages instantly. Now possibly ancient browsers can choke on this, but it will work for everybody who has a browser built since… Continue reading Apache 2 compression the easy way
Month: April 2009
Time to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8
Ten minutes in, and I’m convinced it’s worth it; they made some huge productivity improvements for web developers in IE8. The built-in Developer Tools bring it up to par with Firefox’s Firebug. And I am thrilled that “View Source” finally has line numbers and syntax highlighting! Get it now.
An ExtJS form helper for CakePHP
ExtJS allows you to make really elaborate Javascript-based UI once you get the hang of it. Unfortunately (unless there is some project I missed) it hasn’t yet been integrated with CakePHP so you end up hand-coding a bunch of stuff in order to get simple stuff (like client-side form validation) to work. The world is… Continue reading An ExtJS form helper for CakePHP
Caching expensive actions with Jake
In an earlier post I described using the Jake bridge to get CakePHP working with Joomla. Overall the bridge works like a champ, with one exception I’ve found: it seems that Jake does not support cached actions – if you try to cache an action, it no longer renders through the Jake component. This is… Continue reading Caching expensive actions with Jake
Configuring GNU Mailman on Plesk 8, part 2
I’ve learned a few more things in the process of doing this. Since I needed to perform redirects to the new mailman lists (to accomodate legacy list names), it turns out that you have to use the Plesk control panel for this. So after getting my lists working without Plesk, I had to recreate them… Continue reading Configuring GNU Mailman on Plesk 8, part 2