the echothis blog

A few months ago I posted my experience using the Jake bridge between CakePHP and Joomla. Overall it’s pretty slick, but with one annoyance: the URL’s are not search-engine-friendly. Moreover they broadcast your frameworks of choice which is not a good from a security viewpoint. So after much research into the Joomla component routing and… Continue reading Search-engine-friendly URL’s using the Jake bridge

Lots of times, when installing web applications, you need to make specific directories writable by all users (in particular, the user running Apache). By default, though, this isn’t the case when you create directories in Windows. And the Properties window has a “Read Only” checkbox, but setting it has never seemed to work for me.… Continue reading Setting permissions on directories in Windows Vista

I alluded to this in an earlier post, but if you want to add a new subdomain to a domain, you have to add the DNS entry to the zone manually (i.e., just doing “Create Subdomain” isn’t sufficient). The steps are: Create the subdomain in the Plesk Control Panel, under Domains -> <DOMAIN NAME> ->… Continue reading Adding subdomains to a Plesk-managed domain

Anyone who has ever tried to publish to the web, content that was created in Microsoft Word has come across the dreaded smart quotes when the content is displayed in anything but Internet Explorer. So if you’re sick of the weird characters you run into, here’s a surefire way to strip them out of a… Continue reading How to get rid of MS Word’s smart (?) quotes

Recently I had to debug a perl-based website (don’t ask). In getting my PC set up to do this, I realized that things have changed in the past 8 years – the last time I was forced to do lucky enough to have the opportunity to do any perl development. These were the steps: WAMP… Continue reading Getting a Perl installation running with WAMP