When I switched from Dreamhost shared hosting to Media Temple (dv) server hosting, I had a hell of a time trying to figure out why CRONs weren’t working correctly on the website. I had database backups being sent via CRON jobs so making sure CRONs were working was imperative. What’s great is that the way to make these WordPress CRONs work was by…setting up a CRON.

To get things working, you should:

1. Log into your Media Temple (dv) control panel.
2. Navigate to the domain and click the “Crontab” icon.
3. Click “Schedule a Task”

I recently launched a new website on GoDaddy shared hosting. The website required mod_rewrite for SEO-friendly URLs. GoDaddy provides mod_rewrite but every time I tried to hit a two-deep URL, I would get a 404 error. Here’s what I had:

# Mod Rewrite
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

The fix to this problem was to add the following directive before my mod_rewrite directives:

#Fix Rewrite
Options -Multiviews

Tada! The URLs began working and the website’s SEO has taken off!

I just got the worst news of my life:

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We’re writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

I was recently coding PHP cURL functionality for a GoDaddy-hosted website and I kept running into an annoying 403 error. Essentially, GoDaddy’s proxy server (which they force you to use for cURL) was giving me a “Forbidden” error and wasn’t trying to hit the necessary server. Here’s the code that GoDaddy tells you to use for cURL transactions:

I was recently thrown a real curveball of a project. Instead of using a fresh MySQL database to pull information from, the customer required that we pull information from their new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 server. This isn’t the most desired method of PHP->Database interactivity but that’s what the project called for and that’s what I needed to do. Here’s how to get things going.