Readable URLs are nice. A well made website will have a logical layout, with intelligent folder and file names, and as few technical details as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success. Clean URLs are great because they.

Ever wanted to change the crontab of a server, but got an editor on screen that you're totally unfamiliar with? There are a lot of causes for this annoyance, but one is that somebody recently installed or used midnight commander (mc) which for whatever reason seams to overrule your session's default editor.

I ran accross php value, php flag, php admin value and php admin flag in a couple of .htaccess files, and I've used them sometimes as well by just pasting an example, but I've never really understood why there was such a great diversity. Couldn't php_setting X Y just handle it, and if not, what do the admin, value and flag attributes mean?

I recently had to install a couple of squid servers to act as reverse proxies for a webcluster. You can teach the squid server to stand in between in the end users and the webservers, and to store all the static content ( .jpg .flv .css .htm for example ) in the RAM. This saves a lot of I/O and bandwidth on the webservers, and it can really speeds up a site. And the end of the road the webservers' load dropped with 92%. But before all this worked, I had to run through a massive config file and since the squid config file is their manual at the same time, it's about 5000 lines long. So I had to find out a way to filter only the important settings from the config file.

You want your website to be as safe as possible. So you'll typically want Open Basedir and Safe Mode to be on. When you're in a shared hosting environment, you'll find that any server administrator with a good sense of security will also have these restrictions in place. However security pretty much always limits functionality and this case is no different. Because what if you are caged in a restricted environment, and you would still like to use shared libraries like the ones provided by PEAR?

I scourged the web today looking for the very best (and free) tips on increasing a site's PageRank, and I figure it basically comes down to these simple tips.

Last friday, PHP announced the end of life of version 4 of their popuplair scripting language.

Let's say your site is becoming a big success and as a result it's becoming slower and slower. There are several things you do without buying additional hardware.

If you're running Squid to cache your website, you can use an htaccess file to control what kind of files should be cached, and for how long.

Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a modern SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, modern RAM can do a mind blowing 12.500 MB/s! Normally only the system itself makes use of this ultra fast storage, but we can also access this space directly. And that opens a great window of opportunity.

When you've written an article that benefits other surfers, you want them to know, right? One way to go about this is to publish your article at Digg. Making it to their FrontPage would be totally awesome. Good content is the main thing there, but there are some other tips that can help you. I did quite a bit of research - so you don't have to -  and this is my top 5.

The stable version of the newest Ubuntu version Gutsy Gibbon will be released in October 2007. I could not wait that long however. And since the third alpha of Ubuntu 7.10 was recently released, I figured let's give it a shot. Testing alpha releases (especially from Ubuntu ) is like looking into the crystal ball of technology. This is how I upgraded and got compiz working again.

Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practice or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.

According to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, Dell is pleased with the demand for Ubuntu computers. The company has been distributing computers with Ubuntu since May this year and is planning to expand the Linux offerings.

Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords. Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

Warning. This article is meant for Ubuntu Feisty only and is therefore deprecated! Compiz-fusion comes standard in more recent Ubuntu versions, so don't use this article anymore! I would have taken this article offline if it wasn't for the fact that there are still some Feisty users out there who find this useful. If you're in the midst of upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, read howto upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy without breaking compiz-fusion!

If you've got a website that's heavy on your web server, you might want to run some processes like generating thumbnails or enriching data in the background. This way it can not interfere with the user interface. Linux has a great program for this called cron. It allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals. You could also use it to automatically create backups, synchronize files, schedule updates, and much more. Welcome to the wonderful world of crontab.

Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to it's security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stability and features. You could run updated manually, but why not schedule the updates in the background to make sure you are always running the latest stable versions, without ever having to worry about it.