Author: Abdullah Yahya

Here’s a time-saver when you’re trying to find a color you’ll for your website.

1. Open the page in a browser
2. Inspect the element you want to change the color of
3. Click on the color box and scroll through colors

Raw Text Editor

• Sublime Text 2
  • HTML Tidy Plugin
  • HTML Encode Plugin
• NotePad++

WYSIWYG Editor

• Dreamweaver (good for updated large tables)

SSH Client

• mRemoteNG with Putty (for UTF-8 support, select UTF-8 in the Translation setting in Putty)

Terminal / Shell / Console

• Console
• PowerCmd <- current favorite
• TakeCommand

SOAP Web Service Testing Tool

• soapUI

Diffing Tool

• WinMerge
• BeyondCompare (includes image differ)
• Araxis (includes image differ)

Bulk File Renamer

• Rename Expert

File / Directory Listing

• Directory Listing Pro

(S)FTP / Synching Tool

• WinSCP

 SVN Client

• SmartSVN

HTTP Monitor

• Fiddler
• HTTPDebugger

Web Inspector

• Google Chrome Inspector

Raster Graphic Editor

• Photoshop

Vector Graphic Editor

• Inkscape

 Screen Capture

• DuckCapture
• SnagIt

 Virtual Machine

• Oracle VirtualBox (for testing different versions of IE)

 Video Encoding

• Quicktime Pro
• Miro Video Converter

Amazon S3 Manager

• CyberDuck

Chrome Extensions

• JSONView
• PageRank Status
• Show Title Tag
• Web Developer
• jQuerify
• AdBlock
• Pendule
• Awesome Color Picker
• Tape
• CSS Diff

Font for coding

• Consolas – 9pt
• http://www.sitepoint.com/top-10-programming-fonts/

Installing Apache on 64-bit Windows

0. Download

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679 and download Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 (VC11) which is needed for the next step. Double-click and install it.

1. Download

Go to http://www.apachelounge.com/download/and download the 64-bit version (httpd-2.4.12-win64-VC11.zip)

2. Unzip
Unzip the Apache24 folder to c:/Apache24 (that is the ServerRoot in the config).
Default folder for your your webpages is DocumentRoot “c:/Apache24/htdocs”

When you unzip to another location, change ServerRoot, Documenroot, Directories, ScriptAlias in httpd.conf. Also, when you use the extra folder config files, change to your location there as well.

3. Install Apache as a service
Start > cmd (Run as Administrator)
c:\Apache24\bin>httpd.exe -k install

4. Install ApacheMonitor
Right-click on c:\Apache24\bin\ApacheMonitor.exe, Run as Administrator,
Make a shortcut of ApacheMonitor and put it in your Startup folder.

4. Test Setup
Go to http://localhost and you should see “It works”.

5. If you already have configuration files from a previous installation that you would like to apply to this new installation, do the following:
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/httpd.conf to httpd-original.conf
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf to httpd-vhosts-original.conf
– rename C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf to httpd-ssl-original.conf
– rename old C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts file to hosts-original

6. copy and paste the config files from your old installation into the new installation
C:/Apache24/conf/9264078_local.dev.XXXX.com.cert (SSL cert)
C:/Apache24/conf/9264078_local.dev.XXXX.com.key (SSL key)
C:/Apache24/conf/httpd.conf
C:/Apache24/conf/server.crt (SSL cert)
C:/Apache24/conf/server.nopassword.key (SSL key)
C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
C:/Apache24/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

7. Some useful (necessary) settings to have in httpd.conf

• LoadModule php5_module “C:/php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64/php5apache2_4.dll”
• LoadFile “C:\php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64\libpq.dll”
• PHPIniDir “C:\php-5.6.5-Win32-VC11-x64”
• DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
• AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
• Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Continue reading Installing Apache, PHP, and Postgres on Windows 7 64 Bit

I can’t stand using Putty for SSH on Windows. It’s ugly and very non user-friendly. I even got a Mac laptop which I often use for just SSH using Mac Terminal. But, yesterday I discovered mRemoteNG from a coworker, which is a wrapper to Putty, supports tabs, and offers a much better overall SSH experience from Windows. If you need a terminal on Windows, I’d recommend Putty + mRemoteNG. Learn more and download at

http://www.mremoteng.org/

In addition, to fix the ugly color scheme that comes with Putty, use one of these custom themes.

http://www.igvita.com/2008/04/14/custom-putty-color-themes/

Instead of specifically writing string manipulation code that is multibyte-safe, e.g. mb_substr() instead of substr(), you can configure PHP to do this automatically.  Just update the following lines in your php.ini.

mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.func_overload = 7
mbstring.strict_detection = On
zend.multibyte = On
zend.script_encoding = UTF-8

mbstring.func_overload will automatically cause any non-multibyte-safe functions to use their multibyte-safe counterparts.

When determining the URL for a web page, you often want to use keywords that accurately describe the page’s content. Sometimes, these keywords aren’t in English and contain accented characters. One thing you can do is choose one URL to be the canonical URL and create a redirect to that URL from another that contains the ascii-equivalent version of the words, e.g.

Canonical: http://www.somedomain.com/nǐhǎo

Redirects:

• http://www.somedomain.com/nihao
• http://www.somedomain.com/你好