You can find inspiration through a collection of examples on modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk by Stuart Brown and on thinkvitamin.com by Larissa Meek. Enjoy

The primary site provides you with all the details about who I am, what I do and for how much I am likely to do it. The blog combines both work and personal life (if such a thing actually exists), my experiences as -what some describe- an independent media producer, as well as more generic tips, tricks and reviews on all things media, film and equipment (or should that be gadgets?).

Since I’m in the middle of moving countries (again), expect some more Twittery rather than full blown posts or in fact the much delayed “new look”. But then again, work is more important than play(ing with a new look for ones website).

BTW You can see it in action on my new WordPress vBlog for Axle Video Productions.

The neat thing is that is blocks access to everyone but me and gives people and bots alike a status message that won’t put them off (unless you choose to of course).

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all
Allow from my.ip.address



Allow from all


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^.]*)\.html?$ /$1.php [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

ErrorDocument 403 /403.txt

The first part disallows access to everything for everyone but me. Make sure you replace my.ip.address with your current WAN IP. To find this out you can either go to www.whatsmyip.org or use [url=https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1254&application=firefox]the handy plug-in for Firefox[/url] which will tell you your current external IP.

The second part will only allow our custom error page to show up to everyone (but me). If you prefer an HTML instead of my quick-n-dirty text-only, make sure to change the extension to .html or .htm. PHP or any other webserver readable extension will work of course.

The third part will call our custom error message in form of a text file. Make sure you point it to the path where your error document resides! If you want to make a subdirectory of your domain unavailable (i.e. www.segebrecht.com/lydia) and the doc is in that directory, use /lydia/403.txt !

All you need to do is to knock up a simple file (text or html, or whatever) and put your message in

Then change your htaccess to the above code, upload your error document and voila – a custom “maintenance” message.

To check it’s actually working, just comment out (using #) the Allow from my.ip.address part and hit reload in your browser. If you can see your custom message you are set.

Have fun and remember that I do not take any responsibility in case anything goes wrong

Thanks to Google for helping me find the gem and “lorax” of webmastersworld.com for coming up with the item in the first place.

Ref: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/2458.htm

Technorati Tags: htaccess | websites

Although 2.0.1 was hailed as a major improvement, I fail to see it. But then again I don’t hack around the backend much, so I just take the coders word for it and enjoy a stable WordPress Blog. Most of the old plug-ins are working fine though I updated most now anyway to warrant the “new and improved” headline.

All in all I still cannot fault WordPress as my blog engine of choice and am looking forward to the new AJAX-ed / Web 2.0 improvements currently planned. OK, it’s buzzword hype but some features and functions like the shoutbox or usability aiding layout improvements make punters happy. I’m playing around with a lot of the cool new toys thesedays to help redesign our companies web applications.

Technorati Tags:
WordPress | CaptCha! | AJAX | Web 2.0

PHP and MySQL and most open or closed sourced projects based on it suck!

Some don’t, most seem to just like most of the over-hyped web X.0 enabled malware. Now please don’t get me wrong, I love open source and if I had enough money I’d happily pay for clean code, but most stuff I have to come across is just rubbish.

PHP isn’t really a programming language for starters and MySQL is unreliable and unsuitable for anything larger than a personal blogging site. The alternatives are there but since I’m not a proper hacker (not good with languages you see…) I can only but rely on other peoples work. And that in particular sucks. All I want is for a piece of software to do as I tell it and while RAD (rapid application development) may be nice it’s mostly overrated and primarily suitable for biz-type devs that want to impress their bosses.

I am still looking for something nice and lean, clean even. I don’t want to spend time worrying more about how to secure the latest phpbb version from script kiddies nor do I want to chroot every website on my server.

OK, enough of the ranting. I have a few ideas for a simple and universal CMS… . OMG! I’ve heard this so many times and SourceForge is full of abandoned projects like it. But I will do it, at least all the planning, front end and documentation (three of the most important things – to users anyway – I might add).

Some basics then:

- It’s not PHP / MySQL
- It should be Perl, XML and (perhaps) Berkeley DB
- It’s not cool AJAX web2.0
- It will be usesable usability (who needs those transition fX anyway?)
- It will be extendible through a simple modular structure and go whereever one needs it to go
- It will be as secure as can be by integrating existing security features of the server and programming language
- It will be very simple and logical without lacking ability
- It will be easy to write a god darn theme for the thing without having to touch the code base!
- It will, therefore, know the difference between content and design.
- It won’t require a dual CPU to run and neither will it require permissions it shouldn’t have
- It won’t be a framework
- It won’t be 100MB when untarred

Actually I might pull this off with a little help from Ralf & Co. since my job requires just such a vapourware dream-come-true system.

Oh well I better had gotten on with it then…

Unless you are 16 or have spent the last 10 years in the remote desert, you probably remember that web-portals were all the rage back in the late 90s. After a decent amount of crashing and burning shortly after, we all thought things would mature and the hype die down finally. Hold that tought because it appears that the survivers of the great search engine wars are running out of ideas, so they are re-heating the same old junk that a lot of people found not-so-very-exciting even when it was first brand new.

Check out the all new My Yahoo! and give Google’s Personalised Startpage (or Dashboard as I like to call it) a try. It’s the same old concept of cramming a lot of content into a single page. Now all this seems even easier thanks to RSS. Google allows you to simply pull your listings from anywhere with an RSS feed. Yahoo counters with top-class content from the major news and entertainment providers, plus a lot of other goodies (like cartoons for example). Yahoo offers the use of RSS / XML feeds as well.

Google being Google, I find their Dashboard easy, fast loading and it does what it says on the box in a professional manner. My Yahoo on the other hand, which used to be my startpage of choice a few years ago, does what it did back than: confuse, clutter and generally be hard to use as much as hard on the eye.

Where Google uses fantastically easy to use AJAX containers which can be dragged and dropped around the page, Yahoo! requires users to go through a submenu page and then some. Google’s clean, sometimes a little bland design works especially well with loads of content on the page. You simply never get lost.

Yahoo on the other hand offers lots of themes to choose from, none as easy and fast as Googles and sadly their default theme also comes with an eye watering patterned background image.

On the whole I find Google’s Dashboard much easier to use, more grown up and a lot quicker. It’s what I want and need. My favourite links, top five latest news entries from my top three news sources, the weather and some usefull bits on the side.

In my humble opinion My Yahoo! fails even more than it did back in the days. It’s too much clutter, too many options that are even harder to use by being burried under menus and other stuff all over the place.

If you are looking for the worlds best search engine combined with a useful starting page, choose Google. If you have too much time on your hands choose My Yahoo.

Alternatively you could just download the hack in a handy ZIP file, read the intall guide and get happy quicker. Have fun.

Just copy-n-paste the two commands from the text file and your standard IntegraMod 1.4.0 files and folders will have the right permissions. Please note that the two commands have to be on one line each! Make sure that it is before you copy and paste it into your shell by turning off “wrap text” in your text editor. Questions? Please post your comments below.

Also note that I cannot offer any guarantees that it’ll work for you. However, there’s not much that can go wrong with this really since you are only changing file and folder permissions

Have fun

Download:

IntegraMod 1.4.0 Chmod Commands for Shell use.