Make Better Websites

I stumbled upon a cool website called ‘Make Better Websites’ (www.makebetterwebsites.com) that is more or less just a collection of sites the team puts together for web design inspiration.  Some of the designs are fairly straight-forward, and some are really out of the box, but all of them are visually appealing, professional, and easy to navigate.  Check it out next time you find yourself coming up with something fresh!

If you have a website design that you think should be showcased on the site, they have a submit form where you can enter your design for consideration.

How to Unlock a Google Apps Account

The other day my Google Apps account randomly stopped working in my Mac Mail application.  The ‘the password you entered is invalid’ error kept popping up, even though I knew it was correct.  After some digging, I found that occasionally a Google Apps account might become locked for one reason or another.  Unfortunately the problem and the fix wasn’t obvious, but I eventually found a solution.

To unlock your Google Apps account, go to: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha?, fill out the Captcha, and your account should unlock.

Feel free to leave comments or possible reasons for why a Google Apps account might get locked.

Storm on Demand – Hosting by Liquid Web

I’ve had a Storm on Demand account for about a year now, in an effort to get away from the GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated environment.  The Storm on Demand service, by Liquid Web, is a totally scalable hosting solution that can grow with you as your storage, memory, and bandwidth needs grow.

Customer Service

One of the huge benefits has been their customer service.  Any time I need help with server configuration I can just call them up.  Their techs are very knowledgable, will spend as much time as it takes to help you out, and if they don’t know the answer, they find someone who does.  I know it sounds simple, but I can’t begin to tell you the amount of disinformation I’ve received from other companies when their tech wants to hide the fact that they don’t know the answer.

Pricing

Their pricing structure is totally based on usage, and since you can scale up or down at any time, nothing goes to waste.  Storm on Demand accounts are billed by the minute, which can be useful if you need a temporary bump in bandwidth or storage. Check out their plans and pricing here.

Performance

I don’t have any benchmark data, but I can tell you that the overall speed and performance of a Storm on Demand account blows away your typical shared hosting account.

WordPress Auto Update Problems

I always say “WordPress is a double-edged sword”.  It’s pretty cool that you can get a website up and running so quickly, but there are so many problems that are a result of so many versions, incompatible plugins, and server configuration issues.  I just finally solved one issue I’ve been having for quite a while – WordPress failing on an automatic update.

The fix that is quoted on so many blogs was to delete the wp-content/uploads folder and try again, which never worked for me.  I then stumbled upon a blog which pointed me the right direction – change your server configuration to use  proFTP instead of pureFTPd.   I have a Storm on Demand account (Through Liquid Web) and was able to change this in WebHost Manager in under a minute.  Violia!  Now I’m able to do auto updates as intended!

Cudos to Darcy for figuring this one out!  View source

MYSQL Query – Sort Alphabetical Exclude Articles (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’)

I just ran across this query I had to construct a while ago which can be useful when trying to sort alphabetically, but some of the data contained the articles ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’ which alphabetized the results incorrectly. This query could be useful in a number of situations – album titles, company names, movie titles, book titles, and more.

For example, ‘The Big Lebowski’ ought to appear in the B’s, but if you simply did this query, it will show up in the T’s.

SELECT `id`, `title` FROM `movies` ORDER BY `title`;

With a little MYSQL magic, we can sort alphabetically by title, ignoring any leading articles, while still preserving the full title.

SELECT `id`, `title` FROM `movies` ORDER BY TRIM(LEADING 'a ' FROM TRIM(LEADING 'an ' FROM TRIM(LEADING 'the ' FROM LOWER(`title`))));

Basically the ORDER portion of the query just trims off any instances of ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’ (case insensitive) to get the desired order, but the column `movies` will still return the full, unaltered title.