Michael S. Clark

I recently came upon a situation where a client’s website was hosted by their ISP. They wanted it to be updated, so as always, I looked at using WordPress.

Unfortunately, the hosting package they had chosen supported PHP, but database support was beyond their price range.

That set me wondering if WordPress actually required MySQL to operate. I knew about SQLite as a file-based relational database, so I turned to Google and searched for “WordPress sqlite”. What I discovered was a plugin called PDO (SQLite) For Wordpress by Justin Adie which abstracts the database functionality into a separate layer. At the moment, it supports the original MySQL, and SQLite.

This was exactly what I was looking for. It was easy to set-up and is working very well, as you can see.

Under usual circumstances, hosting WordPress on IIS7 would not normally allow permalinks to be used. There are some commercial solutions, including the ISAPI_Rewrite module (which I couldn’t get to work).

Another less elegant solution was to create a replacement 404 error page that would perform the redirection. This worked, but when the redirection occurred, any POSTed values were lost, so no forms could be used.

I thought all was lost until yesterday, I stumbled across an article on Microsoft’s IIS site.

This walkthrough will guide you through how to enable “Pretty Permalinks” for blog posts in the WordPress blog engine installed on IIS 7.0. Typically, without URL rewriting functionality on a Web server, WordPress users have to use “Almost Pretty” URLs (for example, http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/). This was the primary option for users who chose to host WordPress on IIS. Now, with the URL rewrite module available, you can have “Pretty Permalinks” (for example, http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name/) for WordPress blogs hosted on IIS 7.0.

This solved all my problems for a major project I’m involved in. It involves the URL Rewrite Technical Preview that can be found here.

[Via: IIS.net]

As I type this Mozilla, the company behind the groovy Firefox browser, has just created a new world software download record of over 5 million downloads in less than 24 hours.

You can get your 7MB download here and track the download progress here.

I got a certificate too! (You can get yours here.)

[Via: Gizmodo]

Update:

It’s official: The latest version of Mozilla’s popular alternative Web browser, Firefox 3, set the previously nonexistent Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a day. The final tally settled at 8,002,530 after judges weeded out duplicates and automated downloads from the 8.3 million total downloads logged on June 18, the day of the browser’s launch.

[Via: The Wall Street Journal]

Today’s the day! Click here to watch for progress.

Update: Those of you that want to get Firefox 3.0 right now can use this FTP link, everyone else that wants to help try to set a world record will have to wait until 10am PDT and hit up the official site.

The VeriSign timestamping service is being upgraded to provide a higher-level of security. The timestamping service currently uses the hash algorithm called MD5 to create the timestamp. Although no actual incidents of breaking MD5 have been reported, modern computing power is making it easier to mount attacks against MD5.

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As I mentioned previously, this site is also available at http://michael.clark.name, as is my email address at michael@clark.name.

The people at http://freeyouid.com have also started supplying a natty certificate.

I’ve added PicLens support to all of my galleries.

The required RSS feed is dynamically generated using PHP as are the thumbnails so you would only have to provide a gallery of images.

I’ve zipped up the code here.

I’ve been waiting a while for The Courier (my local paper) to provide an RSS feed for their news stories.

Anyway, I decided to do one myself. I’ve zipped up the code here and I’ve hosted it on my employer’s server here.

Give me a shout if you find an errors or improvements.