Kevin Worthington

Nginx on Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2 Minutes

Kev — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:30:14 +0000

Overview
This is a quick article to show you how I compiled a basic version of Nginx 0.8.33 on Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard. The “2 minute” compilation that I mention in the title of this article is when using the script that I provide below. For the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) crowd, I’m breaking down the steps. Variations in your Mac’s specs, and your copy and paste skills may increase the total time to over 2 minutes.

Prerequisites
First, if you do not already have it installed, download Xcode from Apple’s website, and run the installer from the .dmg file. For the record, the file I installed was called xcode321_10m2003_developerdvd.dmg, yours may be slightly different.

Install PCRE
Nginx requires PCRE – Perl Compatible Regular Expressions to build, I used PCRE version 8.01. In a Terminal, run:
sudo curl -OL h ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-8.01.tar.gz > /usr/local/src/pcre-8.01.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src
tar xvzf pcre-8.01.tar.gz
cd pcre-8.01
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Install Nginx
(You should still be in /usr/local/src, if you followed along from above.)
tar xvzf nginx-0.8.33.tar.gz
cd nginx-0.8.33
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-http_ssl_module
make
sudo make install

Start Nginx
Assuming that you have /usr/local in your $PATH (which nginx should say:/usr/local/sbin/nginx), you can simply run:
sudo nginx
Note: to add /usr/local to your $PATH variable, edit or create ~/.profile to include it. For reference, mine currently looks like this:
PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/opt/X11/bin" – I emphasized in bold type what you need to add to your PATH.

The 2 Minute way, using my script
All of the above instructions, in a nice little script. Save it to your Mac as build-nginx.sh, and run:
chmod a+x build-nginx.sh
sudo ./build-nginx.sh

Conclusion
It’s a pretty quick process to get Nginx installed nicely on your Mac, especially if you use my script. This provides a very basic install, but it should get you moving in the right directions. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, I would love to hear your feedback, so leave a comment below.

Nginx on Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2 Minutes is an article from: Kevin Worthington

Your Comments Needed: Nginx for Windows and Lighttpd for Windows

Kev — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:49:50 +0000

Although I haven’t built Nginx for Windows and Lighttpd for Windows in a while, I need your help. I’m trying to determine if there is enough interest for me to create my Cygwin based builds again. So even if you have never left a comment here before, please do today. Please let me know:

if you are interested in: Nginx and/or Lighttpd for Windows
which version of Windows you will be running on: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 7
if your Windows version is 32-bit or 64-bit

This is very important! Please leave a comment below right now. Thanks as always for reading!

Your Comments Needed: Nginx for Windows and Lighttpd for Windows is an article from: Kevin Worthington

9 More Essential WordPress Plugins

Kev — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:47:27 +0000

In my last article, 18 Essential WordPress Plugins, I discussed 18 plugins that I consider essential for use on any personal blog. I personally use all of those plugins right here on this site.

That should say something about how useful I truly find those particular plugins.

Since then, I realized that I have neglected a few plugins, so I’d like to talk about them here:

Category: Appearance / Presentation

1. PHP Widgetify – “Execute phpcode fast and easy with this simple code-widget.” This plugin works similarly to the built in WordPress “widgets,” but the main difference is that you can execute PHP code from within it.
2. What Would Seth Godin Do – “Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.” This is a nice little plugin that checks if your site’s visitor has previously been to your site. You then are able to display an appropriate note. On this site, I urge people to Subscribe to my RSS feed, and to Follow Me on Twitter using this plugin.
3. Similar Posts – “Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags.” This is a handy plugin that displays links to other articles or posts on your site which have similar keywords and characteristics.
4. Random Pages widget – “This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.” This is fairly self-explanatory, I hope.
5. Subscribe To Comments – “Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.” Enough said for this plugin too.

Category: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

6. Clean Archives Reloaded – “A slick, Javascript-enhanced post archive list generator for WordPress 2.5+.” Rather than have a ton of links for your archives on your sidebar, you can create a single Archives page that uses a collapsible and expandable view of all posts in your archives.
7. Optimal Title – “Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.” Having the title displayed before your site name is better for SEO, and usually helps your Google PageRank.

Category: Social Media / Social Networking

8. FollowMe – “WP FollowMe is a WordPress plugin that allow you to add a Twitter Follow me badge on your WordPress blog.” A nice little flash object that you can customize the look, feel, and location of.
9. TwitterCounter – “Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter.” Pretty straight forward, right?

I hope you enjoyed this follow-up list of WordPress plugins. These plugins work really well for me, so I hope you give some of them a try on your sites.

Which plugins do you consider essential? Please leave a comment below, I’m really interested to get your feedback.

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9 More Essential WordPress Plugins is an article from: Kevin Worthington

18 Essential WordPress Plugins

Kev — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:30:37 +0000

WordPress is an open source blog publishing platform that is also widely used as a content management system (CMS). As of September 2009, Wordpress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide. By itself, Wordpress is a very powerful and flexible system that is easy to get up and running, as well as easy to maintain. But when combined with the available Wordpress plugins, it becomes an unstoppable powerhouse of a platform.

In this article, I’ll discuss 18 plugins that I consider essential for use on any personal blog. These plugins are all in use on this site, so you know that I really believe in the power of these plugins. Ready? Here we go:

Category: Spam/Security

1. Akismet – “Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.” This plugin is indispensable because it does the dirty work of weeding out spam for you.
2. reCAPTCHA – “Integrates a reCAPTCHA with Wordpress.” reCAPTCHA is another mechanism to help alleviate the spam problem. It makes sure that a human is responsible for the comment by showing a graphic with 2 words that the commenter must type in prior to submitting.
3. AntiVirus – “AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.” This is another valuable plugin that helps keep your Wordpress installation safe and secure.
4. AskApache Password Protect – “Advanced Security: Password Protection, Anti-Spam, Anti-Exploits, etc.” This plugin helps you to lock down the Apache server that Wordpress is installed upon.
5. WP-SpamFree – “An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.” One last plugin to help with the spam problem – but more importantly, this is what I use to power my Contact page. It’s very easy to set up, and it allows you to hide your email address from evil email harvesting scripts.

Category: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

6. Google XML Sitemaps – “This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.”
7. Optimal Title – “Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before.”
8. SEO Friendly Images – “Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.”
9. SEO Slugs – “Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.”

(The above plugins’ default descriptions were self-explanatory, so I felt no need to add anything…)

Category: Page Speed

10. W3 Total Cache – “Dramatically improve the user experience of your blog. Add transparent page caching, database caching, minify and content delivery network (CDN) functionality and more to WordPress.” I previously used WP-SuperCache, but W3 Total Cache seems to work much better, and it is equally easy to setup and maintain.
11. GZIP Output. – “Allow GZIPped output for your WordPress blog. Restores functionality removed in WordPress 2.5.” Gzipping each page makes the page smaller, causing it to use less bandwidth, as well as improving the load time.
12. WP JS – “Automatically GZIP your JS files and applies jsmin algorithm. Also add JavaScript files to specific posts/pages.” Another plugin that speeds up laod times.
13. WP Minify – “This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.” Compresses javascript files and cascading style sheets for faster load times.

Category: Administration

14. Theme Tester – “Allow an admin to test new themes without showing your blog visitors.” Very handy for testing before going live with a new theme.
15. WordPress Exploit Scanner – “Scans your WordPress site for possible exploits.” An easy to use interface that does the heavy lifting in keeping your Wordpress install secure.
16. Broken Link Checker – “Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.” This ultimately helps you to keep your site’s SEO in top shape. It makes it very easy to identify and fix broken links.
17. WordPress Database Backup – “On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools -> Backup to get started.” Download a full backup of your Wordpress database on demand, or schedule it to email a weekly backup.
18. Auto-Close Comments – “Autoclose comments after 21 days.” This plugin is very handy since most of the time people do not comment on older posts. It is another way to thwart spammers.

I hope you enjoyed this list of Wordpress plugins. There are certainly many others that are valuable and extremely useful. My goal was to choose my top picks and hopefully let you know about few plugins that you have not already heard of. These plugins work really well for me – I hope you give some of them a try, and that they work well for your site.

Are there any that I have forgotten that should be on this list? Let me know in the comments below.

To get immediate notifications for new articles and other technology related news, Subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter.

18 Essential WordPress Plugins is an article from: Kevin Worthington

Microsoft Windows 7

Kev — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:56:48 +0000

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7 was released on Thursday October 22, 2009. The buzz around the Internet and traditional media outlets has been overwhelmingly positive, even a week later. Links: Windows 7 reviews still shine one week in, Review: Windows 7 Is Microsoft’s Best Yet, Windows 7 review: like Vista, but good.

As a user who has installed the public beta and the release candidate, I can honestly say that this is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has built and released to date. And you would expect that to be the case, particularly after the disaster that was Windows Vista.
I should mention that I have installed these versions of Microsoft Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro, using Boot Camp, and mostly since I purchased my Mac I have been running Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) exclusively. I have booted Windows 7 using VMware Fusion whenever I wanted to play with it.
Windows 7 is pretty fast, and the Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus suite runs very nicely. It is light weight and generally stays out of the way while protecting the system.
There are many specifics to be aware of with this release. First, if you have a capable 64-bit machine, you should definitely install the 64-bit version of Windows 7. It has the ability to run faster than its 32-bit counterpart, while utilizing 4 GB+ of memory. The 32-bit version tops out at 3 GB. Also, if you have at least Windows 2000 (XP and Vista included), you are eligible to buy the upgrade version of the operating system, and use it to do a clean install, using what Microsoft refers to as the “Custom” installation option. A fresh install is always a best-practice way to install Windows, and Windows 7 is no exception. Backup all your data (to an external hard drive or USB thumb drive) and have your installation media available for applications like Microsoft Office ready for your fresh installation. You can then use the excellent Ninite to install all the freebie applications from the web: Firefox, VLC, Microsoft Security Essentials, iTunes, etc.
While I don’t think that Windows 7 is bulletproof or the best operating system ever, it is the best Windows OS to date. If you are running the 8 year old Windows XP, you will be better off on Windows 7. Vista users will also be better off on 7, since it runs about 20 – 30% faster on the same hardware.
What do you think? Is Windows 7 worth it? Will you upgrade soon? Let me know.

Microsoft Windows 7 is an article from: Kevin Worthington

Gmail Service is Down. No problem. Work Offline!

Kev — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:37:10 +0000

As of around 12:53 PM PST, Gmail was (and still is) down.
On their status page it said:

Google Apps Status
September 1, 2009 12:53:00 PM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Having nervous ticks due to Google’s Gmail service being down? Read on…

Gmail Labs’ Offline feature
Gmail has an interesting feature called “Offline” that allows you to read, view, search, reply, and compose email without being connected to Google, or the Internet at all for that matter. In the Settings tab, enable “Offline” from Gmail Labs. You can be completely disconnected and still use Gmail. (Keep reading for more setup information.)

How does “Offline” work?
Google has an interesting free service called Google Gears, which allows you to utilize Gmail’s offline feature. Simple visit the link and install Gears. Then, within Gmail, enable the “Offline” feature. Then all your email messages start to download to your hard drive, making search, compose, etc available to you even if Gmail’s servers are down.
Note that you should not install Gears on a public computer or a computer that is not yours. You personal info IS stored on the local hard drive.

Install Gears today!
Once Gmail is back up, install Google Gears and help overcome the panic that sets in from not being able to access Gmail!

How to verify that it’s not just your connection:
A great site that I used to check if Gmail was having issues. Useful for other sites as well.

UPDATES:

Google Apps Status
September 1, 2009 1:02:00 PM PDT
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1.2 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

Google Apps Status
September 1, 2009 1:02:00 PM PDT
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 2:16:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

2:18 PM PST: Gmail appears to be back online, for me at least. The Google status page still reports it being down, so it may not be back for everyone yet. Down for everyone or just me is also reporting that Gmail is still down.

Google Apps Status
September 1, 2009 2:13:00 PM PDT
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 3:13:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Gmail users may also like my previous articles:
5 Tips to Fix Gmail Slow Load Issues
and
6 More Tips to Fix Gmail Slow Load Issues

Thanks for visiting the site. Please feel free to share this article and this site with your friends. (Use the Share/Save box below.) Don’t forget to rate this article too.

Gmail Service is Down. No problem. Work Offline! is an article from: Kevin Worthington

6 More Tips to Fix Gmail Slow Load Issues

Kev — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:15:13 +0000

Back in January, I wrote an article called 5 Tips to Fix Gmail Slow Load Issues. Since then, it’s become the most visited article on this site, with the majority of the traffic coming from Google searches. Due to the popularity of that article, I have decided to expand on this topic and bring 6 more tips to help speed up Gmail.

Some background of the problem: Gmail tends to load slowly when you first log in and it’s also slow when switching between folders – Inbox to Spam, and after clicking “Send” or “Archive,” etc. To re-cap the previous article, here are my original 5 ways to speed up performance:

Decrease the number of experimental “Gmail Labs” settings that you have enabled.
Decrease the number of browser extensions or plugins.
Use HTML mode.
Use Mobile mode.
Use a third-party email client, such as Thunderbird.

For more in-depth explanations of the above 5 points, please review the original article.

And now, 6 more tips:

If loading up Gmail is the slowest aspect of your entire Gmail experience, this tip will significantly help:
Add the ?nocheckbrowser argument to the URL: https://mail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser. This is an extremely easy and effective hack that makes a dramatic difference to the initial page load.
Disable the experimental labs features. This is much like point number 1 from my previous article, but can be very useful. Adding the ?labs=0 argument to the URL can help you get back to a usable Gmail window. Think of it as an ejector seat for Labs. This is a shortcut step to disabling features one by one, as explained previously.
Disable chat. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the “standard without chat” text link in the footer. Bonus: if you never use chat, take it one step further and disable the chat history feature on the settings menu under the “chat” tab.
Show fewer messages. Reduce the number of ‘conversations’ shown on each page by adjusting the ‘maximum page size’ option to “25″ under “General” settings. It should say: “Maximum page size: Show 25 conversations per page.” This will get Gmail ready faster.
Remove the Skype Add-on. If you are a Skype user and are running Firefox 3.5 with the Skype add-on, it is known to causes sluggishness. Remove the add-on, and you will see a speed improvement. Please note that other extensions/add-ons/plug-ins can cause speed issues, but the Skype add-on using Firefox 3.5+ is a known issue by many, so it’s a great one to start with.
Clear your browser’s cache. Sometimes the simplest thing works wonders. A stale browser cache may leave some unnecessary remnants behind. Flush the browser cache and start with a clean slate. Most browsers have this in the “Options” or “Preferences” menu.

These tips should help you to increase Gmail load times and make the transition time between folders faster. If you have any other tips to share, please leave a comment.

6 More Tips to Fix Gmail Slow Load Issues is an article from: Kevin Worthington

Quick Tip: Quickly Scroll to the Top of Page on iPhone

Kev — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:10:31 +0000

Very quick and easy tip today – you may already know this one…

If you are browsing a web page in mobile Safari on your iPhone, you can fast scroll to the top of the page simply by tapping the clock in the “titlebar” at the top edge of your screen.

This is very handy, especially when reading an extremely long web page. It sure beats sweeping your finger repeatedly.

That’s all there is to it! Tap the clock! I told you it was quick and easy.

Do you have any iPhone tips, tricks, or suggestions? Please leave a comment below. Thanks for reading the site.

Quick Tip: Quickly Scroll to the Top of Page on iPhone is an article from: Kevin Worthington

Quick Tip: Lock the Screen and Passcode Protect Your iPhone

Kev — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:05:29 +0000

Want to save some battery life on your iPhone AND increase your security? Well, this 2-for-1 tip should do the trick. Ready? Here it is:

From your iPhone’s home screen, tap “Settings.” You will see this screen:

Figure 1: iPhone Settings

Next, tap “General,” and you will see:

Figure 2: General iPhone Settings

You may change or set “Auto-Lock.” I have mine set to 2 minutes. With this setting, my screen will lock after 2 minutes and save some battery life for me.

To set a password (or passcode) to unlock the screen, tap “Passcode Lock”:

Figure 3: Set your passcode

It will ask twice, to make double-sure that the code you choose was entered correctly. You will then see the following screen, which outline options for changing the passcode or disabling it at another time:

Figure 4: Passcode options

For now you can leave these settings alone, or change them if you wish. It’s your iPhone, I’m not the boss of you.

Do you have an iPhone tip or trick that you’d like to share? Please leave a comment below. Thanks for stopping by the site.

Quick Tip: Lock the Screen and Passcode Protect Your iPhone is an article from: Kevin Worthington