Bin-Blog

My last post about using a bit of custom PHP code in the wordpress template instead of installing a plugin inspired a new way of thinking for me. How many of the wordpress plugins currently in use are actually necessary? Couldn’t we avoid a few plugins by using a bit of custom code?

The new talk of the SEO world is ‘Canonical URL‘. What is canonical URL? This is the definition given in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog…

I have completed a tutorial that I have been working on for a long time. Its the Interactive SQL(Structured Query Language) Tutorial – it teaches you the basics of SQL. SQL, for those of you who are unaware of it, is the language used to access and manipulate data within a database. It is very simple and very powerful.

I have already created a script to update twitter(or tweet, or whatever) from the command line. For those who are not big fans of command line, there is another method to make tweeting easier – tweeting from the address bar…

I got into programming before I got into Linux – consequently, many of my earlier programs were targeted for the windows platform. I want to showcase those apps in this post. I no longer use them – but if anyone finds any of these useful, it wont go to waste.

If you are a Windows user who want more stability(but unwilling to switch to Linux completely), this post is for you. Basically, you have to create a dual boot system with Linux and Windows – and use Linux for doing the more ‘unsafe’ operations. The end result is windows remains stable – and you will be able to do things that are potentially dangerous.

What’s the keyboard shortcut to close an application? Yes, its Alt+F4. Its not an easy shortcut to hit. I always thought that the Escape key was a much better shortcut to close applications. Once I convinced myself that it was the ‘One-True-Way’^TM, I decided to impose that shortcut on the applications that I use. Metapad and Irfan View already had that option – the other application I had my sight on was the Windows Explorer(explorer.exe). This tutorial will teach you how to add the Escape key as a shortcut to close Windows Explorer.

Most of my regular readers know that I do most of my work in Linux. After all, my development platform is LAMP(L being Linux). But it was not always so – I used to be on Windows(in a period now referred to as the dark ages). Being a power user, I found a lot of tweaks on Windows. But I never managed to share them on any of my blogs – because I started almost all of them after I moved to Linux. So here is three tips on how to make Windows a bit better(or at least less painful).

As my subscribers already know, the week before last was Plugin Week – that’s when I publish one WordPress plugin per day for one week. And I managed to pull it off too – there is a list of all the plugins released on that week…

Some time ago, I was approched by the publisher of the book to write a review of their book ‘Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle[Affliate link]‘. This got a bit delayed because of the plugin week. But I managed to finish the book today – so here is the review. Bottom line – most people are using phpMyAdmin for only the most basic operations(editing data, import, export, etc.). If you are one of them, you don’t need the book – you already know all you need to know about phpMyAdmin. But other(like me) use it for advanced purposes – to manage MySQL, create database/tables, run queries, etc. I would recommend you get this book. It covers everything from basic usage(which is a bit boring and should be skipped over) to advanced stuff(like designer view, configuration options, triggers, innoDB relation options etc.)