Things have changed a bit around here. I’ve revisited Havoc Inspired and made what feels like hundreds of little changes mainly to improve the usability of the site.

You’ll notice that my homepage boasts a completely different layout. When I first designed Havoc Inspired v3.0 I wasn’t producing “Please start from the beginning…” and as a result had not accounted for it in my layout. Therefore the episodes were previously clumped together with the rest of my posts, this was one of the main reasons for the realignment of the design. My Blog and Please start from the beginning… are now separated into their own sections so you can see at a glance the current and previous two episode of the series.

I wanted new area to be able to display relatively temporary pieces of information about what I’m up to, for example that I’m one of the judge for the Webvanta Design Contest in Janurary 2010 were the first prize is a Macbook Pro. So I’ve built a billboard type gallery that transitions every 10 seconds (a time period I‘m hoping is long enough to not be distracting to visitors).

I was also previously listing the boagworld show I’ve been vocally involved with, however this was starting to become a very long list (as Paul keeps taking holidays) so now I’m only showing the most recent.

I’ve made tweaks to my typography, copy and calls to action as well as going over my markup with a fine tooth come and cleaning things up a bit.

I’m a lot happier with the layout, but hey I’m a designer, that won’t last long. :-P

I hope you guys like it too, I’d love to hear your feedback!

Christian Heilmann is an Developer Evangelist working for Yahoo!, he is author of the extremely long titled, Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting & Ajax: From Novice to Professional. Christians role takes him all over the world and in this weeks episode he talks to me about what his job entails and the path his career took to get him there. He also speaks very fast.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

If you follow my blog you’ll know that I’ve recently moved to Media Temple as my hosting provider. I’ve gone for a Dedicated Virtual server and so far I’m very pleased with the flexibility I have with it.

Media Temples’ servers, like many other providers, run Plesk as their control panel which means there are a few quirks that need to be overcome.

I should say at this point that I don’t claim to be a Linux/Plesk expert, i simple know enough to find my way around (or enough to be dangerous depending on who you’re asking).

Default behaviour

By default Plesk uses the PHP open_basedir directive to limit access to files outside a sites directory-tree. So if you have setup the domain example.com all your files go into the httpdocs folder (unless you’re using an SSL certificate in which case they go in the httpsdocs folder). For our example.com domain the server path would be:

/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs

Plesk’s default value for open_basedir is:

/var/www/vhosts/example.com

Which means any PHP script you place in the httpdocs cannot dig any further down the directory-tree than the example.com folder.

This is a security measure.

The problem

There are two scenarios (that I’ve come across) where this is a problem. The first is if you want to use PEAR, which is the scenario I’m most common with and will be covering the solution for here, and the second is if you want to use the Expression Engine Multi Site Manager.

Both require PHP scripts to access files outside of their directory-tree.

The solution

To enable access to PEAR packages we need to add the server path to the open_basedir variable as well as the include_path variable. If you’re on a Media Temple server like me the path should be:

/usr/share/pear

If not you’ll need to locate the folder that PEAR is installed in on your server.

Step 1 – SSH to the server

You need to SSH into your server, if you are with Media Temple and this is the first time you are trying to do this, you’ll first need to enable Root Access for your domain through your Media Temple Account Center.

If you’re on a Mac you can use Terminal to SSH to your server with:

ssh admin@example.com

Then your passworld.

If you’re on a PC you can use Putty. My memory is fuzzy on the exact use however, so you’ll need to consult the manual.

Once you are connected to your server you will need to switch user to root for the next step. To do this enter:

su - root

Then your password.

Step 2 – Create a vhost.conf file

Be careful, you now have godly control of your server!

We now need to create a vhost.conf file for our example.com domain which will override Plesk’s default settings.

The following command will create the file:

vim /var/www/vhosts/example.com/conf/vhost.conf

If you’ve never used vim (which is an editor for Linux) you need to know that pressing the ‘a‘ key puts you into author mode and the ‘esc‘ key takes you out (this is about the extent of my vim knowledge, I hope you are impressed!).

While in author mode enter the following information:

<Directory "/home/httpd/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs">
php_admin_value open_basedir "/home/httpd/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:/usr/share/pear:/tmp"
php_admin_value safe_mode Off
php_admin_value include_path ".:/usr/share/pear"
</Directory>

To save the file and quit, press the ‘esc‘ key to leave author mode and type ‘:wq‘ (write and quit) and press enter.

So you can see that we specify the location of our example.com domain, added /usr/share/pear to the open_basedire variable and turned off safe_mode…?

PHP documentation states that open_basedir isn’t effected by safe_mode being on or off however from my experience if you don’t have it turned off, PEAR doesn’t work, as I say I’m no expert so maybe someone can enlighten me?

You can also see that we set the PHP include_path to also include /usr/share/pear

A little gotcha

We use php_admin_value to set the include_path. This means that the include path cannot be change using the PHP set_include_path function.

If you want to be able to change the include_path from within your script, perhaps you want to include a folder containing your own classes for example, you need to change:

php_admin_value include_path ".:/usr/share/pear"

To:

php_value include_path ".:/usr/share/pear"

Step 3 – The scary bit! Reconfigure and restart apache

You now need to run the following command so that the server knows to use our new vhost.conf file:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=example.com

And then restart apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop
/etc/init.d/httpd start

Conclusion

That should be it, you’re all PEAR’ed up and ready to go. You should note that this configuration will only effect the example.com domain. If you create a new domain you’ll have to create a vhost.conf file for that domain as well.

Jeremy Keith is the co-founder of Clear Left, author of Dom Scripting and Bullet Proof Ajax and Lineman for the County… In this weeks episode Jeremy takes me through his career as a busker, bumming around Europe through to forming one of the most respected agencies in the country.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Rick Ellis is the Founder and CEO of EllisLab, the company that bring us the amazing ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter framework. This week Rick takes me through his previous career in music and love for the web.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Canadian born Kat Neville is a freelance designer and front-end developer. In this weeks episode Kat tells me the story behind her website Safety Goat and takes me through her career as in the print industry before moving into the web.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

I seem to be developing a lot of Wordpress sites recently and thought I’d share with you 6 of the plugins I’ve been finding invaluable.

WP Dummy Content

If you’re building a theme for a brand new blog that doesn’t have any posts or pages it’s a nightmare having to create these one by one so that you have some content to work with.

WP Dummy Content to the rescue! It allows you to add any number of random posts of categories as well as pages, nicely filling up the site with content. And when you are done, there’s a delete all button that removes the dummy content (but not any posts or pages that you may have entered manually).

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dummy-content/

Redirection

If you’re migrating a site that was previously running on a different previous blogging platform, such as Movable Type, you may find that the URLs for your posts no longer match. Obviously you want to avoid dead links.

Instead of writing redirect rules directly into your .htaccess file, you can use the Redirection plugin to manage them.

You simply enter the old URL along with the new URL. Simple!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Improved Include Page

Thanks goes to Mr Stocks for suggesting this one to me. :-)

Improved Include Page lets you pull any pages content into another page. For example if you have an About page with three areas of content, one of the areas could be the content of the About page itself, and the other two could be split into sub-pages. You can then create a custom-template for the About page and use the Improved Include Page to pull them all together. Quite handy if you want to have something more diverse than a single block of content on your page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/improved-include-page/

Update URLs

If you’re like me, you’ll develop your sites in a client or development area before making them live. In Wordpress, URLs for your images in particular are hard coded into you posts/pages. Everything works fine until you make the site live, then you have to go through and update all your URLs?

Not with the Update URLs plugin!

Simple enter your development area URL:

http://clients.example.com/clientsite/

And the replacement URL:

http://www.clientsite.com

Click Update URLs and you’re done.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

Maintenance Mode

I’ve built sites for clients who want to write a few blogs and learn their way around Wordpress before they make the site live. The maintenance mode plugin is quite hand for this. You can activate the plugin and a splash screen appears to all visitors, logged in administrators still see the front-end of the site as normal.

You can even create a 503.php template so that you can customise the look and feel to your hearts content!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/

Scissors

Not really essential but the Scissors plugin adds the facility to resize, crop and rotates images. Much needed additional functionality for the media library in my book.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/

Any more?

Have you guys come across any additional plugins for wordpress that you just couldn’t live without?

Around 3pm on Sunday 4th October, Havoc Inspired and all my client sites along with about 700 other sites hosted on the same server, were hacked!

24 hours later I received an e-mail from my hosting provider:

At approximately 14:48 on Sunday all accounts on the server we host your reseller account on were targeted by a hacking group. They exploited a script from a customers account and were able to upload malicious scripts which were then used to exploit a PHP function to deface all hosting accounts on this server.

As soon as the hack was discovered we began restoring all accounts using our R1Soft CDP Backup system, this process however is taking much longer than normal and we will be raising this with R1Soft which we understand this doesn’t help you now. The full restore process should be complete within the next couple of hours, at this moment most sites on the server are back to normal.

Several of my client sites are still yet to be restored…

The attackers basically replaced every index file on the server with their own malicious script that shrank the browser window and made it float around the screen, eventually resulting in the browser crashing.

As you can imagine, I find this unacceptable. Therefore I have decided to move to a dedicated virtual server with Media Temple. I have had mixed responses to this decision, some people worn against, others swear by them…

The server runs Plesk which I am pretty familiar with already and was available for me to start configuring within 15 minutes of me pleasing the order, very impressive!

Their knowledge base also seems to be quite extensive and I’ve easily found example commands that I just needed refreshing on.

So so far so good. I kind of feel like a grown up now, having my own server and there’s something about being able to SSH that just feels hardcore to me.

Anyone else with Media Temple? Experiences good or bad?

Joe Stump is now Co-Founder and CTO of SimpleGeo, before that he worked at Digg as their Lead Architect. In this weeks episode Joe takes me through his fascinating career and talks about some of the mind-bogglingly huge sites he’s worked on.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

So another FOWA London has come and gone and it was an excellent event, kudos goes to Jo, Ryan and the Carsonified crew for hosting such a phenomenal event. I thought I’d list a few of my highlights be I forget them!

• Going to the wrong Wallace Space resulting in an 8 mile circuit around London to get to a place 0.25 miles from where we started… Google Maps Fail!
• Bunking at the very lovely Inayaili De Leóns pad, and enjoying general good times.
• Visiting my first Apple store and making a purchase (only headphones but still…).
• Eating great food at the Sakura Japanese restaurant thanks to Ben Bodien’s suggestion.
• Dustin Diaz talk on The Future of JavaScipt Design Patterns. CSS is Jesus and jQuery is Cocaine, one sniff and you’re hooked!
• Francisco Tolmasky’s Introduction to Atlas. This could change the way we build web apps!
• Bruce Lawson’s talk on HTML5 (the pimp daddy of markup), clearing up when and where we should be using the spec.
• Paul Boag’s rearranging the FOWA sign (the big kid).
• Anna Debenham’s recollections of visiting the mens lavatories the year before, “Noooooooo!”.
• Meeting Oliver Waters and seeing a demo of his Momento App. Looks awesome!
• Meeting and having dinner with the Neutron Creations lads Ben Bodien and Marc Roberts.
• Paul Boag diving onto a sofa at the after party and nearly getting thrown out within a minute of arriving.
• The after-party, spacious, cool and a great atmosphere.
• Catching up with Mel Kirk as always.
• Relly Annett-Baker busting moves on the dance floor (after very short lived protests to actually get up and dance :-P)
• Alex Hunter’s talk on Marketing your Web App – The Future of Brands Online. Caught my attention with the first sentence, good interview afterward as well.
• Yaili winning the prize she wanted… she wouldn’t even let me look at it… very protective.
• The Gary and Kevin show at the end, Ryan’s dismayed face as he lost control of the event, and the shear insanity of geek blind date and sudden appearance of Kanye West!
• Catching Moon at the Odean with Paul Stanton.