Tutorial: How to Install WordPress onto Shared Hosting

I’ve written a tutorial on installing WordPress onto a shared hosting account. The tutorial takes you step-by-step through the entire process with a screen shot for every step. The account I used was a Windows/IIS hosting account with the Helm control panel, but the steps should translate to most other hosts as well.

Read the Tutorial: How to Install WordPress onto Shared Hosting

Tip: Skip all RewriteRules on a sub-request in Apache

To have Apache mod_rewrite skip processing all rules during a sub-request you could add a NS (no sub-request) flag to each rule. Or, you could just make this the first rule:

RewriteCond %{IS_SUBREQ} true
RewriteRule .* - [L]

Easy Mortgage Calculator

This is a mortgage payment calculator that I created because I was unsatisfied with the ones I have found elsewhere, which were slow and plain—why do an entire round-trip to the server for a simple calculation that can be done with javascript? With that in mind I developed the site using jQuery

This is my first venture. My initial investment in it is $1.19 for the domain registration and a weekend to create the site. I’ll likely put a bit more time into it, but no more money for the rest of the year.

Please visit http://www.easymortgagecalculator.info/ and let me know what you think. How could I improve the usability or the design?

Note: This is currently only tested in FF3. I will complete testing and solve any compatibility issues for IE6, IE7, Safari, and Chrome by the end of the week.

Screenshot of Easy Mortgage Calculator

Tip: Don’t use spaces or dashes in WordPress theme folders

Ever wonder why the theme preview for some themes shows up blank in WordPress even though upon activation the theme works as just fine? This is because using spaces and/or dashes in WordPress theme folder names breaks WordPress’ theme preview functionality, so you should only use underscores.

Photo Blog Converted to WordPress

I finally got around to converting my photo blog to WordPress. I decided to go with the Yet Another Photo Blog plugin and a customized version of the Grain theme. Take a look:

Screenshot of Photo Blog

Credit Card Validation in C#

This code validates credit card numbers based on prefix, length, and the Luhn Algorithm.

Reprint of Cinderella’s Historical Character

It has come to my attention that my first (and only—thus far) published work is no longer available where it was originally published. It is a paper I wrote for an English course in college. My professor submitted it to the authors of the course’s textbook, Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, and it was selected to be a student model paper on the book’s companion website.

How to remove the meta name=title element from Symfony 1.2 pages

Note: If you are using Symfony 1.0, follow these instructions instead.

A commenter from my prior post on this subject noted that those instructions only worked for Symfony 1.0 so I have updated the instructions to work for Symfony 1.2 (the current release as of this writing).

Basic Continuous Integration Server with Symfony and Hudson

This is the absolute minimal setup I was able to find to get a continuous integration server running for Symfony that would report a failed build if any of the project’s unit tests failed. I tried a couple different CI servers and Hudson seemed to be the best mix of easy to install, configure, and use that was also free/open-source.

How to use URL rewriting to control access to www

Having your site respond with content to requests on both domain.tld and www.domain.tld can give the appearance to search engines that your site has duplicate content, so don’t do it. Here’s how:

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