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My good friend DJ Chesto has released a club mix dubbed “DJ Chesto’s Clublife 4 – This is not Techno”. Turn up your system for these beats. It’s a mixture of Electronic and House – any of you Ministry fans will instantly recognize the familiar tunes. I’m looking forward to more of Chesto’s work, and possibly working with him on some new mixes.

The mix was created using Djay and Vestax Spin on a MacBook. Normally, I’m not a very big fan of Apple products, but their music production market is very defined and I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it myself.

In other news, I will be updating the blog on a weekly, rather than daily basis. I have decided to slow down the regular postings to avoid blogging myself dry, and to give myself more time to get some ideas for quality posts. In the future I might introduce guest postings and interviews. We’ll see.

Here is the download link: http://www.mediafire.com/?mhmhmjhdzo2. It is about 44.91 MiB in size, M4A format.

The majority of blogs, forums and small websites (and some large) are using PHP to power their content. This brings about two important side effects: majority usage, and inherent security holes.

PHP is no stranger to vulnerabilities. During its inception, there have been hundreds of security flaws reported and, for the most part, patched. The concept of completely secure software is far-fetched, at best.

Today I’ll be assisting you in hiding your web server’s (Apache, specfically) use of PHP to help deter attackers.
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I’ve been a big fan of storing as much information in the database as possible. This includes HTML pages, PHP-executable files, and images.

It’s a simple concept, really. If it can be stored in a file system, it can be stored in a database. They’re essentially the same thing. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve noticed a lot of websites utilizing XHTML in their websites rather than the widely adopted HTML4.01 standard. I’m not too sure why, though. The benefits of using XHTML over HTML is not applicable to most of these websites, and many don’t use the standard properly (invalidly nested tags, incorrect MIME types).

For those wanting to develop websites in a bleeding edge specification, I recommend using HTML5 & CSS3. Browsers are rapidly adding support for these languages and it offers a lot of benefits (embedded video, content structures, etc) for websites compared to the XHTML standard, which is used primarily to offer websites stricter coding guidelines than any real-world benefits.

There is an amazing array of pre-built PHP (CakePHP, CodeIgniter) and JavaScript (jQuery, Prototype) frameworks out there that are used by many websites, large or small. Each has their own pros and cons. Today, I’ll focus on using a framework for your website versus coding your website or CMS from scratch. Read the rest of this entry