As a web developer I’ve been using Apache for a long long time. Recently though, I’ve started to move away from Apache in favor of nginx (pronounced “engine-X”). It’s not that I really need its power, it’s just that I wanted to learn something new to break my box. It’s fairly simple to set up [...]

Today I’m so pleased to announce the release of Social Sketches, my hand-drawn icon set exclusively done for Six Revisions. Initially it was made for Referrer Detector on my just-started sketch project The Daily Faces, but then I decided to make it available for public use, hence the featuring on Six Revisions yesterday. Here is [...]

Thumbnail credit: Premshree Pillai To a website, comments are important - this you must agree. But not all visitors leave comments - in fact, very, very few. Most of them care about the content only, and tend to leave (bounce) the site right after getting the information they need (so sad a life, huh?) Many [...]

Thumbnail credit: Amnemona If you didn’t notice, I have another site called Thica.net - Vietnam poetry network, a WordPress (what else) powered blog dedicated to poems in Vietnamese. The site is receiving about 60K of views per month, which is 12x to that of the moment when it was started back on March 2008, and [...]

Right after Free CDN was released, I got a request to enhance the plugin to support commercial Content Delivery Networks - you know, those big guys like Akamai, Limelight, EdgeCast, Velocix etc. The implementation is not too complicated: specify an origin host, and rewrite it into a destination host. That origin is of course usually [...]

Office life has its advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it keeps me so exhausted and leaves me so little free time for other hobbies - I’m talking about my books, my December Flower guitar self-training, my photographic stuffs etc. On the other hand, it does improve my knowledge and skills with all those working [...]

With Twitter and its 140 characters limit leading all the trends, URL shortening services are in extremely high demand. We have seen TinyURL in the past, now Bit.ly, Is.gd, Tr.im and dozens of others are joining the party to share the cake. Honestly saying, to me they’re all the same (except for ➡.ws for its [...]

Finally I’ve made it! Referrer Detector version 4.0 is now out! I decided to mark this as a major version increment because of these reasons: The code has been COMPLETELY re-written from scratch. As of the previous versions, it was one big file that handled everything from admin to front-end control. Needless to say how [...]

Following the first snippet, here is another small one to shorten a link using Bit.ly. I chose Bit.ly over other link shortening services due to a simple reason: Twitter uses it as default (by now). Code snippet #2 - Shorten Links Using Bit.ly Purpose Create a shortened URL using Bit.ly. This is extremely useful for [...]

Ok so I’m following some guy’s recommendation (sorry, I really forgot his name as well as his blog address) to try to post something useful even when I don’t have anything to blog about. How about a series of code snippets? To some they are old but to the others they may help - for [...]