Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Posts in: Server management

HTML5 for AS3 Developers: cross-domain.xml and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
This is the second post in an occasional series designed to bridge the gap between ActionScript 3.0 and emerging front-end technologies. Flash, like JavaScript, more-or-less adheres to a same-origin policy by default. Under a same-origin policy, requests for data must come from the same scheme, hostname, and port. If http://foo.example tries to request data from [...] [10 Oct 2011]
On the limits of free speech
Winer’s explanation is purely speculative, and some might call it a conspiracy theory. But it points to a big issue for free speech in the cloud: what happens if one, smaller customer criticizes a bigger customer? In the Web 1.0 era, if you got kicked off a Web host you just found another. Today, the [...] [29 Dec 2010]
Using Amazon S3 for hard drive backups
After reading Baratunde‘s heart-wrenching post about losing an entire terabyte of data, including recordings of his late mother, I decided it was time for me to investigate some backup solutions. I half-assedly make DVD backups of my blog data and important files. But that stuff changes so frequently that a DVD system is really inadequate. [...] [17 Sep 2007]
Creating a faux directory structure using mod_rewrite and switch()
The below example is just one way to create a faux directory structure using the magic of Apache’s mod_rewrite and the PHP switch statement. Sample re-write rules using mod_rewrite. These would be included in your .htaccess file for the directory whose URLs you wish to rewrite. More exacting patterns / rewrite rules are possible. RewriteEngine [...] [15 Sep 2005]
Unix/Linux tip: Listing files with a wild card
Say you want to view all files in a directory that start with foo. Simple, just type > ls foo* That will return all files that begin with foo, including foo.php, foo_bar.php and foot.php. Want to check the permissions on those files too? Type: > ls -l foo* [8 Sep 2005]
Never, EVER, neverever in life
… should you include put a file with your database passwords in your web document root and give it an .inc extenstion. I ran across an example of this today and it’s just a really bad practice. These files are web-readable, and by saving it as an .inc file, you are exposing your data to [...] [17 Aug 2005]
Now with (validated!) RSS!
I’ve been meaning to create an RSS feed for my site for quite some time now. Today, I jumped in and did it. I confess I cheated a bit by hijacking the basic code from a Search Engine Watch article on creating RSS feeds. But I still had to figure out how to automate the [...] [27 May 2004]
X H T M L and MIME types
For the nerd in you, here’s an article on which MIME type you should use when serving XHTML pages. MIME types are an interesting thing. They determine what types of content a server or mail application can handle. The problem with using an XHTML MIME type is that most browsers do not support the type. [...] [14 Sep 2003]
How to stop (most) search engine crawlers
Most search engines adhere to the Robots Exclusion Standards when crawling a site. If you want to stop it,you’ll need to write a proper robots.txt file. How to write one, you ask? Check out the Web Robots pages. [23 Aug 2003]