Back up. Important topic. Booooooring topic. But I finally have a reliable mechanism in place: Except for the logs, every file that’s here on the server is sitting safe on my hard drive, in a basement in Waterloo.

It’s a comfort.

I’ll demonstrate how I’ve done it, since I think it’s a pretty good procedure for keeping a continuously synchronized duplicate. Read on…

Since I’ve been through a handful of site migration situations, I thought I’d share a few tricks for seamless forwarding. Read on…

Programming languages vary in power. Paul Graham argues that it’s a mistake to use anything but the most powerful language available. And power is roughly equivalent to level of abstract-ness.

PHP is a very useful language. It’s got associative arrays that completely rock, a tremendous set of functions for string processing, and a truly extraordinary level of online documentation. Besides that, it’s ubiquitous on shared hosts, so it’s a snap to get started.

But PHP is missing certain language structures. I find it curious that it was not Ruby that revealed this to me, but, in fact, Javascript. Read on…

Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.

Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.

So why have I made us a portal? Read on…