The Holy Grail of local web development servers
If you are a serious web developer, you might have already figured out that performing experiments and untested upgrades on production servers is a disaster waiting to happen, bringing down the live site with them. Staging live servers (in the form of dev.example.com) usually don't cut it either, especially if you have a lot of file transferring or editing to do. However, local development is still a kludge, as you have to develop in a sub-directory, something like http://localhost/mysite. This has all sorts of implications, the most evident of which being that it breaks cross-content links if you try to pack it and deploy it back to the live site.
Ideally, you would need to develop in subdomains, something like http://mysite.localhost, which would mean that you have the flexibility of local development with the peace of mind of not having to develop in a sub-directory. But, face it. Setting up subdomains is an involving process, requiring hacking around your Apache configuration files. This is suboptimal if you want to do it regularly. Unless you come up with a way to turn http://mysite.localhost to automatically understand where it should find its files.
This article will explain you how to combine WampServer and BIND to create this kind of Holy Grail local web development server on Windows. You will configure a single DNS entry and a single virtual host in order to create a server which can handle infinite subdomains! The only pre-requisite is having a fixed IP address for your server. Well, even 127.0.0.1 will do if you can't do anything better than that!
Improve your AdSense results with on-the-fold ads
If you manage an ad-supported site, you are probably aware of the problem I’m going to discuss. Some of your ads are stellar, some others are stubborn underachievers, to the extent you might consider them a waste of screen real estate. The truth about ads is that they are position sensitive. Where you put them determines, for the most part, their success. You can’t avoid all bad positions altogether but you can create new competent positions no-one has ever told you about. Implementing this in Joomla! takes 5 minutes and requires no programming skills!
