Tag: PHP

Giveaway: Back Up Your Site With BackupSF

Comment below to win a BackupSF license worth $25.00 courtesy of EasySector!

BackupSF is a Windows program for backing up web site files and MySQL databases.

Before backing up a site enter the site login details using the Add Project button. Adding a project means filling in ftp details, if needed including or excluding web site folders from the back up, and then filling in database details. It is possible to skip one of file or database back up and only do the other. If database back up is chosen BackupSF will need to upload its php script (and .htaccess file, both included in the download) to the BackupSF_scripts folder which it will create on the host server.

After details are entered a back up schedule – daily, weekly or monthly – can be set up. Finally one can change the default local back up folder.

The program’s limitation is that while it does the backing up the restoring is left to the user – via ftp and phpMyAdmin for example.

BackupSF runs on Windows XP and newer. PHP support is required on the host server. It is available in three versions and the standard version available for this giveaway has a 2 site and 2 MySQL limit.

September 18, 2012
Instant WordPress: Easiest Way To Install WordPress On A PC

As a fan of WordPress (who isn’t?) I was excited to hear about Instant WordPress via this wpmu.org post. Instant WordPress is billed as a “complete standalone, portable WordPress development environment” and “The easiest and quickest way to install WordPress!” The 54MB download installs a portable and completely self contained copy of WordPress on a PC. There is no need to go through more time consuming methods like installing wampserver , XAMPP or others if the exclusive or main use of using MySQL and php is to work with WordPress on a PC.

After installing Instant WordPress on a XP desktop I was disappointed to see that it would not start, it did generate an error (see above image) but the error was obscured by the program’s splash image. The error dialog was not movable using either the mouse or keyboard. I looked in the program’s folder, found the splash image (splash.png) and decided to resize it to a smaller size image so that the error would come into view.

The error in question was “%1 is not a valid Win32 application.” (see above image). That particular error is often associated with Windows not reading or liking a blank space in some configuration (in many cases a batch file) of the program in question. I decided to move the Instant WordPress folder from the desktop – whose “Documents and Settings” path contains spaces – to c:\ and as expected it worked (see below image).

Instant WordPress is the easiest method yet to play with WordPress and it comes with a few dummy posts and pages. As of this post it is bundled with WordPress 3.2, MySQL 5.1.46-community-nt with phpMyAdmin, Apache 2.2.15, and PHP 5.3.2.

August 15, 2011
Caderno Is Notepad Plus More

Caderno is described by its author as

Caderno is a remake of the common program “notepad”

Another point the author likes to emphasis is that Caderno attempts to re-create a Firefox like experience. One important feature of Caderno that makes the aforementioned statement true, and the program very much Firefox-like, is that it comes with a ‘find as you type’ feature to search .txt or other files. It also features tabs for opening multiple documents. A session management console allows a user to work with a set number of documents and be able to reload them together. The revert feature – found under the file menu – can reload the last saved version of an open document. Caderno also supports PHP code completion, syntax highlighting for a growing number of languages and an improving though yet not full support for utf documents. A portable version is also in the works and should arrive after the author makes decisions on how to handle the program’s built-in crash recovery when working with a USB thumb drive.
Caderno is a relatively young project and a very interesting one, it should run on all more recent versions of Windows.

August 16, 2009