A Path Less Taken

I wanted to add pull quotes to my blog posts for added impact. I was taking a break from doing research on the topic when I just happened to come across David Walsh’s post entitled Better Pull Quotes with MooTools. I’m not a MooTools user, but David’s post mentioned that his effort was based on Chris Coyier’s post on CSS-Tricks titled Better Pull Quotes: Don’t Repeat Markup. I checked out the post and it seemed easy to implement, so I decided to give it a go. As Chris says, “Pull quotes are wonderful.“

After acquiring a new domain I had to set up the Virtual Host in Apache. I went to httpd.conf and uncommented the Virtual Hosts Include line which includes the conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file. Then I edited the vhosts file and added the following block:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot "c:/apache/mydomain"
     ServerName mydomain.com
     <Directory "c:/apache/mydomain">
          Allow from all
     </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then I restarted the Apache service and my new domain worked. My thanks to this post for guidance that lead to the Directory directive included above.

Random web surfing brought me to a great post that examined the Technorati top 100 blogs and the blogging software they use. The information on blogging software is interesting, but what is equally interesting is exploring some of the top 100 blogs to see what others are reading. If you are interested head over to Royal Pingdom and check out the article.

Lately my eye has been wondering. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been looking at other blogging software. I don’t really plan to move, but I wanted to see what was out there. I found a really good post at Dan and Cheryl’s Place that gives a new users perspective on both Movable Type and WordPresss. I thought it was worth the read.

I have not posted in a while because I dropped into another science project. I was working on a little one off PHP app to use at work and I needed a small amount of data storage. I didn’t want to use MySQL because it’s not on my work computer and I wanted to make sure the data files were accessible to other applications by making them XML. I looked at several Text DB options (see the previous post), but none of them used XML to store their data. So, as I’m sure you guessed by now, I decided to roll my own. SCIENCE PROJECT!