Work on sites before the DNS has rolled over (by editing the hosts file)
Important: This does not work if you are behind a proxy, which includes antivirus firewalls and such.
- Right click on the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
- Go to properties, turn off “read-only“
- Open the file using Notepad or any text editor
- Add a line to the bottom of the file with the IP and domain
- When you are done, don’t forget to turn read-only back on again
Ex.
Use the IP of the new server and then the domain you want that IP to resolve to.
Now you can browse to that domain and it will resolve to the new IP even though the DNS hasn’t been updated yet.
Make your WordPress site faster (easily)
What:
There’s a feature called “gzip” that’s installed by default on most web servers. Modifying your site to make use of it can really speed up the performance.
How much faster?
Try the quick and easy mod_gzip tester by WhatsMyIP.org. Just enter the URL and it will tell you how much faster it would be.
How to enable it in WordPress:
It’s easy! Just grab the plugin called Gzippy and install it. Run the gzip tester again to see it in action.
Getting “As low as” on Magento unexpectedly?
It’s just a caching issue. All you have to do is go to System -> Cache Management and then click the refresh button next to “Layered Navigation Indices“.
Speed up Magento by ~235%
How to REALLY speed up your Magento site:
The information below on enabling gzip compression will improve your speed a bit, but if you are using a bargain basement web host then that could be a major factor as well. XPC Web Hosting provides advanced technology for speeding up your sites with performance tuned servers in both the USA and Canada. Some of our latest improvements include nginx which speeds up image loading and our database backup system that creates two backups a day and stores off-site archives for 30 days in case of emergency. Learn more.
GZip Compression:
There’s a feature called “gzip” that’s installed by default on most web servers. Modifying your site to make use of it can really speed up the performance.
How much faster?
Try the quick and easy mod_gzip tester by WhatsMyIP.org. Just enter the URL and it will tell you how much faster it would be.
How to enable it for Magento
“One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%. (more…)
Google Web Browser “Chrome” Released
Google’s new web browser “Chrome” was released today. So far I really like it. It’s extremely fast, looks nice and has all the features you would need. It also imports from Firefox perfectly, not just bookmarks either. It does saved passwords, history, etc. as well.
Uxtheme Patches (Windows XP SP3, SP2, Etc.)
Find them all here.
I used this guide to install.
Replacing your main hard drive is actually really easy
I recently had to swap out a hard drive on a perfectly good computer here at work. I needed to do this quickly, so I found out about Acronis True Image. This program lets you make a bootable disc that lets you clone one hard drive to another (so you can then remove the old and leave the new in), or you can backup in windows and then restore via boot cd.
The boot cd restore process is quite nice. You can even browse your network to find the backup files on another computer! So if you were thinking of upgrading your Windows (or whatever) drive with a Raptor or something, this would make it extremely painless.
Easy Windows Explorer Tweak
You can make Windows Explorer start in whatever folder or drive you want! I always found it really annoying how it would start in “My Documents”, which after a while has so many subfolders in it that you have to scroll and find My Computer, and the drive you want to get to, etc.
This is EASY.
- Right click on the shortcut you use for Windows Explorer and go to properties.
- In the “Target path:” field on the “Shortcut” tab, add the following to the end of whatever is there: /e,c:\
Your end result should look something like this:
Note: Change the c:\ to whatever path you want Windows Explorer to start at.
