Friday, February 24, 2012

What is that  on top of my web page?

 is the BOM or Byte Order Mark of the Unicode standard. To solve issues where the BOM appears on top of your web page, simply open it in a note editor like notepad++ and change formatting to Unicode in UTF-8 without BOM and then save the file.

The BOM should not appear anymore when you view the page on a browser after doing this formatting change.

Resources:

  1. Byte order mark ( Wikipedia )
  2. Notepad++ is an open source text editor. You can download notepad++ here.

Internal Server Error After Migrating a Drupal Site to Go Daddy

Scenario


You have your main domain in Go Daddy with a hosting account linked to it. You either have another domain or subdomain that you want to host on the same hosting account, so you go ahead and create a new subdirectory, and migrate your Drupal files into the newly created directory folder. Once the database has been imported and settings.php updated with the database details, you go to your site, is able to access the home page, but no other page is accessible - you get an Internal Server Error on any page that you try to open, even logging in ( from the home or front page ) gives you the same error.


Solutions to try


If Subdomain

On the root of your Drupal folder, look for the .htaccess file. Download to your local drive and open in a text editor, and uncomment the line:

RewriteBase /

See image below.



If on a Subdirectory

If you are not using a subdomain, but just a subdirectory, try uncommenting the line:

RewriteBase /drupal

Replace /drupal with the name of your drupal directory. See image below.


After saving the file, upload back to your server. Test and see if the change in .htaccess resolved the issue.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Focus and Track Time with Tomato Doer

Most of us spend our days trying to manage the time that we spend on different tasks, whether its work related or personal chores. Managing time and getting us to focus on whatever we are doing is one of the goals of the Pomodoro Technique, something that you should try if you want to improve your own time management and focus.


There are various tools that you can use to follow the Pomodoro technique, the most simplest being pen and paper. One application that I have found and am currently using is Tomato Doer. It’s portable, keeps a log of your completed sessions and mostly stays out of the way – which is good so that it does not in itself affect your productivity.

You can read more about the Pomodoro technique here first, then try out the tool by downloading it from Sourceforge. Tomato Doer requires Microsoft .NET 4.0 Framework.