Just a quick note to mention that I’m testing passing the feeds from this site through FeedBurner, partly to get an idea of how the feed is being used and partly because it’s my job to know about all these internet technology thingies.

Anyway, if anyone has any issues with the feed please let me know.

As an addition to my Networked Virtual Hosting Party on Mac OS X article, comments in the How To Setup Development Domains On OS X article on The Apple Blog pointed to something I’d not tried before; using NetInfo Manager to add hosts to local hosts file.

An official Apple article; How to Add Hosts to Local Hosts File clearly outlines the steps. It’s a little confusing as the instructions for Mac OS X 10.2 or later are to edit the /private/etc/hosts file (the same file as /etc/hosts) directly. However, I just tried using NetInfo Manager to add a host on one of the machines on our network and it worked fine despite it running OS X 10.4.8.

A minor detail to mention is I that the niload command was more like this for me:

sudo niload hosts . < /etc/hosts

Really there is not a huge difference between editing the /etc/hosts file directly or using NetInfo Manager and I’m not convinced the latter really makes it that much easier. Either way, it’s useful to know about alternatives.

Lying in the dark, lit only by the glare of my MacBook I suddenly had one of those “Woah!!”, shoot-out-of-skin experiences, as, flicking through Cal Evans PHP Community Playing Cards, I suddenly came face-to-face with this one.

It seems these cards were an actual 3D freebie at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo which means that I was there in an odd, fakey kind of way.

Apparently only those at the conference or featured on the cards got a copy so …erm, let’s just say I was playing blackjack for M&M’s with the kids the other day and it would have been great to see the proud look on their little faces every time the seven of diamonds was pulled out …ahem, cough, hint…

A quick pointer to a really useful series of Vim articles by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier that also appear on Linux.com.

Of course it had to happen! Just a couple of days after I write up on adding posts and adding pages in Wordpress I find a 3 minute intro to Wordpress movie.

It’s just a quick run through of an earlier version of Wordpress but is still useful to watch. Being a Flash movie you’ll need the free plugin to watch it but it’s more than likely you already have it installed.

Having given a basic run through on how to add posts in wordpress the next step is “Pages”. A Wordpress “Page” is basically a fixed post in that it has a link in the page navigation and it’s own link such as http://www.mysite.com/my-new-page/. You can edit it in much the same way you can a post with a few specific differences which I’ll go through.

Create Page

Like a post a page has a Title and Body of text. The main additional settings for a page include:

Page Parent

This is the parent of the page in the site navigation and is only relevant if you have a page needing sub-pages

Page Template

This will change the look of that particular page. Only relevant if you have different page templates.

Post Slug

This is the “my-new-page” bit of the page link; http://www.mysite.com/my-new-page/ and is produced automatically when you “Create Page” but you can change it if needed.

Page Order

This determines the order the page appears in the navigation. If you do decide to set the order of the page you need to make sure you alter all pages influenced by the page order as well as the current one.

Manage Pages

This is not much different from the “Manage Posts” page except for the fact that you access it via Manage > Pages instead of Manage > Posts. Clicking “Edit” brings you back to the page where you can …ahem… edit it.