Category Archives: General

Thanks Ed for the link, your comments are much appreciated.

Yes, Blogstreet is quite cool!

In the beginning..

Stuart pointed me at a new “who’s linking to you” search engine but when I tried to sign up I noticed their terms of use and privacy policies were missing. Will I give a real email addres? Will I sign up even?

The Two Towers – first review!

Zimran looks at phone+camera combos. Vodafone sent me a promotional mail this morning offering a EUR100 discount on 3 such phones.. hmm.

The Object-Oriented Evolution of PHP – history of PHP, good read.

Abstracting the Linux Desktop from the File-system – with lots of nice screenshots too!

The Top 5 Misconceptions About LindowsOS – you have to run it as root? gah! what security is that?!

The Register reports the first MS Stinger smartphone can’t dial up from your contact book! How did that get past the bug testers?

Ok, so you have to bring the site down for maintenance, and display a nice “closed” sign on the site to visitors.
Using Apache this is easy.
1. Create a directory, maintenance in the document root of the web server. Inside there put a .htaccess file with the following:

<limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</limit>

Create an index.html in this directory with whatever message you want to display to the user.

2. Create a .htaccess file in the document root of your server:

<limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from MYIPADDRESS
</limit>

Change MYIPADDRESS to the IP of the machine you access your site from.

3. Add the following to your httpd.conf, preferably in the virtual host of the server you’re taking down:

ErrorDocument 403 /maintenance/index.html

While you’re there, put the same in for 404 too.

Restart Apache and voila! You’re site is now under maintenance! Don’t forget to undo the above when you want visitors to get into the site!