1. Technically Easy provides useful and helpful advice to understanding various technologies in use today. Topics discussed include computers, networking (wired and wireless), security, Web sites, and digital cameras. Free reviews of personal blogs and Web sites are offered.
2. Turnip of Power is The Premier Site On Social Networking! The blog where informed card droppers go to discuss what’s happening on Entrecard. Tips, Tricks, and All things to Almonds…
3. Marriage and Beyond on marriage, everything in between and thereafter
4. Nice2All Website accessibility and beyond.
5. Delta’s Dark Den of Destruction, a Malaysian blog that focuses on popular culture (entertainment), current affairs (politics) as well as the occasional weird blog post.
6. Personal Finance Management Guide - Quick and easy strategies for getting control of your money. An all-you-need-to-know introduction to managing and making the most of your hard-earned money.
7. Modern Glam - blog about fashion trends and tips for men and women, with a rare occasional foray in to other areas, specifically, web news, Etsy gossip, indie design, current events, etc..
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8. WOW Factor - personal photographs. Some old, some new.
9. E-business Ideas - Tutorials and articles relating to internet marketing, copywriting, PPC, membership sites, and search engine optimization. The site also features Book Reviews and Notes.
10. la dolce vita - blogging anything under the sun

An inter-island ferry the M/V Princess of the Star carrying 626 passengers and 121 crew members was reported to have capsized off Sibuyan Island in the central province of Romblon. Search and rescue efforts are being conducted by the Coast Guard where only four survivors have been found as bad weather continues to hamper the recovery of survivors and dead bodies.

We are hoping more survivors would turn up. I basically had no sleep last night as I watched over my family while strong winds came early Sunday morning. My tiny radio died as it ran out of battery power leaving me in the dark on what else was happening outside. There was no power and no internet for most of the day which enabled me to spend more time with my kids.

Classes up to the secondary level were declared suspended this coming Monday in Metro Manila due to
typhoon-spawned floods so the kids will be spending the rest of Monday at home.

Now I’m off to get more batteries…

After successfully downloading and installing the browser on my home computer, I went to the office and began my Firefox 3 Download Day session as well. So far, download speeds have started to slow down, almost to a halt, from where I’m at. One can only imagine the load on their servers as the millions who pledged started downloading almost simultaneously. The Mozilla Blog is reporting that they were able to exceed the 1.6 million first day download record of Firefox 2 within only the first five hours of releasing Firefox 3.

On my previous article on Firefox Beta 4, one of the issues raised by my readers and myself was the lack of compatibility with Linky, which seems to be a favorite tool by people on Entrecard. I personally like using Linky for Entrecard dropping as it has its advantages, but lately I have not been able to use the add-on.

Another weird issue I encountered was that I was able to use Linky and on both firefox 2 and Firefox 3 at the same time on my PC though I was not able to duplicate the same feat on my other computers.

Let’s help get the word out and start switching over to Firefox 3.

The Plugin

I am now using Permalink Redirect by Scott Yang to help me simplify the process of migrating permalinks. The plugin worked like a charm. I tested how the plugin would handle backlinks using the old permalink structure and everything redirected properly to the new permalink structure without any noticeable delay.

Small Hiccup

There was only one problem I encountered while migrating my permalink structure and that was which category name will be used. By default, Wordpress would use the category name with the lowest ID if incase you have multiple categories per post. My theme makes use of different categories as well as some temporary categories which I use as a switch to place posts on the four special feature sections of my theme.

The answer to this minor problem was sCategory Permalink, a plugin by Dmytro Shteflyuk which allows you to tick which category your post will use for your permalink structure. It works by making use of a custom permalink option %scategory% (take note of the extra “s” before the category word).

There is Always a Better Way

What I really wanted was to somehow write a few lines of code on my vhost file on Nginx so redirection would be done on the webserver and not through PHP. For me this is the ideal setup as it puts less load on your server. I also have enough documentation to configure this for Apache but not for Nginx. The next few days were spent looking around for answers, which included several forum postings and reading a lot of Nginx documentation. I gave up after a week so I was left with the plugin option instead but still open to learning how to do it through Nginx but for now I would settle for the plugin.

A person’s quest for knowledge can only be limited by himself and not by anything else. For now this setup works well for me but I know there is better way of doing things.

Other Related Articles

Migrating your WordPress Permalinks Structure by Michael Aulia

Evolution by Choice.

As far as I can tell, I’ve already outgrown the Grid. I’ve outgrown not the capability and limitations of the system, but more on what else I can do and learn from it. I craved for root access and the freedom of being able to fully configure my own server.

The next step was definitely going to be a VPS for me and back then I was choosing between Mediatemple’s DV hosting and Slicehost VPS. The decision was made early last week, where I concluded that learning how to setup my own box from scratch would be more beneficial to me in the long run.

I enjoyed using Mediatemple’s Grid Server (gs) hosting and have had good experience with their tech support and all their friendly staff as well. While there were indeed numerous outages, I still consider Mediatemple a great hosting company and their upcoming Cluster Server (cs) will most probably a better successor to the Grid.

Other problems I encountered with the Grid were related to certain TXT DNS entries which I badly need for domainkeys and others to work. Those who regularly visit my site can probably tell the difference on how much the loading time has improved. From a previous 1.0 to 8.0 seconds to a speedy 0.56 seconds

Why Not Shared?

You really can’t make me go back to shared hosting. I have nothing against it as it works real well for a lot of people, but I really feel more like I’ve outgrown it long ago. Even tried reseller hosting for a few sites last year but to me it’s still just shared hosting with a few added perks.

I also run a few other sites that require more resources and you would probably hate to be my neighbor in a shared hosting box.

What Next?

So that’s about it. I just need to transfer a few sites off to another hosting account and will then officially close my grid server account. I have documented how I set up my NGINX setup and compiled most of the information on a new article which will be posted here soon.

1. Turnip of Power - The blog where informed card droppers go to discuss what’s happening on Entrecard. Tips, Tricks, and All things to Almonds…
2. The Success - Share the experiences, make the analysis and increase the friends-network to reach the success for better life : job, money, business, life and love
3. 60 Were Enough - 60 Were Enough bolog about Music, Artists, Mp3 and 60 Were Enough News.
4. joanjoyce - Making Sense, Cents and Scenes from the Philippines
5. Media Morgue - Throwing sand in the gears of the Hollywood machine: News and reviews on film, television, gadgets, books, and all things media. Hollywood industry news and rumors and a healthy dose of acid-tongued cynicism on the side.
6. Worth the Popcorn - The daily blog about movies worth your popcorn. Casual Monday, Indie Tuesday, Documentary Wednesday, Asian Thursday, Pink Popcorn Friday, Cinema Saturday and Preview Sunday. A movie every day!
7. Something From Some Unfamous Body - The authority on an authoritative amalgamation of sundry items (ie: contests, sweepstakes, instant win sites, email forwards, funny videos, etc…) from my life to yours.
8. Scramories - A blog dedicated to digital scrapbooking tips, tricks and techniques as well as scrapbooking services for the avid scrapper with little time to devote to the hobby.
9. A Girl For All Status - A 36 year old ex-wife with two adorable and forgiving kids, a bunch of legally married true friends, a family who understands—wanting to be single and independent again… Read my daily misadventures, joys and struggles of motherhood and the long journey to singlehood, paycheck, responsibilities, and probably, dating again….
10. Freebie Reporter - FreebieReporter is a website dedicated to bring you daily freebies,coupons,hot deals and much more.Save hundreds of dollars monthly and get tons of cool stuff just by joining our comunity.

One of the main things that I do find interesting with blogging has never really been about making money online but more on the design part of things.

The learning experience slowly evolved from learning how to design websites, to learning the code behind the design, and then ultimately, learning how the whole box works and looks from the inside.

Lighting the LAMP

I started installing LAMP emulators (XAMPP and later WAMP) on my Windows box three years ago to learn Apache and how PHP and apps like Wordpress work with MySQL and all the “code poetry” that comes with it. That experience taught me a lot and helped me learn how to design Wordpress themes from scratch.

Running WAMP was pretty straightforward but then I felt something was still lacking, it was the control and feel of running a real webserver which I really wanted to experience and learn from. My logic was that if I were to learn how to really administer my own sites then I should learn Linux fast.

Enter Ubuntu Linux.

Installing Ubuntu on a box at home was my next step. This has gotten me to write about my adventures with Linux and how I got everyone else at home to use it.

Figuring things out on a linux command line was a fairly easy thing for me to adjust to as there are a plethora of documentation and guides found all over the net. Actually, I find it much easier and obviously more powerful than good old DOS.

What Next?

I set up the slice with Gutsy (Hardy Heron was still in beta back then) and installed nginx, php5, MySQL and Wordpress by following some very informative articles from Pickled Onion, the Slicehost forums and a whole lot of other sites.

Right now most of my sites are already migrating to the slice from my other hosting account. Archon Digital will be last on the list as I would want to work out all the kinks before transfer everything.

Almost everything I need is now running on the Ubuntu box. I used Wine to install my personal accounting software, Photoshop CS2 and Dreamweaver 8. I had a few minutes of using GIMP to edit and crop the picture on my about page but that was my only time to ever use the image editing software.

At the office, I still work on both a Mac and a Windows box for my real design work only because the existing workflow and everyone around me have yet to adjust. Also Creative Suite 3 apps don’t work yet with WINE. I know, life sucks, not everyone seems to be on the same level with me on this but that will soon change.

Working on the Linux command line has given me enough practice to be confident enough to actually setup my own slice at Slicehost. This has been one of my goals ever since when I started out with Ubuntu.

My article on setting up my very first VPS will come next.

So here it is…

Congratulations to Search Engine Panel you have won the main prize of 2000 Entrecard Credits. Also to Kent and to Popular Wealth for winning the secondary prize of 500 Entrecard credits each.

This is the first time I attempted a contest of my own and I was very happy with the results.

The prizes were raffled using Random.org’s integer generator and since we only had five entries to the contest, I have decided to give away 300 Entrecard credits to all participants of the game. Everybody wins and Mondays still suck.

From waking up early to taking the train to work, working and getting back home, the whole day seems to just run on autopilot for me. For the others around me, it’s like I have this big “F*ck-off-it’s-Monday” sign on my forehead.

Do you know what I find worse than getting up on a Monday morning? It’s getting up on a Sunday morning dreading that tomorrow will be a Monday.

And because I hate Mondays so much, I am giving away a total of 3000 Entrecard credits in prizes.

I’d would have loved to have a poll and find out what you guys think but I guess a little comment raffle would be more fun.

Comment and Win a total of 3000 Entrecard Credits

Drop by and comment for a chance to win a total of 3000 Entrecard credits. To join, just answer the following question…

What do you love or love-to-hate about Mondays?

Due to the time difference I will count all entries from now to until Entrecard’s next reset tomorrow. I will close off the commenting and will then raffle off the one 2000ec and two 500ec prizes to three lucky commenters and post the results.

UPDATE: Commenting has been closed.
Winners were annouced here.