These days I prefer static sites when possible or using scalable app platforms like Heroku, though I still maintain and need to run some projects in WordPress on a VPS.

I’ve recently written two posts about AWS and log processing with an external server so here comes a final post to wrap it all up and tie it together.

I’ve started to move my static content for some of my web sites to Amazon Web Services using S3 and CloudFront for delivery. I’ve enabled logging for my CloudFront distributions as well as my public S3 buckets, and wanted to be able to automatically download the logs using cron to my server for processing with AWStats.

One thing I keep doing over and over again is taking screenshots to share with friends, colleagues, forums and so on by hosting it online. To make that process as quick and streamlined as possible I’ve setup a button to automate this in my file manager of choice, Directory Opus.

I’ve been using SyncBack to handle my backup needs to external drives and FTP for a couple of years and it has worked a charm. Time changes though and I’ve recently embraced the concept of using online storage for my backup needs, and went with Amazon S3.

I’ve had some fun playing around with the recently released WordPress 3.0, Beta 1. One of my new favorite additions is the add_editor_style() which allows you to assign a CSS file for the TinyMCE when editing posts, pages and the new custom post types. This is very handy to get closer to a WYSIWYG experience in WordPress’ editor and not having to preview the posts all the times while writing, to check where line breaks end up and so on (if you care about those things).

One of my favorite WordPress plugins is Contact Form 7 which I use on several of my WordPress based sites. Even though it’s highly customizable and configurable I have a few gripes with some hard coded functions in it. You can always edit the plugin file, which I did at first, but then you have to reapply your edits every time the plugin gets updated, which can be cumbersome as this plugin gets updated quite often. So instead of keep editing the plugin file on every update I created some overrides instead.

When working with CodeIgniter, I’ve found the log message functionality built into the framework very helpful. The other day I noticed in my log of one of my CodeIgniter based sites that I’ve had some 404 errors going on for some time. As I don’t have the time to check my logs daily, I hadn’t noticed this problem until now.

I recently stumbled upon the CodeIgniter PHP framework, and a love affair has slowly begun between me and CI.