Dan's Web Spot

I never thought the day would come when I would consider replacing my Mozilla Firefox browser shortcuts with those of a different web browser, but it finally has. One of the best features of Mozilla Firefox (to me) is and has been its extensibility via add-ons that extend the browser capabilities, like capturing part of a web page to an image and being able to annotate and save it, or bookmarks synchronization, or printing only certain parts of a web page in order to save paper and ink.

Google Chrome

About a year ago, I surveyed the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, I had made a small investment in Firefox and a group of add-ons and extensions that I regularly use and like. I couldn't find similar ones for Google Chrome, but was impressed with how fast it opened and loaded web pages. It may have even been in beta, but I didn't feel that it was ready for migration to a main web browser at the time.

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Experts-Exchange

Wow, my first Experts-Exchange accepted solution. Experts-Exchange is a website where people who are anywhere from user-level to guru-level can ask questions and post solutions.

The site used to be free, but I think they are now taking advantage of the increasing popularity it has enjoyed. Here's a link to the question that my solution was accepted for:

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There are several blogs and web sites discussing issues with WordPress sites not getting indexed by Google. I was hoping that the reason my site was not getting indexed would be revealed in this thread: Major Problem solved with WordPress & Google. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

WordPress Privacy Settings

I searched a lot more and finally realized that there was a WordPress setting that handled this. I had set my site to be publicly available in an older version, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it got changed.

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Introduction:

In my last post, I outlined the XAMPP program and what it can do. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a bump in the road, and wanted to share with others how I got around it.

Once I installed XAMPP, set up a new local database for testing, extracted a fresh copy of WordPress in the new c:/xampp/htdocs/wordpress folder I created, I opened wp-config-example.php to add my database and account info, and then saved it as wp-config.php.

All good so far, right? Well, not exactly. To begin the WordPress installation, I pointed my browser to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
I entered my user name and email address and clicked on the next button.

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While I was performing some extensive WordPress plugin compatibility testing, I was getting frustrated with having to wait for what seemed like an eternity for page refreshes to occur. I did a little Google-ing and found an excellent open-source software package called XAMPP that runs on Windows.

XAMPP screen shot

It lets you run Apache (a web server program), PHP5 (a server programming language), MySql (a database program), FileZilla (an FTP program), and Mercury (an e-mail server program) on your local hard drive running a 32-bit version of Windows. You can manually start the programs/servers or run them as installed services. Here is a good XAMPP installation tutorial.

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