I recently ran into an issue whilst trying to change the nameservers for a German (.de) domain name. When I tried to point the domain to a whm/cpanel install I got the error ‘Failed to Modify Domain Nameservers: The domain DNS check has failed’.
The reason for this is specific to .de domains.
Continue reading “Issues Assigning Nameservers to .de Domain Names”
Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines.
How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s sh404sef component and not checking the settings properly. By default it is set to use the case of category and article titles which resulted in some ugly /Joomla/Page-Title type urls. Whilst the component was installed it wasn’t a problem. After removing it (for many reasons) the problems started. When requesting the above url Joomla will serve the page /joomla/page-title and the url in the browser will remain as /Joomla/Page-Title.
If applications do this by default then it only takes a rival company to point several mixed-case links to your site to potentially cause a lot of problems.
Continue reading “Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase”
Sometimes you just need the root path, for whatever reason. If you can’t get it you can create a php file and include the following lines.
Another red warning light when running google page speed or yslow that is quite easy to sort out if you are running your own server.
First you need to know how to login through SSH as root user which you can do by reading this post.
And you need an editor installed to be able to edit the right file to enable the apache keepalive feature, which you can read about in this post.
(all links open in a new window so don’t be afraid!).
So here we go….
In order to run the next generation of content management systems, you really need to be running an up to date version of PHP.
The next incarnation of Joomla (1.6) requires PHP 5.2+
As does Drupal 7 (as well as some current modules for the existing system)
Look at any new CMS or shopingcart PHP software and you will see it all requires a recent version of PHP to be installed on your server.
Continue reading “Update Godaddy VPS and DS to run PHP 5.2xx”
Certain functions within joomla rely on a high/normal php memory limit. Certain web hosting companys have a very low php memory limit, around 8mb.
Continue reading “Joomla – Increase php memory without changing server settings.”
Godaddy does not give root user login information as standard, but it is easy to switch to root user in an SSH terminal.
Download and run the Putty SSH program from their site HERE. Or download the windows version directly HERE.
In the “hostname” box insert the IP address of your server and click on “open” to open a connection.
Login with your default/main username and password.
To switch to root user, type:
su -
(including the space)
Use the same default password for root user. You are now logged in as root user.
Today I was updating a joomla site using the MYAPI Facebook Connect conponent to show facebook feeds on a joomla site.
When updating version 1.0 of the component to 1.4 I found that the site had turned to dust and saw nothing but a white page and empty source code.
It turned out that the latest version of the component and the facebook api require json support within php. So here is how to install it…
A godaddy Virtual Private Server comes without Php-Mcrypt and Mhash installed. Here is how to install it.