CakePHP is a great application framework for “developing rapid websites”. I’ve started building quite a few websites with the system and become quite fond of the MVC framework, the native built-in functionality and vast amount of support available.

When I came to setup an application on RackSpace Cloud Sites (previously known as Mosso), due to the unique way the server was configured (running both Apache and IIS simultaneously), CakePHP didn’t want to work straight out the box.

It was only after quite few hours of research and live chat from the hosting support team that I discovered there were several tweaks that had to be made for CakePHP to work on the Rackspace Cloud.

Basically, it all comes down to the .htaccess files and RewriteBase.

1. In the route .htaccess file, add the following line:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   # Cake Defaults
   RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
   RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
   </IfModule>

2. In the app folder, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /app
   RewriteRule    ^$    webroot/    [L]
   RewriteRule    (.*) webroot/$1    [L]
   </IfModule>

3. In the app/webroot folder, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /app/webroot
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
   </IfModule>

That should do it.

Google Calendar is a great cloud computing calendar solution which allows you to manage your calendar online, as well as invite others to shared events.

One feature Google Calendar is missing though is the ability to delete more than one event at a time. However, by using the remote calendar functionality Google Calendar offers, you can get around this.

(This solution uses iCal on OSX but you could use a similar approach with GooSync for Outlook if you’re on Windows.)

1. In iCal, select Preferences from the iCal menu.
2. Go to the Accounts tab and add a new account (+)
   
3. Select CalDAV from the Account Type then enter your Google username and password.
4. Enter the Server Address as google.com.
5. On the Server Settings, make sure the Server Path is set to /calendar/dav/[username]/user where [username] is your Google username.
6. You have now configured your Google Calendar to sync up with iCal.
7. If you have a mass of events with similar content that you need to remove, search for that term eg. “Morning Meeting”.
8. Select all the events and delete.
9. When iCal synchronizes with Google Calendar, all those events will be removed.

For a long time, this website became dominated with content for the One Phat DJ Podcast. While it was good regular content about fresh funky house music, it was distracting from my main focus in life - the Web and digital media.

The One Phat DJ website has been available for quite a few years now - the first instance was setup way back in 2001 - but has usually been a single page pointing visitors to the podcast and connecting services such as Twitter , Facebook and Last FM.

A few months back, I decided it was time to migrate all One Phat DJ content to a dedicated website to highlight a clear distinction between my two different “guises”.

With the introduction of the Funky House Finesse brand and a regular slot secured on Lifted Radio, I gave myself a weekend to setup a basic website using my favoured CMS WordPress, plugging in all the existing content with minimal effort.

The project is evolving (like most good websites) and is sure to grow over the coming months but, for the time being, if you are more interested in the musical side of my life than the digital media, I suggest you pop on over to the One Phat DJ website, put it in your bookmarks and download the archive of mixes directly from there.

WordPress is quite a popular open source CMS that is often praised for its ease of use and simple installation. Like most open source applications, WordPress tends to have upgrades every few months to improve security, stability and the underlying framework.

In recent versions of WordPress, this process has been extremely easy with an automatic upgrade system (something that has also been integrated into the plugin framework too) but on older versions, the process wasn’t particularly straight forward.

Thankfully, I found a rather useful set of commands that you can run on your server via SSH to make this process extremely simple.

Disclaimer: I recommend you always take a backup of the database and working folder before running these commands in case something goes wrong. 99% of the time, I’ve not had any problems with this process but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

# Get the latest WordPress version available.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

# Uncompress it.
tar xfz latest.tar.gz

# Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
rm -rf ./wp-includes/
rm -rf ./wp-admin/

# Go to the new Wordpress directory:
cd wordpress/

# Copy the downloaded files to your existing WP install, overwriting any old files.
cp -rpf -f * ../

# Remove the uncompressed and downloaded files.
cd ..
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz

# Visit your blog and upgrade the database (if needed).

Make sure you visit your WordPress installation in the browser straight away to run any upgrade scripts that are required. You should only see one screen and that process is complete.