Lately there has been a rise in stop-motion animated clips, from commercials to music videos. Stop-motion is simply frame-by-frame animation using still photos, with objects and/or actors moved incrementally between shots to create the illusion of movement. It’s an old medium, and I can only imagine how labor-intensive it can be… I’ve seen some clips of them being filmed, and the process is amazing. It also can produce some spectacular effects though, and below are two of my recent favorites.

Deadline: Post-It Stop-Motion by Bang-yao Liu

Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie

There are lots of others out there, search for stop motion on Youtube, or check out Anim8stopmotion.com!

There are several ways to take backups of MySql, and though not all are great, it really depends a lot on your situation. Having recently found the need for some heavy backing up, I had to do some deep research and decided to share. Here are some thought processes to use when choosing a backup strategy.

mysqldump

If your data set is small (I realize “small” is a relative term.. to qualify it, let’s say <10GB), then mysqldump will probably work great. It’s easy, it’s online and it’s very flexible. Just a few things mysqldump can do:

backup everything or just certain databases or tables

backup only the DDL

optimize the dump for a faster restore

make the resultant sql file more compatible with other RDBMSes

and much more…

However, the most important options are related to the consistency of your backup. My favorite options are: [More]

Alright, so I know I said in a previous post that I really liked SilverStripe – but the more I worked with it the more I had to find workarounds for things, I’d post questions to the forums that would go unanswered (because of lack of traffic to them, mostly), and the installation of addons could just be painful.

So I decided to give WordPress a try. I have to say I was impressed… the installation was fast, addons easy to install, and there are many more to choose from than SilverStripe. And themes… there a lot of them out there for WP, and much more impressive and flexible than SS. So I made the change permanently, and I plan to sick with it I think, though themes may change as I find new ones I like because I like change (I found one I’d like to change to now, but it’s a premium theme, and I’m stingy).

If you’re looking for a user-friendly CMS WordPress is probably your best bet, nice and simple.

I recently updated my much-neglected blog/personal site using the Silverstripe CMS. It was relatively easy to install and customize for someone like me with decent html skills and a little (ie: dangerous) level of knowledge in PHP. MySql knowledge helps too, but as I already had a running MySql database that side of the install was pretty transparent.

SilverStripe is built on the backbone of an object-oriented PHP5 web framework called Sapphire. Their Model-View-Controller approach allows you to easily separate code from logic. The out of the box classes in Sapphire provide a sturdy foundation for to build from. The folks at SilverStripe boast about how flexible the platform is. Using their modular approach it’s easy to understand why. The code that’s already written and the code you write when extending the CMS is very logical, and easily reusable.

The SilverStripe template engine is set up deliberately simple in an effort to further emphasize separating logic from design. Using the templates allows you to interact through control loops that are built in and others that you can add by extending your pages.

The CMS interface is easy to use once you get everything up and running, it makes it easy to add/remove/customize certain pages and adjust features without digging into code.

All in all I recommend it, but it’s not really for beginners.

This entry is intended to help you set up name based virtual hosts on the Apache Web server. Apache allows you to host several different domains and subdomains on a single IP. While this is an integral part of Apache, many people seem to struggle with setting up such a scenario. Hopefully this will help you learn from my mistakes!

We will assume you already have Apache installed and configured on your webby. Also, we will assume you are trying to host two sites; www.site1.com, which also hosts a blog on blog.site1.com, and www.site2.com

Adding Hosting Directories

By default, Apache serves files that are located in the hosting root folder, usually /var/www. You can put your site files just about anywhere, just make sure to be consistent and organized. For this article we will be creating the following directories for our first domain:

mkdir /var/www/www.site1.com
mkdir /var/www/www.site1.com/public
mkdir /var/www/www.site1.com/private
mkdir /var/www/www.site1.com/cgi-bin
mkdir /var/www/www.site1.com/logs

And so on… repeating the process for www.site1.com with blog.site1.com and www.site2.com. This gives you the directories to place your publically served files in public, files you do not want to expose in private, CGI scripts in cgi-bin, logfiles in logs. Configure Virtual Hosts

Next, we will add the configuration for each site to the default Apache configuration file found in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.site1.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/www.site1.com/public/

# Logfiles

ErrorLog /var/www/www.site1.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/www.site1.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Notice we added NameVirtualHost * to the beginning of the configuration. This is to enable multiple host support and only needs to be specified once in the config. Then repeat for your subdomain (blog.site1.com) and second domain (www.site2.com):

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName blog.site1.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/blog.site1.com/public/

# Logfiles

ErrorLog /var/www/blog.site1.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/blog.site1.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName blog.site1.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/www.site2.com/public/

# Logfiles
ErrorLog /var/www/www.site2.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/www.site2.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

This sets up two sites, which have their docements and logfiles contained beneath /var/www/nameofsite.com. You can adjust the paths if you wish to keep the files elsewhere. Now put some content in the public folders.

To finish off, just restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That’s it. Hopefully now you should be able to surf to your new sites through unique domain names. If you run into a problem don’t forget to add DNS zones for your new sites. Congratulations on setting up virtual hosts!