Category Archives: Coding

Dreamhost VPS Root Access and System Monitoring

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If you are a Dreamhost customer, you may have popular enough websites that you switched from their stellar shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). They offer both your main Apache/PHP server as well as a MySQL VPS. I switched to these shortly after it became available, to ensure maximum control over restarting my servers, troubleshooting problems, and scalable resources. The latter option is a real perk: You can change the memory/CPU allocation for your VPS as activity grows on your websites. On the down side, once those resources are used up, specifically memory, your server will determine that memory was exceeded and all processes will be killed.
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Building an E-Book from HTML: Sample Code

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Update 8/30/12: For those interested in simply writing an ePub file from scratch in a clean editor, Check out the free project Sigil. While it creates a fantastic ePub file, the Table of Contents does not carry over when Amazon converts it. However, Sigil simply creates HTML and this tutorial will give you some additional information regarding how to manually create a Kindle ready version.

I recently wrote up a case study for the audience at NovelRank.com on converting blog posts into an ePub e-book, and the experience helped me immensely. It was a bit of refresher course, as I had gone through the process to create my second book, 50 Conversation Starters for the Modern Age. Once it was built using the sample HTML code below, I used a fantastic and free program called Calibre, which is available for all operating systems, to convert the file to both ePub and Mobi (Kindle) formats. Finally, for editing the HTML, I used Notepad++, especially for its ability to do Find and Replace based upon Regular Expressions.
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Tips for PHP Developers on the PayPal API

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I recently had a large amount of frustration and work trying to get an integration going with the PayPal Express Checkout for Digital Goods API. The steps to just get an account were tricky, but then weeding through all of the API documentation was hard. Mind you, I had just come off of building integrations with both SendGrid and Twilio, which have fantastic RESTful APIs. In all, the entire process was 8 hours. After that much trouble, I wanted to put online a few of the tips, tricks, code, and documentation links to help others out.
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