I've been using the free "basic" account on box.net for about two years. They've never really officially supported WebDAV but it worked and I used it to publish calendars for myself and my wife so we could easily subscribe to each other's calendars and keep in sync (we have crazy busy lives!).

Over the last two years, they've changed the URL patterns and had numerous bouts of downtime on WebDAV. It was free, it was unsupported, it was only marginally annoying.

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And I mean see... Kev McCabe has posted a series of video tutorials about Apache, Subversion and Trac on Windows. This should be very helpful for folks wanting to set up local version control and bug tracking but who feel a bit daunted by all these packages. Kev takes you through how to install each package and then how to configure them to work together.

If you haven't already heard, Yahoo! has released YSlow for Firebug, a Firefox plugin that analyzes your site for ways to speed things up in terms of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I installed it an hour ago and it gave my site a performance grade of D with a score in the low 60's. After a few small tweaks, my grade is B and my score is 83. My blog should be noticeably faster to load.

The first thing it recommended I do (an "F" on Reduce DNS lookups) was to strip a number of the third-party JavaScript features I'd added over time in order to reduce the number of domains my site referenced. I removed the Technorati, Skype and Twitter JS calls because, well, they really don't add much value. I changed my Site Meter code to use the non-JavaScript version - which also had the benefit of removing attempts to ping specificclick.net which sets a third-party tracking cookie (Google for more details - some people feel Site Meter should have been more open about this change).

I also got an "F" for ETags. Reading the Yahoo! site (linked from the YSlow plugin) gave me the Apache magic necessary to disable those (in my .htaccess file):

I have a "B" now because the Developer Circuit widget still has an ETag.

An "F" in Expires header scoring became a "D" after I enabled Expires headers for CSS and images (again, in .htaccess):

My Gzip components scored improved to a "B" by adding a directive to deflate CSS:

Another tweak I made that seemed to help was adding defer="defer" to the Developer Circuit JavaScript include - the only third-party JS left on my site now.

The only remaining "red flag" - my one remaining "F" - is the recommendation to use a CDN which isn't really available for free to folks like you and me.

If Developer Circuit adds a few Expires headers, enables Gzip and disables ETags then my site will get faster still but I'm impressed with what I've been able to do in a short space of time.

Thanx Yahoo!

p.s. Also thanx to John Farrar who was the first person to notify me about YSlow!

I don't know why but I've never bothered setting up named virtual hosts for local development. I've generally just used multiple ColdFusion instances on different ports or multiple Apache listeners (and port-based virtual hosts). I guess that was related to the type of development I was doing (working for a corporate and thus focused on just one big project at a time).

Today I decided that my Apache setup was less than ideal and took the plunge and reconfigured everything to use named virtual hosts instead. It went pretty smoothly because all I did was:

• Replace existing Alias directives with VirtualHost groups (and copy in any associated Directory group)
• Changed each port-based VirtualHost group to use *:80
• Added appropriate ServerName directives with made up domain names
• Added those domain names to /etc/hosts
• Restarted Apache (sudo apachectl restart)

Now I can hit dev.corfield.org or dev.fuseboxframework.org or whatever and get the site I expect. Nice. Why didn't I do this sooner?

The only roadblock I hit was that I drew a complete blank on how to enable directory listings (for my local "scratch" ColdFusion instance). I had Options Indexes enabled everywhere but no dice, just "403 Forbidden". I could browse directories on my main document root but couldn't browse directories on any of my ColdFusion domains. I thought it was something deep inside an XML file. After bashing my head against a wall for about half an hour I asked a few folks online. They didn't know. So I did what I should have done in the first place: I asked on the #coldfusion channel on irc.dal.net. Sure enough, within a few minutes I was up and running. Thanks go to B0llock5 for that!

The solution? To add the following directives to the VirtualHost that needed directory browsing:

• Order Allow,Deny
• Allow from All

I knew this really so I just felt dumb for blanking on it. Duh!

Stephen Collins has just released the second edition of the ACME guide - a complete guide to installing and configuring a ColdFusion development environment based on CFEclipse that uses Apache and MySQL. A lot of work has gone into this second edition!

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Updated link March 1st, 2007.

Part of the fun, interesting and varied content on Fusion Authority - a link to a presentation (PDF, 670Kb) from the European ApacheCon this this entitled "Why I Hate the Apache Web Server".

Now, I love Apache but I'll accept that it has some, er, "quirks"... My favorite slide is the one that talks about the powerful mod_rewrite:

I probably don't need to say anything more than just "mod_rewrite". But I will.

"Voodoo" and "... flexibility of sendmail"

The docs practically scream "GO AWAY!"

After upgrading to Tiger and the new iCal, I noticed that the calendar files are no longer in the same place. In fact, I haven't actually found where the new iCal stores the calendars. That was kind of a pain because I used to push my .ics files up to my ISP so that my wife could subscribe to my calendars (a cron job runs on her iMac to push her calendar to my ISP and a cron job runs on my PB to push my calendars to my ISP).

I figured I could publish my calendars to get at the .ics files. iCal publishing supports .Mac and WebDAV. My ISP does not offer WebDAV. Hmm.

Guess I could enable WebDAV on my local Apache and publish to that, then use my old cron job to push the files from the webroot up to my ISP...

I found these articles about WebDAV on O'Reilly and WebDAV.org that helped me figure out most of it. I added a .htaccess file to Limit the WebDAV operations but couldn't write to the new WebDAV setup. Finder could connect, even prompting for the right credentials, but the folder was mounted readonly. Eventually I realized that the DAVLockDB directory path I'd specified didn't fully exist. A quick mkdir and a chmod and everything started working!

Now iCal happily publishes to my local Apache setup, my cron job pushes the files to my ISP and my wife can, once again, see what I'm doing.

It's the first time I've used WebDAV. It's pretty neat!

I added a convenience URL so I could search my blog more easily - then realized other folks would probably like to use it too...

http://corfield.org/search/keyword will search this blog for keyword as if you'd typed keyword into the search field (below, right).

This has been achieved with an Apache mod_rewrite directive (search this blog for mod_rewrite).

Enjoy!

Updated to 1.1 and now in (smaller) FlashPaper format!

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Steve Collins, Rae Buerckner and Jeremy Cox have put together a great document on how to setup a development environment based on Apache, CFMX 7, MySQL and Eclipse for Windows. It's a great step-by-step guide (with a little humor thrown in). This "ACME" environment is what I use locally (on Mac OS X) although I've substituted DBEdit for QuantumDB and XMLBuddy for <oXygen/> (since XMLBuddy is free). It makes for a great localhost development system - free, flexible, robust and powerful.

The problem with mod_mono not working on Mac OS X turns out to be an endian issue, i.e., which way round bytes are stored in an integer. A small C macro fixes the problem in the latest CVS sources for mod_mono.c so I now have ASP.NET running on my Mac, via Apache.
It was not as easy to get that far as I'd hoped. A Mono developer said "Well, just pull the latest files from CVS" but what's in CVS differs from the packaged source files so you have to run an 'autogen.sh' script to create the 'configure' script. However, the mod_mono autogen.sh complains about a few things on Mac OS X and then the generated configure script fails with a syntax error (at line 18,817!). After struggling with the infrastructure for a while, I simply ran a diff across the mod_mono source code and then applied what looked like the necessary changes. Ack!

Since I get asked questions about CF5 - particularly in terms of comparison to CFMX for specific tags - I figured I really ought to have a copy installed locally to experiment with. As most of you know by know, I run everything on a PowerBook G4 so, in order to run CF5, I have to install it on Virtual PC (where I already have HomeSite+ installed to try out various HomeSite / ColdFusion Studio extensions that folks have written).
I discovered I don't have IIS installed on my VPC copy of Windows 2000 so that was a good excuse to download and install Apache 1.3.29. That went very smoothly and took only a few minutes. The CF5 install took a bit longer but was still fairly straightforward. It complained that it couldn't find IIS but it didn't detect Apache so I was in for a manual install.
That manual install consists of copying from to and adding two lines to the file: Then I just restarted Apache and all was well. Almost. CF pages wouldn't process - they just came up as source code. Hmm. Well, it's Windows so I just rebooted and then restarted Apache again and it was fine. Great, so now I have CF5 locally and can try out code on that as well as CFMX6.1!