I’m been delving more deeply into the world of front-end development recently, and after trying out a few different JavaScript unit testing tools I selected FireUnit.  I installed the Firefox extensions Firebug and FireUnit – you need both for unit testing with FireUnit.

However, sometimes Firebug doesn’t work for me and I want to use Safari for debugging JavaScript.  I also found some tests that worked in Firefox but failed in Safari just because of differences in how the browsers handle UTF-8. Running your JavaScript unit tests in multiple browsers is clearly a good idea.  So, the obvious drawback to using FireUnit is that it only works in Firefox.

My solution is to create a stub version of FireUnit so when I run my tests in Safari, the stubs are defined, but when I run them in Firefox, my tests use the real FireUnit functions.  The following code at the top of my test files make them work in any browser, with or without FireUnit.

<script src=”FireUnitStub.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Of course, I need my stub source code in a file FireUnitStub.js in the same directory for the above line to work.

I’ve only implemented a few of these functions so I hope someone else will do it properly and completely, maybe using the source code for FireUnit itself.

Hereby forthwith released into the public domain.  Have fun!

Here’s a screen shot of my tests after a successful completion in the Safari browser, with the debugging enabled.  (Click on the image to see the whole image.)

Even though it only lasted two or three months, there were a lot of twists in the story of how my brother and I purchased Afternic.com in 2002.  It was a comedy of errors that in the end worked out great for everyone.

I had called Register.com to discuss a referral deal when they turned the discussion towards purchase.  Of course, I said, “how much?” and they said make an offer. They had announced they were shutting it down, so I said that means they must value it at about nothing. Right?  Somehow, we agreed on an amount around $400,000.

Only one problem: we didn’t have the money.  I had an MBA but no track record in business and in hindsight I was naive about how hard it is to raise investment quickly. The biggest bank in South Florida laughed at the idea of borrowing funds for a website, so that option was off the table. My rep there didn’t get it – she thought I wanted something like a home page. LOL. Friends and family were not interested.  I did raise $25,000 from two former classmates in my executive MBA program but one of them – the one who put in $20,000 – got cold feet and I refunded her investment about two months later.

I thought I was going to have to cancel the deal.  My brother and I discussed how it might go when we told them. Then, out of the blue, Register called. Said, very sorry, but after legal review, they could not sell us the user list – the database – because of the privacy agreements with their customers.  They were canceling, not us!

We agreed to leave the database and the software that ran the website out of the transaction.  It would become a domain name only transaction (plus some email marketing service for some emails to the old customer base). And they would drop the price about 75% to around $100K.

Deal! I was able to handle that with a home equity loan, which was easy to get back then.

Turns out even that refunded investment was a twist of good luck – we had needed just that much money for just that period of time to cover an earnest money deposit before my home equity line funds became available!

Michael and I thought we already had a better website on NameBuySell.com – I just had to rebrand it – so we didn’t value the technology that ran the old Afternic.

Register agreed to email the old user base up to 12 times for a fee each time. We used two emails and passed on the rest.

I finished up a software development contract developing the software for an embedded Linux USB module for aircraft for Gables Engineering in Coral Gables, FL about one week before we closed the transaction.  I became the first full-time employee of the New Afternic, working from a spare bedroom in my house in Plantation, FL.

I rushed to rebrand NameBuySell.com to Afternic.com in one week.  We came up with a promotion to sell all memberships for $1 to celebrate our becoming the New Afternic.

I was extremely nervous because none of my websites had ever had to handle as much traffic as Afternic.com would get.  Turns out one managed server running PHP/MySQL replaced several servers running Cold Fusion for Old Afternic.  And it worked great.

We owned the #1 site in the US for aftermarket domains according to Alexa.

This blog has been in the “getting established” phase for years.  I had been dabbling at it before, but since I left my last full time job at Hostopia, I’ve gotten more serious about this blog and I’m seeing the results:

Visitors per month are up 121% in the last month.  (Went from double digit to triple digits.)  Here are some things I’m doing differently to kick things up a notch. Consider this post my tips for bloggers from a newbie.  More to come as I learn.

I’m posting a steady stream of posts.  Thanks to WP’s scheduling feature, I even scheduled the last two  to post days after I wrote them.  This helps me post steadily with less pressure.

I included a video for the first time this month.  Hope to use more rich media going forward.  I think it is an increasing expectation of surfers these days.  I know I prefer sites with pics and videos.

I installed Ronald Heft’s Google Analyticator and started tracking traffic with Google Analytics. You improve what you measure!

I wrote and installed my own Feedburner plugin for WordPress so I can track RSS subscribers. (The whole source code was about 5 lines and is included in that post. I’ve never written a smaller piece of code that had a practical use.)

This morning I installed the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress: All In One SEO Pack.  All I wanted to do was change the header title of the home page to include some keywords.  I was shocked (like many others, I noticed), that WordPress does not let you specify the page title in the header independently from the name of the blog.

I activated WP’s Askismet to prevent comment spam. Comment spam was so bad before Askismet that I actually turned commenting off on this blog.  Very few people comment during the “getting established” phase – you just have to wait for it – but I’m ready to receive them now.

If you try to install WordPress with the PHP and MySQL procedures I recently posted you’ll get the following warning all over your WordPress pages.

Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘America/New_York’ for ‘EST/-5.0/no DST’ instead in file-name-here on line NN

Here’s how to fix it.  Edit (or create if it does not exist) /etc/php.ini and add the following line:

date.timezone = “America/New_York”

Then restart  your web server:

sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

Part of making OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) a great LAMP development platform is installing MySQL. Here’s how to install that along with the most popular web interface for managing MySQL, PHPMyAdmin.

1. Download the Mac OS X 10.5 (x86_64) package format from dev.mysql.com.  The downloaded file should be named mysql-5.1.xx-osx10.5-x86_64.dmg with “xx” replaced with a minor release number.  Open it and see something like this:

2. Double click the mysql-5.1.xx-osx10.5-x86_64.pkg and install it with the defaults.

3. Do the same for MySQLStartupItem.pkg.

4. Double click MySQL.prefPane and follow the instructions to add the MySQL pane to your System Preferences.

5. Open System Preferences -> MySQL and start MySQL.  Check “Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup” unless you want to restart it with this panel manually every time you reboot.

We’re done with MySQL.  Now lets download and install PHPMyAdmin.

6. Download the PHPMyAdmin .bz2 file from phpmyadmin.net.  Put it in the Sites folder (under your home folder).  Double click it in Finder to unarchive it.  Rename the folder it creates to phpMyAdmin (just removing the version info to make it easier to remember).  Now for the trickiest part.  Edit the Apache configuration files.

7. Edit system file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and just remove the # from the line that includes the httpd.vhosts file.  From now on whenever I say “edit system file” that means use sudo and your favorite editor.  (I use vi but I would never recommend that unless you want to learn a powerful but very obscure and difficult to learn editor.)  If you’re not sure how to edit a system file try this.  Open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and enter this command to edit system file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

When it asks for a password, enter your OS X login password.  Look at the hints at bottom of the Terminal figure out how to write the file with your changes and exit the editor.

Should look like this when you’re done:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

8. Edit system file /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and replace the VirtualHost example blocks with this (replacing roger with your own username):

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /Users/roger/Sites/phpMyAdmin
ServerName phpMyAdmin.localhost
ErrorLog “/private/var/log/apache2/phpMyAdmin.localhost-error_log”
CustomLog “/private/var/log/apache2/phpMyAdmin.localhost-access_log” common
<Directory “/Users/roger/Sites/phpMyAdmin”>
AllowOverride All
Allow from All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

9. Edit system file /etc/hosts to add the local domain name for your PHPMyAdmin site.  Just add this line to the file:

127.0.0.1     phpMyAdmin.localhost

10. Now just restart the web server with the new configuration with this command:

sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

11. Open your browser and visit http://phpMyAdmin.localhost to experience the victory and start managing your databases.

I think these instructions should work just as well on 10.5 (Leopard).

Good luck and post a comment if you need any help.

Here’s how to get a PHP site running on your Mac with minimal effort.  First, lets put a PHP file in the right directory so we’ll have something to see when we get it working.  Put the following code in Sites/phpinfo.php

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

It is an effective method to develop backwards, so lets start with what we want to see at the end of this procedure.  Open your browser and visit (replace roger with your username):

http://localhost/~roger/phpinfo.php

You should get an error like “Unable to connect.”  That’s because we haven’t enabled the web server nor enabled PHP in the web server.  Lets enable Apache web server.  Go to System Preferences -> Internet & Wireless -> Sharing, and check Web Sharing.

Now if you refresh your browser with the above URL you’ll just see the PHP file as you coded it.  Still not what we want, but at least the web server is running.

Edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, search for “php”, and uncomment (remove the #) on that line. Should look like this when you’re done:

LoadModule php5_module  libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Now go back to Sharing, uncheck Web Sharing, wait till it says it stopped, then check it again.  This restarts the web server with the configuration change you just made.  Now refresh your browser and you have your first PHP page served on your Mac. Congratulations!

Added a page for my mac.  I will be recording what I install and why on that page.  One additional tip from studying computer architecture.  When you’re deciding where to spend money increasing your computer’s performance, start with the slowest things first, namely the hard drive. A standard MacBook Pro 17 already comes packed with high performance but I did add one item above standard.  I got the 7200 rpm  500 GB hard drive compared to the standard 5400 rpm drive.

Of course there are exceptions.  Your mileage might vary if you’re running some particular memory intensive app or cpu intensive app all the time, but for most people, the hard drive upgrade will be the most satisfying.

Click here:

http://www.twitter.com/rogercollins

Been very busy with my new job, but finally got the time to restore my blog.  For the first time I launched a site without writing one line of code or entering one command into a shell.