It's been a year since I got this domain! Crazy. My hosting plan, with Hawk Host, has come due again. I just had to say that I was super impressed-once again-with their service. I was thinking to myself that I probably have an overkill hosting plan (plus I'm trying to save some money for the wife's sake), so I decided to downgrade my plan. Wouldn't you know it, there is a button right on my client panel that let's me downgrade or upgrade to whatever service tier I want. It's pro-rated which means that, since I just paid my invoice, I was able to downgrade and be refunded the exact difference between my advanced hosting plan and a standard plan. I'm impressed with a company that is willing to make my life so easy at the expense of greater profit for themselves.

A very basic snippet of code that sends an email to me when a comment is made

Updates

Maybe not really a huge update, but it sounds cool as a title. Okay, all I really did was switch the primary domain name back to BytePartisan.com and make a few minor improvements. My original domain name was finally released from my old web host earlier this month and I much prefer it to the hyphenated version (which will still forward to this website...

Trine is one of five games available in the Humble Bundle
Frozenbyte has released five games in the latest Humble Bundle. For those of you who don't know what Humble Bundles are, they are packages of indie games that are sold direct to the consumer online. The customer gets to choose what price they pay, including how much of their purchase price goes to charities like Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I always like to share my support for the Humble Bundles for several reasons. 1- Because they are multi-platform and even work on Linux. I like to support vendors who support Linux because many developers don't see it as a profitable market. 2- Because I'm a huge fan of the EFF who seeks to protect the consumer from corporations that wield huge power and influence.

Click the image above to go to the Humble Bundle home page.

Website Update

This weekend I revamped my CMS and built a better HTML interface to allow for easier editing of posts. I can now easily edit posts, titles, excerpts, images, etc. Overall a pretty good update for a few hours of work!

BytePartisan.com running on my test server

Installing the LAMP Packages on Ubuntu

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is a common web services suite for web developers. Collectively, LAMP provides a web server, relational database management system, and a scripting language for creating dynamic web pages.

I suspected that LAMP would be super easy to install on Ubuntu. I was right. Unfortunately, stupidly,I assumed that it would work out of the box. That obviously wasn't right. There was some configuration that I had to figure out. Since that has been done, it has been smooth sailing. I've found that LAMP (Ubuntu) is a little bit snappier than WAMP (Windows), which means I'll probably spread my development more evenly across the two platforms from now on.

I've decided to provide the following instructions to anyone else who may be looking to setup a test environment on Ubuntu (especially the newbies) so that they can avoid some of the troubles I had. Let's begin...