Taavo is a Boston native who earned his B.A. at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since he first learned to program in '94, he's been involved with a wide variety of projects - from neural network message categorization, software internationalization and desktop application development to everyday web development. Paradoxically, Taavo is also an actor, dancer and playwright, and received his M.F.A. from Naropa University in 2009. You can find info on his performances at taavosmith.com.
[Quick guide written for internal DD9 use, published for the good of mankind.] This is a rough guide, since I don’t have a specific project to test it on. When we get there, I’d like to test it out myself to improve this document. That said… 1) Download and Install … more
Interesting bug today: A client’s web form takes file uploads and forwards them as email attachments. Script works great for .doc files, but .docx files end up as mysterious attachments with filenames like ATT00010.txt, whose content starts with this: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; name=”filename.docx” Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”filename.docx” Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 This “header” is followed … more
One of our clients wanted two sites—two URLs, two designs, two sets of content—on a single WordPress install. They wanted to be able to log into a single admin area to manage both sites, and to be able to make posts of certain categories show up on both sites, while … more
We’ve integrated in-house Microsoft SQL Server databases with public PHP web sites a number of times, now. Until today, this meant dealing with Windows VPSes for even modest sites, simply because we were unable to find a Windows shared hosting plan which permitted access to remote databases, and all the … more
We just launched a new site for one of our clients, and one small improvement we made was replacing all the old and ugly (and not especially SEO-friendly) URLs like /cand_jobs.shtml with shiny new ones like /jobs. The catch here is that Google’s existing index refers to all the old … more
WordPress automatic updates are awesome. When they work, they’re as easy as a click of a button. When they fail, however, you’re left either reconciling yourself to an eternity of manual updates, or troubleshooting your host–a process that routinely takes much longer than applying the update manually would’ve. In this … more
A VPS is the standard upgrade when conventional shared hosting won’t meet your needs. The catch, and most hosts try not to make this clear, is that you’re then on the hook for all configuration, upgrades, and maintenance. And as an added bonus, many hosts offer default VPS installs configured … more
Compared to WordPress’s automated self-updates, Drupal’s update process is something of a chore. This chore isn’t made any easier by Drupal’s documentation (also here), which at the time of writing takes up nine pages, is self-contradictory, unnecessarily time-consuming and somewhat paranoid. And it never offers a canonical pragmatic checklist. After … more