Colin McCann Dot Com

I am the technical administrator for a decently sized vBulletin forum that is hosted on a system offering a lot of performance at the cost of some storage space. I also have hosting and a number of domains on a system that offers less performance, but ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and storage. Lastly, I have a strong need for peace of mind, and off-site database backups seem like a nice way of getting a bit of that back. (continue reading…)

I’ll cut right to the awesome. This script runs every minute, checks an IMAP mailbox (that happens to be my work email), and detects if any new messages have been received. If so, all HTML and special characters are stripped (leaving plain ASCII text) from the message body, and truncated to 150 characters. Next, the script sends me a text message through Verizon’s email gateway “from” the original sender’s email address. (continue reading…)

These examples show the difference in handling form submissions between Internet Explorer (version 7 tested) and probably any competent browser on the web (read: everything else). Never mind the fact that this sort of browser behavior is contrary to everything you’d expect. Hope this saves someone the three hours it wasted for me. (continue reading…)

I recently got this all polished up, and it’s working so well I decided I had to share. This little gem allows me to completely do away with setting up a dev server to make changes on a live site, as the functionality is basically created on an as-needed basis. It’s easy, but oh so useful. (continue reading…)