Easy File Transfers Between Remote Hosts
I’ve just moved from one web hosting provider to another one. But getting large web sites from Host A to Host B can be challenging and time-consuming, especially if you have less than a T1 connection. Let me share with you how I was able to move a 1.3 GB backup file from one host to another using ssh.
First, I logged into the new hosting account via ssh:
ssh username@new-domain.comThen, just a matter of using command-line FTP, I was able to move the file from the previous host:
ftp ftp.previous-domain.com
Name: [username]
Password: [password]
cd [to directory]
get [filename]That’s it. What’s nice about this is that the file transfer occurs between the new hosting server and the old one, which undoubtedly have a better internet connection speed than my current one. Also, it removes the task of having to download the backup file to my local machine, and then upload it to the new host. As long as one of the hosts doesn’t impose a bandwidth cap, this should transfer the file much more quickly than if you were to add your local machine to the process.
Crunch Time and Updates
If you’ve seen the book on Amazon, you’d have seen that it’s publication date is set for early July. Well, I’m happy to say that the book is coming along nicely. And it is crunch time. Still some revisions to make and more editing, especially since Cake was updated to 1.2rc1 just last week. But I’m excited for the book’s release.
Folks have criticized the framework for its lack of documentation, though I think there’s plenty of good docs out there to get you started in Cake. What they’re really saying, I think, is that they expected more documentation than what they got. I know when I started working in Cake, the first thing I searched for was a book, even an e-book if there was such a thing. I have been quite surprised that something hasn’t been printed yet with regards to learning Cake. So I’m happy to offer something to the Cake community that should help boost participation in the framework. After all, my main goal in writing a book is to bring awareness to Cake and to help fellow developers avoid the mistakes I made when first learning the framework.
As the title suggests, the book is designed as a beginner’s tutorial through Cake. The original title was “The Newbie’s Guide to CakePHP” or something like that. You can still download those early chapters, if you’d like, though the book will be much more detailed than these early drafts.
The first part deals with the basics of running CakePHP. Once those routine tasks of getting an application running are discussed, I move on to a tutorial - yes, the classic “build a blog” tutorial - but at least this application takes on a bit more than the usual walkthrough. For instance, the blog I build uses Ajax comments with voting links, category trees for sorting blog posts, and other useful features.
Throughout the tutorial I take some detours to further explain concepts like working in MVC, using helper functions, and building custom resources. The last third of the book deals exclusively with building custom classes like DataSources, behaviors, helpers, plugins, vendors, and more. The book is also set to include a resource in one of the appendices that outlines most of the functions and properties in Cake.
In the end, I think it gives a necessary foundation for the reader to be able to explore the online documentation without any problems and misunderstandings. I think that this is the real benefit of the book, to help the reader get excited about Cake. Later, another book that deals with a more exhaustive approach, i.e., a full explanation of everything Cake can do, you know, like those 1000-page tomes, ought to be written. But I’ll leave that one to the Cake Foundation or another more ambitious developer :)
Anyhow, I’ll keep you posted on developments on the book as we get closer to the release. And thanks for all the support!
Got Accepted.com
I, like many grad school applicants out there, have been waiting for months for graduate school decisions to come in. At this level, it gets a little ambiguous about how one gets in. So many individual factors are used to figure out who fills the spots for a given program. More than any other factor, the competition matters. One year there might be 50 applicants, another year over 200. So the qualifications for admission go up and down dramatically.
In comes Got Accepted.com, a web application designed for pulling together admissions decisions from across the country. This tool helps applicants know what’s happening with others and how their programs are making their decisions. It runs using CakePHP and hopefully will grow to include a lot of application decisions.
I’m pleased with where it’s at, but I anticipate adding more features down the road, like user-specific tracking of schools and programs. What I think is most useful in the current release is the comments section that allow users to discuss a particular decision in more detail.
Anyhow, the beta version is up and running. Check it out and let me know what you think ;)
