• What would you learn to do if you got rid of your tv?
• How do you define success?
• Is knowledge holding you back? (“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” —Shunryu Suzuki)

With the question “What’s the coolest thing you’ve experience this year?” SoulPancake had this video embedded.  What a cool idea!  I hope you enjoy it – and I hope it ignites a creative spark inside you.  We live in such a wonderful time and anything really is possible;  we are limited more by our imaginations than anything else.

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

Just to make things easier to understand, I will share that www.eclecticthoughts.com and www.kieransmith.net pointed to the same site, and explain that I wanted to use www.kieransmith.net for a new site – a single page listing all my ‘homes’ on the ‘net. I knew that search engines and friends (and probably some other folks) were referencing content on the www.kieransmith.net domain, so if I were to simply remove the mirroring, they would end up getting 404 pages if they tried to access the pages there.

The first thing to do is make sure that the new site has a custom 404 page; the browser should show a page, and not an error when someone hits a page that doesn’t exist. If you don’t have this set up, it is rather easy to do. I use PHP as my programming language of choice, so modify these to suite your needs if you use a different language. To have the browser show a custom 404 page, simply add the following line to either your virtual-host entry or a .htaccess file in your document root:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Make sure you create your 404 file, too. It won’t do anyone any good if you point folks who can’t find a page to another page that doesn’t exist! By using PHP for our 404 page, we’re able to put some smarts behind the page, and maybe even serve up the “lost” page. Using a mix of cURL and headers in PHP, one can check if a page exists somewhere else, and if it does, redirect the visitor to the now-not-lost page. Here’s the script I came up with:

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	$ch = curl_init( "http://www.eclecticthoughts.com" . str_replace( " ", "+", $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] ) );
 
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
 
	curl_exec\( $ch );
 
	$info = curl_getinfo( $ch );
 
	curl_close($ch);
 
	if( $info["http_code"] == "200" )
	{
		// If we got a 200 status code (versus a 404), the page was found.
		// We can now throw a 301 (Moved Permanently) and redirect to the new address.
		header( "Location: http://www.eclecticthoughts.com" . str_replace( " ", "+", $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] ), TRUE, 301 );
	}
	else
	{
		// Put your 'Oops, we lost your page content here.
	}

Note: The line “curl_exec\( $ch );” should not have the slash in it. Adding this slash was the only way I could sneak this line of code into the post. Apparently all the other code goes through just fine, but this one borked WordPress when I posted it.

It is that easy! Of course, you need the curl PHP extension set up, and if you don’t have access to your virtual-host file, you’ll need your hosting provider to allow .htaccess files, but most should have both of these conveniently set up, so the code provided should work ‘out of the box.’

Let me know if you have any additional ideas or run into any problems. I’d love to hear from you!

I couldn’t agree with him more!

I started a business with a great co-worker, Kris.  With my employer having sold the hosting division, we’ve been very displeased with the hosting services our clients have been using.  There’s been lots of downtime and hiccups along the way.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!  After years of talking about starting a business, we’ve finally decided to take the plunge.  We’ve started a hosting business and hope to get it off the ground in the next couple weeks.

I’ve also been working with Josh Jones pretty closely on a couple projects, sometimes as a minor contributor (sexy-bookmarks, url-shortening) and also as a continuting author to his web-design blog (Eight7Teen).  Hats off to him for taking so much on!

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time working behind the scenes (literally) on Let’s Make a Movie.  Not only am I crewing this insanely awesome show, but I’ve also been working on a mobile version of their web site, and a video streaming site that will assist in tracking who shares which videos so those who spread the word can be rewarded.  This show is awesome.  Live video feeds, editing on the fly, an outstanding cast, and special effects – this show grabs my inner technical and theater geek like no other show has before.  I really, honestly, sincerely can’t think of another show that I’ve been so excited to be a part of – and I’ve been a part of *many* shows.  There is nothing I wouldn’t do for this cast, crew, and production staff!

Then, of course, there is the normal day-to-day work.  You know, that 9-5 gig that we’re all thrilled to have right now.  While I’m bound by non-disclosure agreements and the like, I have to say we’ve got some really exciting projects coming up at Venux.  The more we do, the more I realize how wonderful technology is, and how the sky really is the limit.  Not a day goes by that we aren’t exploring new territory and,in my humble opinion, driving the web forward that little bit more.  Anyone who thinks full-blown applications don’t belong on the web has another thing coming; there’s nothing we can’t do on the web just as well, if not better, than a desktop application!

I’ve also been exploring the “social-web” a heck of a lot lately.  Sites that I’ve skimmed right by in the past are suddenly catching my eye, and there are also some great new start-ups out there.  Ping.fm gets a definite hats off for keeping me up to date on a majority of the social-networking sites.  I insist that there is no way to keep one’s status up to date on three, ten, fifteen different social sites without this wonderful application.  Send them an e-mail, text in a message, or enter your status on their site, and they’ll blast it off to as many social networking sites as you can shake a stick at – and then some.  For those who want to delve into multiple networking sites without the time investment of maintaining them all individually, Ping.fm is a must!

Speaking of social networking sites…  Blellow gets a nod for a great start.  A mix of twitter and facebook with a dash of project management, Blellow lets folks share what they’re working on.  I think it is geared at tech-folks, but I’ve managed to start a backstage theater group that has a few members and some posts.  I could see Blellow growing into a must have for any community that could benefit from outside contributors (and what community couldn’t?).

There’s so much more coming down the pipeline – from several software as a service applications I hope to get to, to a community-driven theater site.  I might be so busy that bagels have turned from a breakfast food to a dinner food, but I have no doubt it will be worth it in the end; it already has been – and it can only get better.