Blogfile is a simple PHP blog which I wrote in my spare time, and which (as mentioned under the menu on the left) is powering this blog.

It was largely experimental, and I didn't really hold myself to the highest standards of code quality. I just wanted to build a basic blog in a single PHP file, and didn't really put much thought into "properly".

That being said, it's worked well so far. It runs fast, has a low footprint, and has survived a few onslaughts from Hacker News (and other places). It stood up well to a few periods of 20000k hits in a day (not common, but apparently I pissed HN off a…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog titled "Just pay me", which stirred up quite a bit of discussion. This isn't really the time to answer all the comments I received (I answered the major themes in the comments on that post), so I'll move on. The reason why I mentioned that post, though, is because it's one side of the coin when you're running a business, and this is the other.

Pay your suppliers.

It's as simple as that. If you hire someone to do work for you, whether it be designs, accounting, or a plumber, then pay them. Once again, this shouldn't come as a shock to most people - if you ge…

There are hundreds of posts around the Internet that explain how to share between Linux and Windows with Samba. For some reason it seems to be less easy than it should be.

Here's a quick run-down of the steps and settings that I changed in smb.conf to get this to work.

1) Run ifconfig to find your local network IP address:
Mine was 192.168.2.10

2) Add your subnet to hosts allow in the [global] section of smb.conf:
hosts allow = 127. 192.168.0. 192.168.2.

3) In your defined shares in smb.conf, set guest ok to no (or remove it entirely)
guest ok = no

4) Add the force user directive to the share to ensu…

So I've been free-lancing for a little while now. It's fun. I enjoy it. I get more freedom with my time than I did working a 9-5, and I get to pick the projects that I want to work on. The only problem that I have to deal with now is clients who don't want to pay quite so promptly.

This post isn't going to be ground shaking, or earth shattering. This is just one little developer's thoughts about dealing with clients who think invoices are suggestions more than requirements.

Standard terms. My standard terms are 10 days to pay from the date I send the invoice. This is not an unmovable, hard-and-…

A few days ago, I launched my new site: The World, Your Stage. Somewhere in my mind I had the idea for a no-cost launch (the domain name was free from Dreamhost as part of my hosting package; the hosting I already had for other projects; the code and design was done in my spare time)

I spent a while getting it as good as I could while making it ready for launch. I put up an early version without full interaction just so people could get a feel for the idea. I cut down the feature set to only that which I felt was really important. A couple of days before I launched, I put aside some client work…