David Wang writes about troubleshooting 400.x “Access Denied” errors in IIS. The first step is to pull the substatus code out of the logs, which will give you more information on what’s going wrong and narrow down the list of causes.
Alternatives to Select/Multiple
Ryan Cramer details some of the problems with select/multiple and a few good alternatives. It’s useful in certain circumstances, but unintuitive and error-prone. Instead, you can create a list of checkboxes inside an element with overflow:auto set, or use a jQuery plugin he developed.
Automated FTP Uploads/Downloads
ISINC has a writeup on how to pass a batch file of commands to Window’s command line FTP client. You can then create a Scheduled Task to automate them.
CSS Selector Browser Compatbility
kimblim.dk has a chart showing browser support for various CSS selectors, including pseudo selectors. It includes CSS versions 1 through 3 and all of the major browser versions.
PHP Error Logs with Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo sets domains up to have PHP’s display_errors flag turned off by default, so that you’ll only see a blank page when there are critical errors. This is a good thing in production environments because it avoids potential security issues, but it can also be annoying when you’re trying to debug something. Instead of displaying […]
Troubleshooting htaccess
If you’re troubleshooting an htaccess file and aren’t seeing any changes, no matter what you put in the file, make sure that you have permissions to execute the directives you’re using. Check Apache’s conf file to see if AllowOverride None is set for your site or directory. If it is, add the directives that you […]
Making Coding Mistakes Obvious
Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting article on ways to make coding mistakes obvious, like using semantic prefixes on variable names. If you have unfiltered data from the user, you can make the variable something like $usFoo so that you always remember that the data is unsafe, and won’t output it unfiltered (therefore preventing malicious code injection).