Apache Logs

This has happened to me a couple times, still more than I would like to admit.  First off, I used to have my apache logs named the same as the website URL (“bodhidevelopment.com”).  This is a pretty minor problem and can go unnoticed for years… until your server runs out of storage space.  Apache2 has a nice little feature to rotate logs, but the default will only look for files with the “.log” extension.  I used to regularly have log files that were over a gigabyte, and I could only imagine what kind of performance issues that might cause.

I never really paid attention to PHP warnings/errors unless they were causing serious problems, but it felt like the next logical step after getting the logs in order.  A large potion of warnings were just undefined variables being used, which is extremely easy to fix, and can add up fast if there are a large number of variables/loops on a page.  This gave me the opportunity to look through code that hasn’t been touched for years.

Overdue Updates

Over the last few weeks I have been performing some much needed maintenance on the Used Boats Ahoy! website.  I originally had much more ambitious plans for this website, but I decided to start with an interim solution.

Used Boats Ahoy! is built on top of Joomla 1.5, which has become obsolete by a few versions.  I began researching on how to bring it up to version, but unfortunately there are currently too many ties to deprecated APIs to upgrade.  This led me to starting a fresh branch which will eventually replace the current project.  I decided for the time being, updating the current project made the most sense.

Change Summary

• SEO updates to URL rewriting
• Update link exchange pages
• PageSpeed improvements
  • Google Adsense script loading asynchronously
  • FaceBook API loading asynchronously
• Boat Search “Modify Search” populates search criteria
• Formatting fixes