OpenDNS is a free DNS service that promises to be safer and faster than your ISP’s DNS. They offer a safer DNS by intercepting phishing attempts and warning you if you attempt to visit a phishing site. OpenDNS will also fix typos in the URLs you enter whenever it can. For example, if you’re using OpenDNS craigslist.og will lead directly to craigslist.org.
With Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Manager you can remotely manage any number of IIS 6.0 servers from a Windows XP Professional workstation. Sure you could use remote desktop, but if you simply need to start and stop a server or create a virtual directory this tool is perfect!
[Link from Charlie Arehart]
The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection site has a great tutorial that will show you how to Mount Amazon S3 as a File System in Amazon EC2. S3 is Amazon’s distributed storage service and EC2 is their distributed, virtualized server solution. In the past it was difficult to have persistent storage in EC2, but now using S3, persistent storage is possible.
ISP on a Mac is a great series of articles that will show you how to compile all the software required to turn your Mac into a full fledged web host. Instructions are easy to follow and cover installing Apache 2, PHP 5.x, MySQL 5, Postfix for mail and spam filtering. What make this series great is you learn how to compile your servers and how to specify many different features and configuration options.
Aaron Hopkins, a software engineer for Google has a kick ass article on Optimizing Page Load Time. His techniques are really dead simple and can dramatically make your web applications load quickly.
Ryan Tomayko documents How he explained REST to his wife…. I’m not too sure why his wife was asking about REST, but this is one of the easiest reads on REST out there.
If you’re running an Apache web server, you should most definately give this short how-to a try. Security Testing your Apache Configuration with Nikto is super simple to follow and you might find the results surprising (like I did).
Your new Mac makes an excellent web application development system and a great database to power that web app is MySQL. O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter has an article that will help you with Managing MySQL on Mac OS X. Their coverage includeds installing mySQL then getting a GUI based tool to manage your databases.
If you have developed a web application with a database back-end, you should check out this article titled SQL Injection Attacks by Example. It clearly explains what a SQL injection attack is and shows you how defend against such attacks.
