Author Archives: Steven Michaels

About Steven Michaels

Hollow Developers consult on a variety of web applications, from Wordpress to Mediawiki to custom PHP/ASP/JAVA applications. Steven Michaels is the founder and project lead of Hollow Developers internal projects.

SOPA – Rackspace Announcement

This is how a SOPA press release should read, GoDaddy.

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Google Chrome DNS Caching

For the most part, I enjoy Google Chrome and use it almost exclusively for web browsing.  However, I ran into a bit of a problem this weekend as Hollow Developers was switching our production servers from one host to another. … Continue reading

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SVN Commit Error

Ah, version management.  For the professional and novice alike, version management can really prevent a lot of headaches.  Accidentally break something in your most recent version?  It’s easy to go back and revert to the last working version. As helpful … Continue reading

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Google Street View in Bloomington, IL

Be on the lookout for the Google Street View car in the Bloomington/Normal, Illinois metro area.  Hopefully, this will mean that a Street View & satellite imagery update is in the works for the area.  For years now, the Google … Continue reading

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GoDaddy Instant DataCenter vs. Rackspace Cloud Servers

We have written in the past about Rackspace Cloud servers, and the fact that our site is actually built on these servers.  As traffic increases and decreases, we can quickly scale up and down our servers to accommodate spikes, and … Continue reading

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One Week In Google+

So it’s been a week since I signed up for Google+.  (Profile link)  So far, so good.  But, it’s still early in the service’s evolution, and I have a few thoughts: It’s a ghost town among non-techies.  As much as … Continue reading

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Yii Framework Separate Configurations for Different Environments

Yii doesn’t have a built-in way of changing configurations based on the environment that it is running in. However, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Method #1 There is a great extension available that allows you to … Continue reading

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Yii Framework – reCAPTCHA with Active Form

CAPTCHAs on the Internet are as prevalent as they are annoying.  Unfortunately, these squiggly words are sometimes the best protection from automated attacks.  In our applications, we try to reduce use of CAPTCHAs, but when we do have to use … Continue reading

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Gmail Smart Labels

Gmail introduced new smart labels earlier this week as a Labs feature. When you activate this lab, Google will attempt to assign the appropriate label to the message.  At this time, these labels are categorized as: Bulk Forums Notifications Personal … Continue reading

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Google’s Japan Earthquake People Finder

Google has deployed its people finder again, this time for the Japan earthquake that occurred earlier today. The massive quake not only unleashed devastating primary damage to buildings and infrastructure, but also spawned a tsunami that inundated low-lying areas. Even … Continue reading

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