We always hear people saying ubuntu works well only when you have a strong internet connection as the Install CD doesn't contain all the packages required agreed now a CD cannot contain all the packages you require so you need to download the packages but there is a clear misunderstanding among new users that they always need to download these packages, Its essential to download them once but if you are reinstalling ubuntu on new machine you need not download these packages all over again if you have installed required packages on one of the machine you can use the content of below listed directory for installation

/var/cache/apt/archives

this directory contains the debian packages download by the apt-get :)

so have fun reuse the content for each install and save time and bandwidth

Search Engine Optimizations, i am very sure that all would have heard this term by now, in simple terms its a process of "making your website Search Engine friendly" there are various ways methods to do this, let me be very clear there is no specific way by which you can have a perfectly optimized website, in this post i discuss one of the methods by which you can remove the confusion of a search engine :).

Confused Search Engine !!! yes this happens often, just because of a silly mistake done unknowingly. Search engine often gets confused due to the links for example http://www.example.com and http://example.com may open same website but they are 2 different links and hence there are chances that both of them gets listed on search engines which is not what you will want to happen how to solve this problem ?

And i have a one line answer to this "by using 301 redirects" or "URL Redirections" below is the process by which you can implement this on various types of websites

For Websites hosted on Linux Servers

Edit .htaccess present in web root and add the following lines

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This will redirect requests for example.com to www.example.com ensure you have mod_rewrite enabled.

For Websites hosted on IIS use the following steps

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
• Enter the redirection page
• Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
• Click on 'Apply'

Just in case you don't have control on the server as if you are on a shared hosting which does not provide any such service you can also programatically  redirect below are the code for PHP and ASP similar kind of code is applicable for others

For PHP

<?php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?>

For ASP

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.example.com/"
%>

I am sure you would have thought atleast once of hosting your website from your machine itself, if not the website atleast a sandbox version of it as it would be comparatively easy for you to maintain it so i discuss the steps you need to follow to achieve this, first lets go through the requirements, in this post i am talking about small sized sites a minor modified version of this post is applicable for large sites as well.

Requirements

1) A really broad Internet Connection.
2) A Static IP
3) A High End Machine (if the site you are hosting is pretty static a lower end machine is sufficient to be more clear a dynamic personal blog kind of site will also never need more than 1000 Mb of RAM unless you are the Top blogger of the country)
4) Server Software (Apache preferred)
5) A Database Server (if needed, mysql/postgresql recommended)
6) Scripting Support (might be PHP. perl, python as per the requirements)

In simple words your local LAMP machine can work as the server for your website :)

I have the machine ready with a good internet connection and a static IP Now what

Hey you are almost done just a few entries here and there and you host the website from your home

Now you will need to resolve your domain to your IP address, now whats it and how will i do this

Its quite simple you need to add an entry in DNS so that it can resolve this, request your registrar to do this for you if you are unable to do this, generally you would be able to do this at no additional costs, in simple terms if you have registered a domain say example.com and your static IP is x.x.x.x then example.com should resolve to x.x.x.x thats it.

Once the above step is done and are planning to host only one website then your setup is ready :) if you need to host more than one domains on this single machine just add virtual hosts in your server configuration for each of the domains and make all domains pointing to same IP.

What else you will have to do ?

Keep this machine up 24x7 after all you will not like your site to be down

Also dedicate the machine as server dont try playing games on it, its a server now and putting extra load to it will slow down your site performance

I would warn hosting a server is not that easy as it looks like security issues can pop up now and then and you should be technically sound to handle this so its recommended spending some amount and  take a hosting plan from someone in the business after all he is there for providing you services.

Using remote shells is all time favourite but remembering those many passwords is a pain so here are the steps to login using SSH without putting a password :)

1. Create a public ssh key, if you haven’t one already. Look at ~/.ssh. If you see a file named id_dsa.pub then you obviously already have a public key. If not, simply create one.

ssh-keygen -t dsa should do the trick. Please note that there are other types of keys, e.g. RSA instead of DSA.

2. Make sure your .ssh dir is not publically writable

    # chmod 700 ~/.ssh

3. Get your public ssh key on the server you want to login automatically.
   
    #scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub remoteuser@example.com

4. Append the contents of your public key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and remove it.

Important: This must be done on the server you just copied your public key to. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had to copy it on your server. Simply issue something like

    # cat id_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys while at your home directory.

5. Instead of steps 3 and 4, you can issue something like this:
   
    # cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh -l remoteuser remoteserver.com 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

   6. Remove your public key from the home directory on the server.

   7. And you are in

    # ssh -l remoteuser example.com
        or
    # ssh remoteuser@example.com

 without getting asked for a password.

Drupal is one of the most flexible Content Management System available and Its been more than 18 months since i am using it and have tried and tested lot many  modules, in this post i try to categorize non core drupal 6 modules on the basis of my experience in must have and enhance your site categories. i am sure this list would change with time

Modules you cant live without

• CCK
• Views
• Administration Menu
• Pathauto
• Devel
• CAPTCHA
• WYSIWYG API
• SimpleNews
• Google Analytics
• Mollom

Enhance your site using the below

• ddblock
• Gallery
• Panels
• ImageCache
• Lightbox2