Emulating the web production environment with an Apache HTTP server running on a Windows 7 development machine

To minimize overhead costs of my website, I would restrain myself from buying a hosted plan until my website is launch-able. In the process of developing my website, I will want my tests to be as close to the real thing as possible.

This meant that when I type in the real domain of my website in my browser location bar, my browser will connect to my development web server, instead of the web server which my domain is being parked at.

I was using Windows 7 and an instance of Apache HTTP server as my development environment when I achieved that. My Apache HTTP server was listening at port 80 for HTTP requests.

There are two main steps to achieving my objective:

• Routing HTTP requests, made to the actual domain, to my local machine
• Configuring Apache HTTP server to serve HTTP requests directed at the actual domain

Getting documents from MongoDB collections with PHP

We have a MongoDB server running as a windows service on the same machine as our web server. Over time, this MongoDB server had been listening on port 33333 to help us remember information that we had collected about our friends.

As time passes, our memory can hardly rival that of our MongoDB server, which was designed to help us recollect information efficiently. This post documents some proof of concept that I did for querying documents from MongoDB collection via the PHP driver.

Inserting a document into a collection in MongoDB with PHP

Assume that we have a MongoDB server installed as a windows service on the same machine as our web server. The server listens on port 33333.

We met a new friend, and we want to save some details about her. That night, before bidding farewell, she said: “Remember me, I am Mary Jane. You can write to me at mary.jane@gmail.com“.

Although that’s all we have about her, this is sufficient for us to insert a document about Mary into our MongoDB database.

Inserting documents into collections in MongoDB with PHP consists of the following steps:

• Derive an instance of the MongoCollection class that represents the MongoDB collection to insert documents.
• Define the document to insert.
• Define additional options for the insert.
• Execute the insert function of the MongoCollection instance.

Connecting to and disconnecting from a MongoDB server in PHP

The first step to manipulate data in the MongoDB ecosystem is to connect to a MongoDB server. In php, we can use the Mongo class to help us connect to one or more MongoDB servers.

For the purpose of this demonstration, let’s assume that we had installed a MongoDB server instance as a windows service which listens on port 12345. In addition, our PHP web server runs on the same machine as the MongoDB instance.

MongoDB at a conceptual level

Right after my first look at MongoDB, I went further into understanding the main elements of MongoDB‘s ecosystem. The information contained within this post is the resultant notes to help me conceptualize some of the key ideas behind MongoDB.

Installing MongoDB as a windows service

After using MongoDB for quite a while, I realised that I had been repeating the starting up of the MongoDB database daemon whenever I reboot my PC. Manually starting the MongoDB database daemon via my command prompt whenever I want to work on my projects is inefficient.

Hence making MongoDB run as a windows service automatically when my computer starts up is one way to avoid repeating myself. In this post, I document how I install my MongoDB database as a windows service.

My first look at MongoDB – Why I will want to use MongoDB in my next project

There are many NoSQL databases available and I had chosen to dive deeper into MongoDB so that I can use MongoDB in future projects. In this post, I list some reasons behind my decision to explore MongoDB further after doing some research on the web.

Displaying post author information in your WordPress theme

Every blog post has an author behind it. As web masters, we have the authority to decide whether to display some information about the author.

Although I am the sole author of my blog, I feel that including some information about myself right after my posts can give my readers some form of assurance that they are reading something from a human.

Make your PHP webpage loads faster by aggregating external CSS scripts

In most cases, the speed of which a browser completes the rendering a of webpage is very much dependent on the network connection which connects it to a web server. While some browsers have the luxury of fibre connections, there could be others that are rendering your webpages via a mobile network.

Because each HTTP response consists of the header portion in addition to the actual content, we could reduce the number of bytes that our browsers need to read from our servers by aggregating external CSS and JS scripts.