Jim Westergren
About me, my projects, SEO, Web Development and Personal Development since 2005
"If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves." - Thomas A. Edison

Web Development

RSS

Setting up and Managing a MySQL Server

18 Mar 2020

Disclaimer: I am not a professionally trained sysadmin. What I have learned is by trial and error and study from Google searches. This is more notes for myself rather than a guide or article. I will regularly update it. Intro I am using a dedicated MySQL server for Domainstats.com and I have been doing that since [...]


PDO vs MySQLi speed comparison

31 Oct 2017

My conclusion Based on my testing and the advantages of PDO (info) I recommend the following: Use PDO with PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES set to TRUE and use the charset=utf8mb4 in the dsn (to be equally safe as if emulation was turned off). The speed increase is around 80% and this is not the default with for example [...]


How to load WordPress in a few milliseconds using Redis

25 Oct 2012

Redis is an advanced key-value store. Like memcached on steroids. Everything is in the RAM and you can theoretically reach 100 000 GET per second with Redis. My solution below will cache all the HTML output in Redis and display it without the need to load WordPress. A big thanks to Jeedo Aquino who have [...]


A new approach to block web spam

22 Apr 2010

This article updated on the august 11, 2010. Around half a year ago or so I had a unique idea (at least I had never heard or read about it before) on how to block web spam. It is very simple, yet very powerful. Normally comment spam, false registrations and other such spam are being [...]


Redesign of JimWestergren.com

26 Apr 2009

There comes a point where your feel so ashamed of your old design you did a few years ago that you just have to sit down and change it. Writing the CSS and XHTML from scratch took only around 4 hours. I was little surprised by that as a year ago it would probably have [...]


Display Links to Latest Items of a RSS Feed

21 Jan 2009

With a simple RSS parser you can very easily make a list to latest items of a RSS feed, server side with PHP. The uses of this is great, especially if you manage several web sites. It is great for users to see directly new fresh links and it is great for SEO and ranking [...]


Checklist when won a web site auction

20 Feb 2007

This article is written for my friend "honey" (site). I have been bidding against honey on web site auctions for almost 2 years now. I have won maybe 60 auctions and I have now over 100 web sites. Honey owns over 300 ... So here comes my checklist that I want to show honey as [...]


Protect yourself from invalid Adsense clicks

13 Feb 2007

Have you also heard of those horror stories of Google banning Adsense accounts for the smallest mistakes? You have read the Terms and Conditions and you know the basics but what do you do when you show your friend your site on your computer and the first thing he does is to click the Adsense [...]


Stop the Topsites Spam!

14 Sep 2006

There is a site I have had a lot of problems with in regards to the hosting. That is my Directory TopSite. I finally moved the site to another hosting I have in which I pay $150 monthly for (15 C-class IPs, unlimited accounts etc). But then I got an urgent mail from the hosting [...]


Where do I buy and sell web sites?

24 Apr 2006

Aaron Pratt asked in a comment where do I buy and sell so here comes the answer. SitePoint: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=56 Serious place. DigitalPoint: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52 Second best place. Sorting by thread start time here NamePros: http://www.namepros.com/developed-sites-for-sale/ Good place to buy cheap web sites. Whenever I have "too much" money I will go to those three places and [...]


Tutorial: RSS Feed inside Smarty Template files

6 Jan 2006

Some while ago I wanted to set up an RSS feed according to this post on a directory of mine. The problem was that the directory is run by a smarty engine and the templates files are of the .tpl type and so the normal way to do it with simple PHP won't work. After [...]


Fastest way: activate hosting and new domain

30 Dec 2005

Do you, like me, sometimes need to get a new site up VERY FAST ? Here is the guide how to get a page up on the internet with new domain and new hosting in 30 minutes - I did it yesterday and I love it. Reg the domain at Godaddy - the fastest registrar [...]