As you run your blog you may find yourself building relationships with some of your visitors. I know that when someone puts in the time to be a repeat commentator to Search-This I often find myself wanting to investigate that person a little. I may visit their blog and read a handful of their posts. I then usually look for an about page to get a brief bio of the person. I guess we all like to know who we’re inviting into our homes…

One of the problems I had at Search-This was that I could never easily tell how many comments a given person contributed. It would be nice to know who our top commentators are, not just for a given month but overall.

In addition to satisfying my own curiosity, I thought you guys might also like to know how many comments total you have logged.

Now we both can tell!

Simply mouseover the dude representing you for your comment and it shows you your total comments. It also displays links to the last three posts you commented in. See the screenshot below:

You’ve likely spent a lot of time writing blog posts, bookmarking sites you like, posting photos and videos, and creating the perfect blogroll. That makes for a lot of YOU online — a collective reflection of your personality, interests, network, and expertise. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way for others to benefit from all of that effort…or is there?

Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine. One that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll, and more. By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog, readers can search all of YOU. In turn, Lijit gives you detailed statistics about those searches, so you can better understand and serve your reader community.

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In this second installment of the Developer’s Toolbox, I’ll be sharing with you another of my favorite tools that saves me a lot of time and energy: phpMyAdmin. As comfortable as I am doing things from the command line, there are certain tasks in MySQL that are quite tedious to do by hand. Having a user interface to use makes these tasks much easier and quicker to complete.

If MySQL is not your DB of choice, there are other applications out there for interfacing the various other database platforms (such as phpMyAdmin’s relative for PostgreSQL, phpPgAdmin), but MySQL is the most widely used and phpMyAdmin is often included or offered as a part of many basic hosting plans.

As of this writing, 2.11.3 is the most current version of phpMyAdmin. It can be downloaded at the main phpMyAdmin download page. Please follow the installation instructions found in the phpMyAdmin documentation. I’m going to show you how to use phpMyAdmin to create a new database, create tables, insert records, backup your data, and import data into your database. There are many, many other things you can do with this wonderful application, but I’ll keep it simple.

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This is the first article in a new monthly series entitled the “Developer’s Toolbox”. Each month we’ll introduce you to a new application or set of tools or plugin or some type of gizmo that will make your life as a developer a little easier.

First up in this series is a tool that I find indispensable and use almost daily: the Web Developer Firefox extension.

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According to a study done by Port80.com in August 2006 they found that “Microsoft IIS serves 54.9% of Fortune 1000 web sites.” I’ll be honest, I would have lost money on that; my money would have been on Apache.

Does this surprise anyone else?

I decided to do some research of my own using Firefox and the Web Developer extension to view each website’s Response Headers to see what web server they’re using. Here’s what I found:

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Larry Wall (of Perl fame) once wrote in the “Camel Book” that the three virtues of a great programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Out of these three, laziness is my favorite. Wall defines this as “The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.”

He goes on to talk about coding and documenting in such a way so as to not create more work for yourself down the road, but he never addresses how to make the initial effort easier. I want to give a few pointers as to how you might get off on a good start.

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Quite often when developers create a website they typically design for the latest version of Firefox and IE. While in general this will cover the majority of the users, there are other browsers you should test the site in to make sure you take into consideration your other users. Unfortunately, with various operating systems and compatibility issues, it’s not always that easy. Hopefully this guide can get you started.

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