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Blog Day Afternoon

Take a walk on the mild side.

October 2007 - Posts

  • FileZilla is my friend

    FileZilla has become my favorite FTP program. I love being able to select all of the files for uploading and store them in a queue until I am ready to upload them all at one time. I have several interconnected websites where if I implement a change in one of them, they all are going to have similar changes. If I had to update them one at a time, selecting the appropriate folders on both servers, upload a few files, before having to switch to another directory or even another website, the websites are going to be out of sync leading to possible errors.

    The feature of FileZilla that I have come to appreciate a great deal is the ability to export the list of files in the queue. I work on my local PC as the development environment. I am also lucky enough to have a separate test environment that lets the customer review and approve the changes before I move them into production. I build the queue of files for upload into the test environment, then I select Edit on the menu and Export. I check the box for Export Queue and save the XML file on my PC. At this point I edit all of the connection information (which is conveniently located in one place at the top of the file) so that it will point to the live server for the next upload. By the time the changes have been reviewed and approve for go-live, I don't have to worry about remembering all of the files that were changed and are in need of uploading to the live server. I open up FileZilla, select Edit and Import, and load the XML file. If I did the uploads to the test environment in a series of uploads, I can import as many XML files as needed and they are all appended to the queue. I also save all of the XML files with the date in the filename and a brief description so I will have a history of all files uploaded at what times and for what purpose. I start the processing of the queue and right after that I start any database update scripts so as to minimize any downtime.

    FileZilla is great!

    Posted Oct 23 2007, 09:32 AM by Blogette with no comments
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  • Choosing an ASP.Net Project Management Software

    I have just started working with BugNET as a project management software. I use it as a Website Management Software. I have each of the websites I maintain set up as projects. The owners of the websites can add their requests for changes to their projects. (When each customer logs in, they can see only their own websites.) The BugNet program was originally designed for tracking bugs (hence the name), but they are making efforts to change it to a more management-oriented system. Although the web pages still have the word "bug" in them, and all entries are referred to as "issues", I have managed to remove most of the instances of the word "bug" from the web pages. Far too often, a customer will call to "fix a bug" when really they want to "request an enhancement" or a change. The customers, however, seem to have trouble with this concept. To me, a bug is when the system or web page does not function as it was designed, and, unfortunately, I can get a little offended when a customer complains about a bug when in reality it is performing exactly how they wanted it to three months ago. Just because their business model has changed, don't point fingers at my code and say there is now a bug in it. (Sorry about ranting on my pet peeve -- "bug" versus "change".) Anyway, so far the system is working pretty well. I think the customers appreciate being able to log into an official looking system and see the progress of their requests.

    Posted Oct 19 2007, 04:23 PM by Blogette with no comments
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  • Splitting large files for transfer

    I had to FTP a large file (~4.5 GB) from one server to another. It took over 4 hours. This was only a test move so I was going to have to do it again and possibly on a regular basis and on the weekend. 4 hours was just too long to sit around baby-sitting a file transfer. I've been using the program 7-Zip for zipping and unzipping files. I like it better than WinZip as it seems less resource intensive. I noticed it had some choices under the "File" menu for splitting and combining files. That looked interesting so I read up on those features. It turns out that you can split a large file into smaller files of a size you choose (floppy, CD, or DVD). Then combine those files back into one.

    I took the large file (it was a database backup file) and split it into 7 CD-size files (~700 MB each). Then I FTP'ed the smaller files. It only took under 2 hours to get those files across. On the destination server I combined the files back into one file. I was then able to successfully restore the database on the new server. What a time saver!

    Posted Oct 05 2007, 01:06 PM by Blogette with no comments
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