We're pleased to announce that we're going to head out to the 2010 OHUG Conference in Las

 Vegas again this year.  

We built the OHUG Website a while back and have been helping manage it ever since.  Home to over 5,000 active members, it features social networking capabilities, document and video libraries, and we've recently adapted K2 to serve up all new content in a way that facilitates constructive feedback by organization members.

Just for fun (and to show off a bit) we mashed up an application for the OHUG Pedometer Contest.  Sure it's simple, but it serves to show just how quickly we can knock out a real-time analytics application.  If you'd like to see a full fledged demonstration of the kind of things we do, check out our free website analytics service at SynergyStats.com, or view the Demo Webcast.

 To find out more about how Synergy Codeworks can help you see into your data in real-time just Contact Us.  If you're an OHUG attendee you'll find John Hobart wandering the halls of the Mirage Conference Center.  He can be reached at jhobart@synergycode.com or just give him a call at (603) 568-3757 to set up a consult. 

We created a customized Joomla plugin for SynergyStats.com.  

Unlike typical plugins, this one is pre-configured for your site and ready for download.  

All you have to do is login, download the plugin, and install it on your Joomla site.

At present you have the ability to enable or disable:

• SSL between your client and the SynergyStats server (to encrypt user data); 
• Sending the user's email address, Joomla! username, and/or full name

Our real-time web analytics package is now live and available at SynergyStats.com.  A short list of the features include:

And lots more!  Give it a test drive with a free trial and watch your visitors in real-time.  

 Check out the Animated Demo too, it's pretty cool.

Sometimes it's tricky to get a package installation to install exactly how you want it.  Plesk uses:

/var/www/vhosts/(yourdomain.com)/httpdocs

as the default document directory from which to serve up pages.   If it's a subdomain you'll find it in:

/var/www/vhosts/(yourdomain.com)/subdomains/(subdomain name)/httpdocs

This might not work for you for any number of reasons and you might need to set the default document directory to something different.  All you need to do is create a vhost.conf file that tells Apache where to look.  (Plesk is the control panel, Apache is the web server software bundled with it.)

The procedure is really simple but it's a little different for subdomains than for the main domain.  We'll start with the main domain.

Use whatever text editor you like best.  (I'm a huge fan of Notepad++ when stuck working on a Windows box but Notepad will work just as well.)  Create a file called vhost.conf with a single line:

DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/httpdocs/(yourdomain.com)/httpdocs/(path-to-new-document-root)

Replace (yourdomain.com) with your domain and (path-to-new-document-root) with wherever you want Apache to read the files from.

FTP this file to:

/var/www/vhosts/(yourdomain.com)/conf

Now we need to tell Plesk to reload the configuration files.  You'll need console access to your server to do this.  This is available from your Plesk control panel or if you have permission to SSH into the server you can use a program like Putty to logon to the server.  Either way you need to execute the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a

Now if you type http://www.(yourdomain).com into your browser Apache will serve up files from your new directory.

 If you're setting a new document root for a subdomain you do pretty much the same thing.  Create the vhost.conf file - again with a single line:

DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/(yourdomain.com)/subdomains/(subdomain name)/httpdocs/(path-to-new-document-root)

Again replacing (yourdomain.com) with your domain name, (subdomain name) with the subdomain you're changing, and (path-to-new-document-root) with the path of the new document root directory.

FTP this file to:

/var/www/vhosts/(yourdomain.com)/subdomains/(subdomain name)/conf

Per the instructions listed above execute:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a

to get Plesk to reload the configuration files.  Finally - and this is important - for subdomains you also have to restart Apache.  You do this by executing:

service httpd restart

from the command line or use your Plesk control panel to restart Apache under the System menu.

Now documents located at http://(subdomain name).(yourdomain).com will be served up from the new directory.

Questions?  Feel free to drop a note in my community box or leave a comment below.

From time to time Plesk will stop responding.  While this is a sledgehammer approach, sometimes the only thing you can do is restart the service.

 You'll need root access to your host.  Use the following command to restart Plesk:

 /etc/init.d/psa restart

 That should do it!

Sometimes it's handy to make a quick copy of a database locally or on a remote machine from the command line.  This is a lot simpler and more reliable than exporting it from phpMyAdmin and then importing the data into a new database, though it does require command line access.

For a simple case where you're executing the command from an SSH session on the same machine on which your database resides and have the ability to run mysqldump and mysql:

There's a lot more information available on the MySQL website, but it's worth mentioning that you can use the -h option to run this remotely or make a copy of a remote database.

Keep in mind this might not be a suitable solution for your environment.  For databases with high transaction volumes your cloned copy might have some data left in an inconsistent state.  Your only option at that point would be to take the database down for maintenance during the export portion of the clone (which might not be acceptable) or setup replication.

Check out the blog post about Using lftp to Recursively Clone Your Website File Tree, it beats doing it the old fashioned way!

Hope this helps!

The built-in functionality of your plain ol' FTP client doesn't extend to recursively parsing directories and uploading them to a remote machine.   We use lftp to clone our production environment periodically to refresh our development environment.  It's also really useful for migrating your site from host to host.

lftp works similarly to ftp so you shouldn't feel too lost when you fire it up.

$ lftp username@hostname

And here's where lftp really shines - you can use the mirror command to recursively parse a remote site and download it locally, or use mirror -R to reverse the action and upload all your local content to a remote machine.  Just be careful - it doesn't ask for confirmation, so it's really easy to launch it in the wrong direction and blow away all your hard work.

To download a remote file tree just lcd and cd your way to the correct working directories and execute:

> mirror

To do the same thing in reverse, uploading your local content to a remote server:

> mirror -R

As usual there's lots more information in the man pages.  Enjoy!

Also see my blog post on using mysqldump and mysql to replicate your MySQL database from host-to-host.

Sometimes all you want to do is run a big script or import a database using the MySQL command line tool without echoing out tons of output.  Luckily it's dead easy.  If the script you want to run is called script.sql just ssh into your machine and type:

mysql -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DB_SCHEMA < script.sql

Substituting your username and password and the database you want to run the script against.