Forget crying your way through Google’s expansive and complicated custom search API documentation! Just check out this amusing and well-written article on Dev-tips about how to get a custom search up and running in 10 minutes! This really got me out of a jam :)
PHP Tip: Add Custom Google Search Results to Your Site with PHP
Here’s a fun discovery I made last week!! Â In the past if I needed to test a website on the production server I just made a dev.domainname.com site, or I got an IP address to use for a month until it was ready to go live.
While working with a colleague on a website going live, he opted to use GoDaddy’s free preview service, previewdns.  The website we were testing was a PHP/Mysql/Apache on Linux server running off  Drupal 6.0.  A bunch of things in the admin went wonky.  All the collapsible menu features stopped working, so did the WYSIWYG.  We had countless issues with anything involving Javascript.  Imagine our consternation trying to figure out how so much could be different on a practically identical server!  Turns out, it’s previewdns’s fault.  Once moved over to the live domain name, all these issues were fixed.  Maybe next time I’ll just spend a buck on an IP address and be sure of what I’m seeing :)
I’m trying to find some articles that explain how and why previewdns is breaking everything – but only positive reviews exist so far! Â Spread the word! Let me know if you have had any issues or find any articles on how to deal with these problems.
I’ve run across this problem many times in my career with WordPress – suddenly the page-edit.php screen or the page-new.php screen starts loading up blank. This is a very common problem that has a LOT of solutions. Deactivate plugins, deactivate your theme, and so on. But for the first time ever, this was not the problem for me.
After some creative sleuthing, I discovered that if I had less than 56 pages in the database the problem went away. This naturally led me to check PHP’s memory limit, and sure enough it was set to 16M! I also turned on errors and got this lovely note: “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 58368 bytes) in /wp-admin/menu-header.php on line 84”
So short story shorter, check your memory limit! 16M is pretty small for any website running off a database. Â I would just like to add that to the long list of things to check. Â Here’s a good article on increasing memory limit.