My web application recommendations

Update: I decided to maintain this as a “page” (see the link on the right). So I won’t update this blog post anymore, but instead you will find any new information on the “My web application recommendations” page.

As I’m playing around with various web applications (mainly LAMP-based ones) for quite some time now, I thought it might be useful to have a list to point to, when the “what’s best for this task?” questions arise. And so here it is:

• Blog: WordPress

  Note: never change the domain name (for example I changed from “blog.bla.com” to “bla.com/blog”) – it’s a PITA, because WordPress uses absolute URLs in some places in the database.

• Webmail: SquirrelMail

  It really takes some time to configure to all your needs (for example encryption through gnupg, …), but then it’s a great mail user agent with nearly the comfort of your desktop application. On a side note: When nothing else works, because the connection is very, very slow – webmail still works. I experienced that during my stay in China while Asia was mostly disconnected from the rest of the Internet. At that time, access to my IMAP server was impossible due to timeouts – loading a website (like my Webmail interface) took forever, but worked after all.

  Tip: if SquirrelMail is very slow (in searching and listing folders), try to activate server side sorting
  
$allow_thread_sort = true;
$allow_server_sort = true;


  it will accelerate SquirrelMail from being nearly unusable to instant reaction!

• Picture gallery / photo album: Coppermine

  Well, there are some worthy competitors (for example Gallery), but I still like Coppermine best.

  Problems: Don’t use the “batch add” function with a large number of large images, or this will totally overload the server. The problem lies in the fact that all conversion processes are being started in parallel, thus using up a huge amount of memory for large images.

• MySQL database administration: PHPMyAdmin

  This tool is just excellent. In fact it’s better than any desktop application I saw for database administration.

• Browser independent bookmarks: SiteBar

  My newest discovery. I was tired of having different bookmarks in different browsers and on different machines – why not store the bookmarks “on the net” – you need a connection to browse it, anyway 😉

  Problems: SiteBar says that all my bookmarks that start with https:// are “broken” when I run a validation – don’t know what’s wrong here. Anyone?

  What I don’t like about SiteBar: There seems to be a Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerability, which has been discovered last summer (June or July of 2006), but is still not fixed (2007-01-21). There is a patch from the Debian project, which has also been included in Gentoo portage – otherwise I wouldn’t use that web application.