If ANY of you that have personally worked with me feel this way in the very least “I am sorry.” please reach out to me personally and I will clear this up any way possible. I personally feel that I have always acted professionally when dealing with *anyone* not only recruiters or potential employers.

I was also informed that I was ignoring their emails and or not responding to them at all. I actually went through my sent items and found that I in-fact did reply to them and they may have missed the message on their end. If you think that I have not replied to any of your emails I am *not* intentionally ignoring you, I am sure I sent a reply. Please reach out to me and we can clear this up.

Thank You,
Joseph Crawford

The line-up of speakers is just AMAZING, these are all very well respected people in the PHP Community. If you have ever attended an on-site conference or you have seen the speaker panel you will know that you would only see a handful of these guys at the conference. You would also be lucky if they were not speaking at the same time in different rooms and if they were you have the hard decision of who you want to hear speak and what you want to learn.

At the PHP Master Series you will be able to see THEM ALL back to back, no one is going to be scheduled at the same time, this is just AMAZING!

Also not only will you get to see and hear the best of the best talk about topics that would interest any PHP developer you will be able to ask them question in real time and they *may* answer your questions live. I have not heard anything about it but I am sure if you didn’t get your question answered live you could find them on IRC or on Twitter and ask them for an answer or clarification.

Every one of these guys are extremely talented and I cannot wait for this event to take place.

OH BY THE WAY DID I MENTION IT’S ONLY $50.00. A conference ticket can easilly cost you a thousand bucks not to mention the travel, hotel, etc. This is an event you WILL NOT WANT TO MISS!

For the cost of this event let’s take a look at the speakers you will hear, I’m sure you have heard a few of these names if not all of them. If you haven’t now is the time to hit Google and see just how good these guys are.

• Matthew Weier O’Phinney
• Anthony Ferrara
• Ryan Weaver
• Rafael Dohms
• Ian Barber
• Luke Stokes

Let me know in the comments if you will be going!

One of my main goals was also to make my site responsive so that it would work on any device, be using this theme I gain the benefits of a responsive site.

I have opted to go with a paid theme to save me time. I wanted something that was clean and easy to loo at. I think this theme suits the site well. Now that I do not have to take any time to work on my theme I can focus on providing more content. Not only am I going to provide more content but it is actually going to have more substance to it.

I look forward to writing more great content for many years to come.

One thing to note is that if you start to mess with your DNS for your domain it might take upwards of 48 hours for your DNS to propagate worldwide. This means that even if the site loads for you after your DNS changes it may not yet load for people in other parts of the world.

To start out I wanted to run a simple test and see if I could make home.josephcrawford.com point to my home machine. The first step in accomplishing this was to transfer my DNS for my domain to NameCheap. Once they were controlling my DNS an option showed up on the left side of the screen named ‘All Host Records’. Clicking on this took me to another screen where I had to enter some information. The first information I had to put in place were the settings so that josephcrawford.com and www.josephcrawford.com would point to my web host. If you are not familiar with DNS at all you should know that the @ sign means your domain without any sub-domain so in my case josephcrawford.com, www.josephcrawford.com is actually a sub-domain itself. To make it so that my domain would still point to my shared web host I noted down the IP that my domain was pointing to prior to switching the DNS. I used this IP in ‘IP ADDRESS/URL’ column of the settings. I then choose the record type of A for Address. I saved my changes and then loaded up www.josephcrawford.com and josephcrawford.com in my browser to make sure they still worked. To my surprise it worked the first time and did not take long for DNS to propagate for me.

Now that I have the main domain working it is time to try to get some of my sub-domains working. I have several sub-domains that were setup on Lunarpages when they managed my DNS. They are sub-domains for mail and ftp. However without these entries in my NameCheap DNS entries the hosts would not resolve. On top of those sub-domains I also wanted to have home.josephcrawford.com point to my home computer as well. To accomplish this I had determine what my home IP was and to do that I just visited . With this information in hand I started to fill in the sub-domain settings as seen below.

As you can see it is pretty simple. I just added the sub-domains for mail and ftp and added the IP address to the machine where those are hosted. To get the home sub-domain to work I just had to enter my IP address of my machine. I saved the changes and waited a few minutes for DNS to propagate then tried pinging my home.josephcrawford.com and to my surprise it was hitting my local machine. I setup a quick virtual host in Apache and tested that it was hitting the site. In my case my cable company does not block port 80 so there was nothing more I had to do in the settings. However if your ISP does block port 80 then you can setup your apache to run on a different port, say 8001. With this port information in hand you would just modify the ip to be IP:PORT and choose the ‘RECORD TYPE’ of ‘URL FRAME’. What this will do is load up your site by domain but actually load the correct port in an iframe so that end-users won’t have to deal with port information.

After a bit of testing I found that everything worked perfectly so now I needed to finish setting up my Mail so that I could send and receive mail. To do this I went down to the mail section and filled it in with the correct information as seen below.

For the hostname I had to use a plain @ and then provide the sub-domain that I had setup prior as the mail server host name. Once these settings were in place and saved I went to my mail client and tested sending a message and receiving a message. Everything was working smooth.

However after thinking about things a bit more I found that a single sub-domain would not work for my situation. I do a lot of web development on my home machine and I have many virtual hosts setup. Using a single domain of home.josephcrawford.com could point to one site but could not point to many sites. To over come this I determined that what I really wanted was a wild-card sub-domain. A wild-card sub-domain just means that *.home.josephcrawford.com would point to my home machine where * could be anything you wanted.

Setting this up would take a bit more work however. I would need to register home.josephcrawford.com as a domain that NameCheap would manage. Once this is done I will basically have to manage 2 domains in the NameCheap domain management panel. I will explain this as we continue to implement this feature.

The first thing as stated above is that I had to register the domain with NameCheap so they knew they would be managing the DNS. I just went to the Free DNS page and entered the url of home.josephcrawford.com. Once I clicked ‘Get DNS’ it took me to a page that looked exactly like the one we used to setup the main josephcrawford.com sub-domains. In this page I had to tell the main domain home.josephcrawford.com that it was going to point to my home machine’s IP. I also had to enter an * for the sub-domain name and tell it that it was also going to point to my home machine. Notice all of these record types are A for Address. I clicked save and tried to hit something.home.josephcrawford.com which failed. I realized that I was not finished with setting up my domain.

I made sure the sub-domain DNS was saved and then went back to my domain management panel and checked my settings for my main domain of josephcrawford.com.

Ah-Ha! I have home.josephcrawford.com pointing to my home machine which is no longer where it should be pointing. Since NameCheap is now handling the DNS for that domain I need to make the sub-domain point to NameCheap’s DNS servers. These servers are as follows: freedns1.registrar-servers.com., freedns2.registrar-servers.com., freedns3.registrar-servers.com., freedns4.registrar-servers.com., freedns5.registrar-servers.com.

Please note that the periods after the hostnames are not a typo, you must put these in place exactly as they are otherwise things might not work out properly. When putting these settings in place you will also have to choose the Record Type of ‘NS Record’ for Name Server Record.

You can see my settings below:

Now that everything was in place I made sure I saved the settings. I then wanted to verify that my settings for the wild-card DNS entry were in place. At-first I could not figure out where this domain was because it was not listed with my other domains. However in the left side of the NameCheap panel I saw a Free DNS section, in this section clicked on Hosted Domains. That is where I found my settings for the home.josephcrawford.com domain. I double checked that everything was set properly and then I went on for some tests.

I quickly created a couple virtual hosts in my apache installation called test1.home.josephcrawford.com and test2.home.josephcrawford.com. I restarted apache and loaded up the sites in my browser. Both were working perfectly so I have accomplished exactly what I wanted to. I can SSH to my machine using home.josephcrawford.com and I can hit all of my virtual hosts from outside of my local network. Below is a screen shot showing pings from different hosts due to this method of setting up my DNS.

Now if you are anything like me your first question during this setup process is well.. What if my home IP changes? We all know that unless you pay for a static IP from your internet provider your IP address could change quite frequently. However the configuration I setup in NameCheap is directing traffic to a static IP. If my IP changes these DNS entries will no longer work. Well currently NameCheap does offer a Dynamic DNS client which can update your IP when it changes so that there are no interruptions in service. However currently they only offer a Windows client. That makes it difficult for us folks who run Mac and Linux. The only way you can solve this issue is to change your IP manually unfortunately. NameCheap has stated that they are working on a Mac Client to update the Dynamic IP address however they have no release date announced.

I am only using this service as a “fun” thing right now so I don’t mind any service interruptions and can make the necessary setting changes when the time comes.

I do have to state that I am not a DNS expert and a lot of assistance was provided by NameCheap support staff. With that in mind I have to throw out A HUGE THANK YOU to NameCheap for making this so simple to accomplish.

As mentioned above things are changing for me and it’s for the better. I will be departing my position at Dailybreak this Friday and will be starting a new adventure with Acronym Media. I love the team here at Dailybreak and I will be sad to leave, however I have to make some adjustments to my life so that I can be closer to my family. The position at Dailybreak does not allow for me to work remotely so I have to remain in the city 4+ hours away from my family. It has always been in my interest to move back closer to my family and taking the position with Acronym Media will allow for that as it is a remote position where I can work from home and visit the office every so often.

This weekend I will be packing up the U-Haul and relocating to Adams, MA. Since I will be closer to family and not driving 4+ hours each way every weekend I will have more time to dive in and learn even more advanced programming techniques and also to write about what I am learning to share with all of my readers.

Stay tuned the updates should be more and more frequent once I get past the next week or two.

Hey Joe,

Thanks for getting back to me. I appreciate the honesty and transparency of your blog to me. I cannot apologize enough for the inconvenience we have caused you over the last few months. If it is all comforting, I have already sat down with my VP and discussed this situation with him. His name is Joe Budzienski and he can be reached at 781-305-3563 or joeb@xperttech.com . I can tell you he is very hands on and very concerned that he could not be reached to rectify this situation much earlier. Joe encourages that you call him to discuss this, but he also understands that you do not wish to be bothered by our company. It is completely up to you to speak to Joe, but if not, I assure you that I have made it very well known in our database for you not to be contacted by our company.
It does bother me as well knowing we have burned a bridge with a very decorated developer. If over time you would like to work with me directly about opportunities, I would love to help.
Again, my apologies and good luck with your current job or any opportunities.

Regards,
Jared Pavey

All I can say is I really truly hope this is the end, if it’s not then I am going to do what I have to do to annoy the hell out of all of their employees every-day for a long time since I am a developer I will automate the piss-off mode

In 16 hours the project was funded on Kickstarter raising an impressive $950,000. The best part is we anticipated it would be funded by 5pm today and it was in-fact. But the best part is that it went from $925,000 to around $950,353 in just 10 minutes. I cannot believe that in 10 minutes they raised $25,353, I mean that’s $2112.75 every minute. I really hope to see this become a reality!!!

Cal Evans has posted a nice article explaining the options for this. It’s a great read and I will be checking out his suggestions in the near future.

Today’s Hack-A-Thon was based on a service offered by a new start-up called PubNub. PubNub is a blazingly fast cloud-hosted data network for building real-time web and mobile applications at scale. We wanted to see what we could do with this by integrating it into our current system but we did not want to have any adverse effects on our user-base so we decided to make it an internal tool for the time being. However I wanted to share this with my readers because it really is a nice service that is being created by PubNub.

We integrated the messaging system into our user registrations, auction bid’s, raffle entries and daily spin functionality. It really puts things into perspective when you see just how fast people are completing actions on the site.

If you look in the header of the image you will notice different icons with counts. These are the counts for those activities over the last minute. As the items are scrolling down the screen you can also click on them to make them dock to the bottom of the list and remain on the screen. The default behavior is for them to flow off the screen as new events come in.

The 3 hour Hack-A-Thon was possible thanks to the following people who participated: Jared Stenquist, Ansel Stein, Mike Miklavic, Jeff Bachand and myself. Next we will be looking at how we can implement this to improve the experience for our users. It’s activities like this that really make me appreciate CampusLIVE as an employer.

XpertTech is headquartered in Waltham, MA and I tried my hardest to get a hold of a manager at that location and could not. I went to their website and had to call the Chicago office in order to get a hold of anyone who would help. I spoke to a person from the Chicago location and they had a manager call me back. I told them about the gentleman who was rude to me on the phone and that they hung up on me. They expressed they were deeply sorry and would handle the employee per company policies.

Over the last 2 weeks I have been getting HASSLED by the people from this company. I am getting on average about 3 phone calls a day and 2 emails a day all from different people within the company. I actually got an email yesterday from the same gentleman who was really rude to me and hung up on me.

I have requested that they remove me from their database of candidates and when I request that I generally get some rude response about how I should remove my job board profiles. Hello, if they even read anything on my profile it would show that I am no longer seeking a position.

One email conversation I had yesterday is below:

Joseph,

I believe I just spoke with your wife regarding a fantastic opportunity I have in Quincy, MA. This is T accessible and comes with free parking in their garage. I am looking for a Senior level developer to build interactive web-based applications on a LAMP platform. This company is growing at a 30% rate per year and offers 401k and profit sharing. Please let me know if you would like further details, thanks!

Best,
Albert Alphin
Resource Manager

Thank You but I am currently employed full-time and not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Please forward this to a supervisor to make sure my request is followed through with.

I have also requested that I be removed from your database as I was treated with a great deal of disrespect from a colleague of yours. I requested to be removed when the manager called me back but it appears I am still in your database.

If after this email I am not removed from your system and I receive even 1 more email from your company I will be contacting the attorney general and the better business bureau.

Thank You,
Joseph Crawford

Ok, sorry.

Also,

A good idea to stop receiving contacts from agencies is to remove your CV from the job boards, FYI.

Best,
Albert Alphin
Resource Manager

Hello

It’s not that I don’t want to hear about positions, I just don’t want to hear about them from your company. I have been called on numerous occasions about positions which do not meet my background and your employees who could not speak english very well. I told the guy once that the position did not match my qualifications, he called me back the next day about the same position. When I requested to speak to a supervisor the gentleman hung up on me. I then had to email and call the Chicago Office before I got a manager from your office to call me.

I requested removal from your system and if you do not remove my entry you are violating my rights. I wish to be removed and NEVER contacted again by ANYONE from XpertTech.

Thank You,
Joseph Crawford

Sure thing, we do not have an office in Chicago. Best of luck though.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

This is the exact reason I wish to have nothing more to do with your company.

You DO have an office in Chicago and YOU didn’t know it. Apparently you guys don’t know much, why would I ever want to work with you?

Please verify with me that I have been removed from your system.

This page shows your locations, maybe you should read it and get to know the company you work for.

http://www.xperttech.com/contact/

Thanks,
Joseph Crawford

Ok, I apologize for the inconveniences my company and I have caused you.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Now I know I might have been a little rude in the emails myself but I have been telling everyone in the company for the last 2 weeks (multiple times for some of these employees) that I do not wish to work with their company and wish to be left alone. I have been told by supervisors that they will make sure I am not contacted again, but I keep getting contacted.

How can I resolve this properly? Is it the Attorney General I would write to and the BBB or another agency? I know going there and kicking the door down is not going to be the right approach even though that’s how I feel every-time one of these guys calls me. I am beginning to think that they are all remote employees because they are all from India and never seem to be around a manager, I’m always told to email and someone will get back to me.

Thoughts?