TGIF! You’ve managed to survive another grueling workweek, so it’s only fitting that you get to sit back, relax, and read some of the best posts that the blogosphere has to offer. We’ve rounded up five articles from around the web for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Saman Sadeghi doesn’t like it when people steal his bandwidth. He also doesn’t like it when people steal his pictures. That’s why he has put together a guide for creating an .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking. With a few minor tweaks, no one will be able to hotlink to your blog’s photos ever again.

Tamara Berry is a freelancer, but she doesn’t work from home. She’s working out the practical implications of an office outside of the home, paying for that extra office space and all the other related expenses. You need furniture, parking, and more, but do the pros outweigh the cons?

Shaun Low is totally into social media and social networking. He’s discovered a number of ways to integrate Twitter into your blog. You can help your readers “tweet” your blog posts, share your Twitter updates in the form of a blog post, or even update your Twitter status right from within your blog.

Coach Stan discusses the complications of dealing with the media. All too often, people interviewed by the press get shoved into a corner and then they don’t know what to say. Even so, Stan says that you should never say “No Comment”. This is in line with a book written by Ian Taylor & George Olds. What do you think of “no comment”?

John Biehler is working his way through some interesting photographic accessories, trying out a fisheye lens with the Kodak Zi6. The Zi6 is a pocket camcorder like the Flip and Vado, but popping on that fisheye lens produces a whole new kind of experience. Check out John’s sample video to see what it can do.

This week we’ll be installing PHP on our servers. PHP is a popular, open-source, server-side scripting language. It is one of the most commonly used programming language. It stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Alright, let’s start out by SSHing into our server, and getting the URL of the latest version of PHP 5.2 from the PHP downloads page (choose the .tar.gz file). First start by changing your working directory to /. Now, let’s download it to our server (replacing URL with the URL you got from the downloads page):

wget URL

Now we need to decompress the PHP files, which we do using these two commands (replace NN with the current version number):

gunzip php-NN.tar.gz
tar -xvf php-NN.tar

Before we get started with installing PHP, we need to stop Apache:

apachectl -k stop

Now, let’s change our directory to the one we extract (again replacing NN with the version of PHO you downloaded):

cd php-NN

Now, we need to configure the options for our PHP installation. We will be configuring it with MySQL, MySQL PDO and cURL support. We’re also adding in support for a couple extra libraries to support some tools we’ll be installing later on during the series. So, here’s our configuration command:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-curl --with-mcrypt --enable-mbstring --with-gd --enable-zip --with-bz2 --with-zlib

Now, we can start making the installation files:

make

After that’s completed, we can install PHP:

make install

We now need to copy a PHP configuration file to the system:

cp php.ini-recommended /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Now, we need to ensure that PHP gets loaded into Apache. Start off by opening up Apache’s configuration file:

nano /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Now, check to see if the following line was added to the file (if it wasn’t, add it yourself):

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

Now, we need to tell Apache to process .php files as PHP. Add the following somewhere in Apache’s configuration file:


SetHandler application/x-httpd-php


Now, save that file by pressed Control-O and then hitting enter, then exit out of it by pressing Control-X.

After that, you can start Apache again:

apachectl -k restart

Congratulations, you have now installed PHP and will now be able to use PHP on your server.

I think most of us would agree that it would be ideal if advertising was not deceptive, but many companies take advantage of certain pre-conceived notions to try and get us to buy their products. For example, a toothpaste company may have a commercial take place in a dentist’s office with an actor playing the role of a dentist, complete with a white lab coat, so that we are given the impression of authority and sound advice. Even so, we know that this is a paid commercial.

One series of television commercials that have been bothering me lately are those by Brand Power. They say that they are “helping you buy better” by highlighting certain products and why we should consider buying them. Based on the presentation of these commercials, we are given the impression that Brand Power is an unbiased third party who is simply reviewing or featuring a particular product. We assume that they are not associated directly with the manufacturer, just like when you read a CNET review of a laptop, for example.

However, the relationship between Brand Power and the companies that they feature is not quite so objective. These are paid endorsements that are posing under the guise of an objective and unbiased recommendation. Enough people will assume that the recommendation of Brand Power holds a fair amount of weight and they may go out and make the purchase based on this recommendation.

I’m not saying that the highlighted products are inferior or of poor quality, but they are being misrepresented. How do you feel about these kinds of commercials? Do you find that they are overly deceiving or are they fair game?

At some point during your development of WordPress plugins, you may need to be able to “undo” changes in filters and actions made by the WordPress core or by another installed plugin. We can achieve this by stopping the modifying plugin from successfully hooking into a filter or action.

You may need to do this if something is conflicting with what your plugin is trying to achieve (or you may want to remove some annoyance added somewhere). For example, if you do not like how WordPress automatically adds p tags into posts, you could prevent that function from hooking into the filter.

Now, let’s look at how we would accomplish the example above. Before we can remove the filter or action, however, we need to know a couple of things. The first is the filter or action name that we want to remove a function from and the second is the name of the function that we want to remove. We can get this information be looking at the add_filter or add_action line for the filter/action function we want to remove.

In this case, the function wpautop is hooking into the filter the_content. So, to remove this, we will use the function remove_filter (you would use remove_action to remove an action):

[code='php']remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );[/code]

If the hook uses a different priority than the default, you will need to specify this as the third parameter. This line will then remove the wpautop function from filtering the_content. It’s as simple as that.

Many of WordPress’ default filters and actions can be found in wp-includes/default-filters.php.

Increasingly, bloggers want their readers to know what they’re doing. That’s partly why social networking sites, like Facebook, and social bookmarking sites, like Reddit, have increased in popularity as well. We want to be social with our readers so that we can connect as people. You encourage readers to follow you on Twitter and to be your friend on Digg. The My Comments Elsewhere WordPress plug-in expands on this sentimentality.

Just as you probably want the readers of your blog to engage in conversation through the form of comments on your blog, you probably surf around on the blogosphere leaving few comments of your own. The My Comments Elsewhere plug-in integrates these two activities by displaying the comments that you have left on other blogs on your own blog.

Using the BackType API, the My Comments Elsewhere plug-in checks the web for your latest comments at an interval of your choosing. Your comments can be culled hourly, daily, or weekly, being displayed as a sidebar widget or as core content on your blog.

For more information, including installation and setup, check out the official page and announcement post on ImprovingTheWeb.com.

Last week we asked should all customers be given an affiliate link when they sign-up for our services and 76% said yes. This will be something we will be working on in 2009. This weeks question is…