How to easily caption an animated gif

So the challenge came up to add a caption to an animated gif without purchasing software and preferably without watermarks. While there are likely many ways of adding text to an animated gif, the all online solution we came up with works very well. Furthermore, as of this writing at least, there will be no watermarks on the resulting image either.

The big problem when it comes to adding text to an animated gif is most tools open every single image contained in the gif, thus you can edit every image and hope that you can save it again in a working state with your caption.
Then many free online tools that can do this like to watermark the image and charge you to have it removed in some cases. Here is our free solution for captioning an animated gif.



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Reverse Proxy from IIS Website to WordPress

Our client has a corporate site at www.domain.com hosted on IIS and the blog hosted on a subdomain on a separate LAMP server at blog.domain.com. Our client feels serving their blog up under www.domain.com/blog will help their SEO and they will rank better (this is debateable but what client wants is what they will get).

The objective of this project is to serve a wordpress site on a linux server under a subdirectory on IIS. In order to accomplish this we need to setup IIS to act as a reverse proxy, thus serving the the wordpress site under the desired blog subdirectory.

The first step is to make sure your version of IIS is compatible (IIS 7+). Once you have determined this, you will need to install the Application Request Routing Module. The easiest way to go about installing these is using the




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Adding Adsense Code in Responsive Design

We needed to be able to display different sized adsense ad’s based on the end user’s display size. What was happening is the large banner advertisements would ‘break’ the design on smaller resolution screens like iphone’s and android phones. In order to accomplish this, we had to adjust the adsense javascript, in accordance with Google Adsense TOS for responsive design.

This is what the modified adsense code for responsive design looks like:
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Apache redirect for wildcard domains

We recently had to redirect a wildcard domain to another wildcard domain using Apache redirects. It is assumed you have already enabled mod_rewrite, if not make sure you enable that apache module before you try adding this rule.
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Updating Server Time on Ubuntu

A handy way to help keep a Ubuntu server’s date current is to add a daily cron job that runs the ntpdate command. To do this you just repeat the following in a terminal.
Create a file named ntpdate in /etc/cron.daily/ :

sudo nano /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate

Now add the following to this file:

ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com pool.ntp.org 

Save and exit, then make the job executable:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate

Your server will now update once a day using either the ntp.ubuntu.com or pool.ntp.org time server. But there is a better way...

A much simpler method is to add the ntp daemon. This use to be called ntp-simple when using apt, but it is now just ntp on Hardy:

sudo apt-get install ntp

To add more time servers, edit the ntp.conf file and modify the settings:

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf
server ca.pool.ntp.org
server pool.ntp.org