By installing Robert Buzink’s YouTube Brackets you can easily embed YouTube videos directly in your WordPress blog, even if you’re hosting it yourself.

All you need to remember after activating this little piece of code (plugin) are to include [youtube= before the YouTube URL (which is normally on the form; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtNKMRNl7r4) and close it with ] while posting a post/page.

Using the Internet to make calls is becoming more and more popular, mainly because it’s cheap(er). You can use a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone or you can call via your PC simply by adding a headset with a microphone. The most popular companies offering this service are probably Skype and Windows Live Messenger, but are they best in the market?

There’s a lot of good reasons to choose Skype or MSN (or both) as they’ve proven reliable and continue to develop the quality and features within the product. This again makes it even harder for competitors to gain market shares. BUT just 6 months ago I stumbled across another company offering a similar service to Skype, namely VoipStunt.

This article was written after a successful upgrade of my local server running on Win XP SP2. I started out with Apache 2.0.59, PHP 5.1.5 and MySQL 5.0.24, and are now running PHP 5.2.0 and MySQL 5.1.4 on Apache 2.2.3.

If you are starting a fresh install please see the following articles, as the installation procedure hasn’t changed much from previous versions:

• How to install Apache 2 on Windows
• How to install PHP 5 on Windows
• How to install MySQL 5 on Windows

Some thoughts before upgrading

As some of you already know PHP 5 versions prior to 5.2.0 is not automatically supported by Apache 2.2.x, therefore I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade PHP before starting the server upgrade. It also seamed like a good idea to completely remove Apache 2.0.x before continuing since version 2.2.x is such a massive upgrade. This article also assumes you have installed Apache, MySQL and PHP to the following locations: C:\Apache2, C:\mysql and C:\php5