Bluehost has finally started offering PHP 5.3 on a per-request basis. Even though PHP 5.4 is on the horizon, compatibility issues for many customers prevented large shared hosting companies like Bluehost from making the move to 5.3 earlier. By working with tech support in the early hours this morning, I successfully completed the migration to a 5.3 box.
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PageRank (PR) is a semi-secret algorithm which serves as the foundation for Google’s search engine. To put it crudely, the higher a website’s PR, the more “meaningful” websites reference it via links. While other factors are taken into consideration (ie, the age of the domain and search engine optimizations), link reputation is the dominating component in PR.

Earlier this afternoon while I was replying back to a comment, I noticed that RK.md’s main page was bumped to a PR of 4. I’m incredibly thankful for all those who helped me achieve this milestone by continuing to reference my posts, subscribe to my RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter. Hopefully, each one of you has gained insight from one of my tech walkthroughs, medical writeups, or blurbs about experiences from medical school.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Early in block 1 of the basic sciences, an upperclassmen mentor pointed out a post I wrote following my first preceptorship session which could have been considered an invasion of patient privacy. I had deliberately altered and removed descriptors which I thought could be labeled as HIPAA violations, but the mentor wanted me to err on the safe side by removing the post entirely. Just a few weeks ago, another entry was brought to my attention by a faculty mentor and friend – apparently, a physician outside of the Texas Medical Center came across a post containing, again, material which could supposedly be used to identify a patient. In both cases, had I not been confronted directly, I would have never known I was stepping on toes. Read more  

With the advancement of cloud computing, Dropbox has become a cornerstone of mobile computing. The ability to manipulate files on one device, have them stored “in the cloud”, and then reflect these changes on all of one’s devices has provided a great deal of flexibility for consumers. I wanted to extend this functionality to a shared web hosting environment (in my case, BlueHost). Read more  

There’s just something satisfying about being in complete control of your data… even the analytics. Switching over from Woopra was tough – it’s an incredibly well run service with regular updates, a gorgeous UI, and great community of developers. However, as with all free analytics services, there are limitations. While analytics don’t matter to me as much as businesses, I do like to track the site’s growth over time – and by “time”, I need the service to collect more than 3 months of data. Read more  

I’ve used eAccelerator and XCache for quite some to speed up my WordPress sites, but with PHP6 around the corner, I wanted to get my feet wet with alternative PHP cache (APC) – an opcode cacher which will be built into the next generation of PHP. This is a walkthrough for how to install APC in a shared hosting environment (BlueHost in my case). Read more  

Throughout my time on the wards, I’ve been showered with random “clinical pearls” regarding tricks to the physical exam, shortcuts for diagnosis, pathognomonic features of a disease on imaging, etc. I decided to create a new section on the main page of my site entitled “Clinical Wisdom” where I’ll share the tidbits of knowledge I pick up from time to time. If you’re a Twitter user, follow me @clinicalwisdom!

Since I don’t foresee myself having time to work on this site’s framework too much during clinics, I went ahead and made some small tweaks (most of which won’t be visible to the front-end user): combining a few CSS sprite images, throwing some CSS3 shading onto the page, adjusting some text sizes and scalability, and overall code optimization. I also wrote a really simple JQuery implementation of AJAX page loading, but didn’t think it would be feasible to employ on a weblog-centered site. If you’re interested in the code, let me know. Read more  

A long time ago when I initially signed up with BlueHost, my primary domain name was rishi-kumar.com. I hosted my blog and other sites using that as the main header. Ever since acquiring rk.md, I automatically routed all queries of rishi-kumar.com to my new site. Essentially, my first domain had become nothing more than a stopping point for redirection. Read more  

Its been two years since I transferred my previous domain to rk.md. At that time, I was running WordPress 2.7, using a theme written by the K2 community, and eagerly awaiting acceptances from medical schools (especially Baylor Med ). Read more