The Delicious Brains site has posted the final part of their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series to their site. In this latest tutorial they cover ongoing maintenance tasks for your server to keep it running smoothly and secure.

So you’ve followed our in-depth guide and built yourself a shiny new server that’s secure and tuned for optimal WordPress performance, but what’s next? In this installment of Hosting WordPress Yourself, I’m going to outline a few tasks that should be carried out on a regular basis to ensure that your server continues to run securely and perform well. We’ll look at performing software updates, upgrading PHP, and a few “gotchas” to watch out for that we may have experienced ourselves. Let’s dive straight in!

The article is broken up into several sections, each with a summary providing a bit more background:

• Keep Plugins and Themes Updated
• Check Backups are Running
• Keep an Eye on Server Metrics
• Watch Those Log Files
• Update Server Packages
• Upgrade PHP

They also talk about upgrading the OS itself (Ubuntu) and how to outline an action plan that, when used regularly, can keep your system and software up-to-date easily.

NetTuts.com has completed their series on refactoring with the posting of part eleven today: "The End?" This post finishes off a series where they've moved from the most basic level of testing out to a complex set of tests that can ensure your code's quality and functionality even after making their recommended refactoring changes.

In our previous lesson we've learned a new way to understand and make code better by extracting till we drop. While that tutorial was a good way to learn the techniques, it was hardly the ideal example to understand the benefits of it. In this lesson we will extract till we drop on all of our trivia game related code and we will analyze the final result.

They start off by "attacking the longest method" (wasCorrectlyAnswered) by starting the testing process. They make some simple checks to ensure the output is correct for various circumstances and values. With these tests in place, they safely refactor the method, splitting it up into functional pieces and completely dropping the method in favor of more targeted handling. They finish off the post with a look at some final results and comparing the refactored code with the original on things like lines of code, complexity, dependencies and structure (using this tool).