Torrential Web Dev

I'm considering writing an article comparing a selection of open source php based forum applications. phpBB is the best known example but there has been increasing concern about the frequency of security vulnerabilities that are identified and how they are handled. To a certain point phpBB is very much a victim of its own success and part of me wants to stick with it despite the problems in the belief that they will be resolved. This is especially true given the upcoming release of phpBB 3. Continue reading "Searching for alternatives to phpBB"

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I quite like this article posted at Devpapers looking at displaying the google pagerank for a site. The only problem is that I find it quite limited.

The current class would be fine for a small site with not much traffic but if you want to use the script on a larger site you are going to be connecting to the google servers thousands of times each day. There are two problems with this, firstly google is unlikely to be happy and secondly your pages are going to load more slowly than they could.


Continue reading "Displaying a google pagerank"

Judging from comments both here on the blog and on a few forums there is an appetite for a tutorial going right through from grabbing a visitor's contact list to actually sending emails out to their contacts. Accordingly, here it is. Continue reading "Contacting a contact list: A tutorial"

This post is mainly aimed at anybody who hosts their site on a shared web host. As the name suggests on shared web hosts you share your web server with a number of other users. This has a number of potential problems, including the fact that if one of those other users sends out spam email (and shared web hosts are popular for this) all the users on the same IP address can be affected by blacklisting.
Continue reading "Checking your spam status"

I'm a big fan of the cheat sheets available at Ilovejackdaniels.com. I keep the PHP and mod_rewrite cheat sheets available on my desk when I'm working and now another cheat sheet has just been released which is likely to join them.

I don't really use regex all that often so when I do come to use it I tend to like having some sort of reference available to refer to for character meanings. The cheat sheet can be downloaded here in PDF and PNG format.

A while ago I stumbled across this post discussing a simple script for viewing all the images in a directory and finally I'm posting about it.

The main reason I'm posting is that not so very long ago I wrote a script that did something very similar. My main problem was that I had perhaps a couple hundred images and as far as I could tell for many of the existing solutions I would have needed to individually input each image or write a script to populate a database or flat file. If I was going to write a script to make things work I might as well write the gallery script myself.

The main difference between my script and this script is that becuase of the numbers of images I had I wanted to view multiple images on one page in thumbnails and then click on the thumbnails to view the full size images. I could have generated the thumbnails on the fly but I decided to generate them at the start so that everything would run nice and quickly when I really needed the speed.

Hopefully the numbers of these scripts popping up will fall if we can actually find suitable examples for our needs quickly, without having to create them ourselves.

Just a quick post today to flag what looks like an interesting tool. Bad behaviour analyses the HTTP requests at a site and attempts to identify spambots before they can post their comments or harvest email addresses etc.

Although originally developed for Wordpress it can be integrated into any website. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but I can see it being a very powerful addition to Akismet as well as being handy in other situations.

My thanks to Ryan Malesevich for flagging this

Here is a little function which I like to use. For some reason whenever I start a new script I slip back to using just var_dump or print_r and then have to look at the page source if I want to make sense of the output. After growing increasingly frustrated I rewrite this function. Hopefully this post will act as a reminder to me to stop wasting time and will hopefully help someone else as well.

This entry is one of a series looking at fetching contacts. For a summary of all the important facts, sample code and the download link please view the AIM contact grab page in the scripts section.

This is a slightly delayed update on my previous post. The updated class to download an AIM contact list can be downloaded here.

It can be used as follows. Continue reading "Grabbing an AIM contact list"