Torrential Web Dev

There have been a couple of requests for the source code to the msn contacts grab web service so that anyone interested can run the web service on one server they have access to while querying it from other servers they use. This sounds like a good idea to me so here are the details you need.
Continue reading "Source code for the contacts web service"

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

Unfortunately I have received reports that this script is no longer working. As there is now a better alternative available directly from Microsoft I currently have no plans to update this script.

I've now updated the class I wrote to grab the contact list from MSN messenger. The new script should now fail 'gracefully' if there are any problems.

This doesn't help anyone whose server was unable to run the original script (there is still the web service available) but it does mean that anyone who could run the original script now doesn't need to worry about ugly error messages.

The sample usage script can be run here and the class script can be downloaded in zip format here.

There was a good post by 'mass nerder' on the digitalpoint forums on Wednesday highlighting a new tool he had just created. The idea is that it breaks down the inbound links to a site based on the page they are directed at.

It's quite a useful tool to identify which pages on your site have received the most attention. It can also be used to analyse the linking strategy of your competitors.

It is still a little rough at the edges just now (there are still some errors being returned) but I think the tool has a lot of potential. A more refined analysis capability would be helpful but it may be added once the bugs are worked out.

The thread is here and the tool can be tried here.

A few days ago I was going through the site statistics in Awstats and noticed that 72% of my visitors were coming from bookmarks and direct links. This didn't seem right so I posted a thread in the traffic analysis forum on digitalpoint asking if anyone knew why this value might be so high. Luckily I very quickly got a great reply back from Jean-Luc. Continue reading "Awstats is far from intuitive"

A couple of days ago magnetboy posted on the cookieempire forum that he was having some trouble accessing my blog. In the discussion that followed it was pointed out that my site doesn't validate. 14 errors were in fact reported which is quite surprising really.

I could just fix the errors but it seems like the perfect justification for a re-design on the site. I'm still using one of the default styles that came with serendipity so a re-design was always planned for sooner or later. Turns out it will be sooner.

I'm not yet sure where I want the design to go but hopefully I'll have some time this weekend to put some ideas together. Meanwhile, suggestions are welcome.

I'm quite fond of articles looking at security in PHP. They're easy to write and can, if you wish, be quite sensational. In fact I seem to be noticing such articles on quite a few blogs, including my own attempt here.

Probably the best new article I've seen recently is here at PHP Hacks. I'm going to skip over the majority of the article and head straight for predictability. Continue reading "Articles on security in PHP"

I subscribe to a few rss feeds relating to PHP and over today I've seen quite a few posts coming through highlighting the work of Damien Seguy from nexen.net in his latest project to gather statistics on PHP configuration settings. These include a post at ThinkPHP, Chris Shifletts blog and Professional PHP.

They each have something to add . . .

ThinkPHP

• Register globals is still being used
• It's not a good idea to have a phpinfo file publicly available

Chris Shiflett

• magic_quotes_gpc is commonly enabled
• display_errors is also commonly enabled - ok in development but shouldn't be used in production

The Professional PHP post is the most comprehensive with some significant commentary and discussion. Because of its breadth I won't summarize it here but I would recommend you read the post. It is a useful addition to the main statistics, especially for anyone developing a project they want to be reusable on a variety of platforms.

The first article looking at the statistics gathered is available here.

---

I've just found an interesting article on creating an intensity histogram of an image in php via the phpdeveloper site. It's not really related to the creation of web applications but I've flagged it up because I did something similar as a tiny part of my final year project at University. Continue reading "Creating an intensity histogram at bubble.ro"

This is just a short followup to the post I made a short while ago looking at checking to see whether the server you host your site on has been blacklisted for sending spam. Although checking your status is important it is also rather boring. Instead of manually checking every so often we can create a script which is automatically called and which contacts us when there is a problem. Continue reading "Automatically checking the black lists"