SEO Web Development and Design Blog

Detecting search engine bots with PHP

I have to admit i am writing this post because i will publish soon big article about cURL extension and show you how to use it to create bots which would be even able to login to web pages and do some actions there, actually nothing illegal, but still i fill the need to tell you how to detect “good” (search engine bots) and “bad” (scrappers) bots and how to protect from them. Read the rest of this entry »

Shorthand for MySQL JOIN

Hey guys, i am currently finishing my degree at collage and do not have a lot of time to write as you can see. Last month was short on post and i believe that this month will also be short, although i have already long list of topics i want to write about. Anyway i managed to find some time so here something interesting i found recently. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft BrowseRank

Maybe you already heared about it or maybe not. BrowseRank is Microsoft response to Google PageRank, it is not even close to being ready, but there is already some reliable data coming from Microsoft developers. It is only 8 pages long, but contains a lot of text that you may not found very interesting - like mathematical calculations and probability theory - so i boiled it down to most important facts, to present it to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Detect connection speed with JavaScript

Recently i created JavaScript application which tests user connection speed, in fact it measures connection speed between user and my server, but that aside, i decided to share with you mechanics and technology i used to create this tool, maybe some of you guys will find this helpful. Also i want to promote interesting small AJAX framework :). Read the rest of this entry »

Where to outsource webmasters?

Hey, guys. I have very interesting topic to discuss. “Where to outsource webmasters?”. This is the question i was asked this week few times already. So actually, yes it still a good topic to discuss, but at the same time if someone ask me this question again, then i will send him here (and increase my pageviews :)). Read the rest of this entry »

Clone keyword in PHP

A lot of people do not read PHP manual. That is a fact, they will look for answers to their questions on forums, books, blogs (like this one for example) and so on, while most of the answers they are looking for, are already there … in PHP manual. Or maybe it is me who is weired, because i like to browse PHP.net to see “what’s new”, well can’t really tell. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone is wrong on the internet

I didn’t blog for about a week now, i started to miss you guys so i decided to write something, but the problem was i did not had anything to publish. Fortunately i remembered a post i read few days ago. At first i found it so … bizarre that i wanted to, put the link here and write about how ridiculous this post is. Read the rest of this entry »

Semantic Search Engines

I read interesting article recently (btw i do not read my news, but if i did then i would probably found out that i begin each of them with the similar sentence), the article was about the future of search engines, mainly semantic search engines. I do not want to get into details here because as you know, English is not my native language and i am not sure if i could explain the whole concept clearly enough, so if you need more information on semantic search check out … correct, WikiPedia Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress Theme Toolkit Plugin

If you ever edited WordPress theme with build in theme editor you probably know how uncomfortable it is. Default theme editor not only do not have syntax highlighting but also (and i think it is even worse) every time you save file textarea scrolls to the top, so when you need to make further changes in file you need to again find lines which you were editing. Read the rest of this entry »

PHP, JSON and JavaScript usage

Today i want to introduce you to jSON (JavaScript Object Notation), in short, it is a simple format designed to exchange data between different programming languages. I will show you how to create JavaScript object, convert it to JSON string, and send to PHP script, which will decode jSON string to readable format (for PHP). But that’s not all, PHP script will create it’s own data object encode it to jSON string and send it back. All communication between JavaScript and PHP will be done thru AJAX. Read the rest of this entry »

My Blog is DO FOLLOW now

As you may notice my blog do not displays links in the comments, mainly because a lot of comments are post only to get a backlink to commentator site, if someone really wants to contribute something to the discussin then he will do it no matter if he will get something (link) out of this.

However, after some thinking on this topic i decided to add recent comments plugin which will have bold do follow links pointing to your site. I do not know if it will get popular or not and will you start post more comments on this blog, however i think that if someone decides to post comment interesting comment which would add value to then i think that such commentator should be rewarded somehow, i can’t (and won’t) pay for the comments so i guess do follow bold link with your selected anchor text will be satisfying.

On the other hand you may do not like recent comments plugin and prefer top commentator or any other similar plugin if so … post comment in this thread

Fennec - FireFox mobile web browser

Not so long ago Mozilla released FireFox 3, it was quite a big event, you probably remember the whole Download Day thing right? It looks like Mozilla wants to keep momentum (which is great) and soon enough they are going to release FireFox Mobile version, not to mention that at the same time they are working on FireFox 3.1. Fennec (that is mobile FireFox code name) is not a first web browser designed for mobile devices created by Mozilla. Probably not many readers remember project named Minimo mostly because of it spectacular failure, so will be Fennec any different? Read the rest of this entry »

Who is the most spammed person in the world?

Few days i wrote an article about protecting email address with .htaccess, today i stumbled upon interesting news. Collin Wells an UK mechanic revealed that he receives over 44 000 SPAM mail a day that is close to 16 millions a year. Before he started to use ClearMyMail service he spent over 2 hours a day removing unwanted messages, well i guess next time i will receive SPAM i will thank God it is only one message :).

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Protecting email address with .htaccess

I hate spam, i received since i created my first email account and i am always interested in web development tricks and techniques for protecting email accounts. Recently i read book about email security and found there very interesting technique which allows users to send email to you while proveiding email harvester with completely false email address, i created variation of this trick which i will share here as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Google web application security tool

Good news for developers tired of testing their applications security, Google finally decided to release for the public Ratproxy - passive web application security assessment tool. Software is available under Apache 2.0 license terms and conditions which basically means that this tool can be used for free.

Interesting fact about Ratproxy is that it is NOT a new software. Google developers used heavily - and probably still use it - for testing new Google applications. So why they did it? Paraphrasing Michał Zalewski from Google: “We decided to realase for free our tool, as an open source, because we belive our decision will make huge contribution into IT security”. The question remains, if they had such a good security tool why last year (2007) bloggers reported over 20 security holes in Google apps? Is it Ratproxy fault? i guess it is rather their programmers fault.

There are already few security tools like Ratproxy ou there, so why release next one? Google has an excellent answer for this question, it starts with … if you don’t like it then you don’t have to use it :). Further they write that this software is designed for testing mainly Web 2.0 applications.

Ratproxy can simulate numerous different attacks i never even heared of, so for full documentation visit Ratproxy Docs.

Clean input variable PHP

Some time ago i wrote a post about query string and i think i pretty well covered that topic, however i didn’t mentioned one thing … cleaning input variables. In fact it is much more important to know how to clean $_POST and $_GET arrays then know how to handle query string, because variables sent by user are the only way to hack your script, it is that simple, if you take care of input variables then your script is 100% safe.

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Using PHP cURL to read RSS feed XML

I very rearly, use feeds, i prefer to go to my favourite website and see what is going on instead of downloading their content to my computer with some RSS reader. However the fact is feeds are getting popular and people are searching for a ways to access and easily automatically parse those feeds with PHP, and because RSS and ATOM are nothing more then XML documents then i have for you really simple way of handling those feeds which i want to share with you (thru my blog as well thru my blog feeds :)).

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Is Cheap Hosting really cheap?

To be honest i am not a big fan of cheap web hosting, however my web hosting costs me less then 25$ a year! This is about 2$ a month, talk about cheap hosting right? Despite the price i am very satisfied with my hosting provider: great customer support and no down times since two years. Hmmm i believe it sounds like a great (or rather obvious) sales page but it is not, mainly because my hosting provider is only available in Poland.

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PHP Query String

Query strings play important role in building web applications, especially if you want to make nice urls without question mark and many key, value pairs, actually it is not so easy to design application with nice urls however it is always worth doing so, because it not only looks very proffessional, such URLs are search engine friendly, which means that they will get indexed faster but also it happens that search engines have problems with indexing pages with more then 3 key=value pairs in query string.

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PHP DateTime and DateTimeZone Tutorial

With each new version PHP is getting more and more object oriented. In version 5.x we get two useful classes for date and time handling. Many programmers are still using outdated methods which are available in PHP mainly for compatibility reasons, so i want to introduce you to DateTime and DateTimeZone objects. Read the rest of this entry »