A Simple Way to Protect Your Uploads Folder

I found a simple way to protect folders that need to be writable. Its a simple htaccess file placed in the writable folder that disallows a script such as PHP, Pearl or the like from being executed. Continue reading »

Make changes to your putty configuration stick

Being a LAMP developer, I spend a good portion of my day SSH’d into servers via Putty. For those unfamiliar with it, Putty is a free telnet/ssh client for Windows and Unix operating systems. The problem with Putty, or maybe me, is the text is really hard to read. By default Putty displays white text on a black background in 10pt Courier font. It is very hard on the eyes, especially when you spend any significant amount of time using it. Continue reading »

CakePhp is Definitely….Cake

I’ve been playing around with this PHP framework called CakePhp. CakePhp is designed for super fast php development, and I must say, fast is an undestatement. Continue reading »

WordPress as A CMS

Yes, I know this isn’t anything new, but I’m quickly becoming a big advocate of using wordpress as a CMS for client websites. Continue reading »

PHP and Paypal

I consider myself fairly versed in the programming language PHP. I prefer it over M$ languages because its free and open source, also because the majority of shared web hosting servers available are linux based. PHP and Linux play very nice together. Although you can run PHP on Windows-based servers.

When developing a new site, if I need a php script that I don’t already have in my library, I try to find a free one online that requires minimal alteration to suit my needs. I find this cuts my development time considerably. As it stands, there is an abundance of free php scripts available for just about anything one could possibly need. Most of them are fairly easy to understand and alter to your liking. This is not the case with paypal IPN scripts.

I’ve been looking for a PHP Paypal IPN script for a very long time. There are many of them out there, but until yesterday I couldn’t find one that worked first time AND didn’t require server alteration to run. Then I found Paypal Web Services over at Sourceforge. Paypal Web Services is a collection of paypal scripts that cover all your paypal payment needs. After configuring the config.inc.php file, I was accepting Paypal payments in less than 20 minutes. This beats trying to read Paypal’s 122 page PDF explaining how Paypal payments work. Yes, I’m not linking to the PDF for spite!

Tags: php, paypal, programming, IPN, free scripts

Open Source Business Model

Lately I’ve been playing with the idea of developing some sort of open source software. As I near graduation, I’m trying to find ways to add to my awkwardly thin resumé. I feel a well planned open source project might be just the addition to my resumé that could land me a job in the already flooded php developer market. Continue reading »

Internet Explorer and Forms

I ran across this little quirk with Internet Explorer the other day. It appears that when a form is submitted by actually clicking the submit button, an element in the PHP array $_POST is created for the button. Simple enough, right? Well I noticed that when the form was submitted by pressing the Enter key instead of clicking the submit button, an element in the $_POST array was not created for the button. It’s not an exceptionally large quirk, but definitely caused me to rethink my form submission checking. Firefox and Safari created the array element for the button regardless of how the form was submitted.. This occured with Internet Explorer 6.0 and PHP version 5.0.3

Tags: Internet Explorer, PHP, forms

How to Oust Unwanted Spiders

As a whole, web spiders and robots are a good thing. They are an automated means for search engines to index new content on your site. However, there are some cases in which spyders and robots can be a bad thing. For instance, improper spydering techniques can cause the indexing of individual pages multiple times or repeat visits by the same bot daily. This all adds up to wasted bandwidth and skewed traffic statistics. Continue reading »