Internet News, Tips & Tricks

2009-10-12T14:14:00.003Z

Filter out an email address from a pipe

tel blenkinsop | grep -o "[[:alnum:][:graph:]]*@[[:alnum:][:graph:]]*"

Where tel is a simple address book script, in this case I just want the email address and not the whole address

2009-10-09T15:15:00.004Z

A Baby Could Install Ubuntu! (FUD)

Our communal room Windows XP PC which everyone uses but nobody owns was infested with viruses , and although I kept eradicating them with various virus programs things got worse and then finally Windows refused to boot. So I had a choice reinstall XP, re-download the service packs, Open Office etc etc or try Ubuntu.

So with nothing to lose I went to the Ubuntu website downloaded the CD image and blew it to a CD (if that worries you they will send you a CD for free). Inserted it in the CD drive (had to press F12 to get it to boot from the CD) and it asked if I wanted to install or just try Ubuntu out.

Cautiously selected try it out and it fired up straight away, I opened Firefox and could immediately browse the Internet. Amazingly I could see the old Windows file structure and I download all photo and files to a portable hard-drive.
Then everything being OK selected full install. The only thing I have to select was Time Zone! Now here's the beauty you get a fully working system with Open Office etc.

It was absolutely painless; now why didn't I do this years ago? Well it was because I'd read all these FUD articles (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) in the technical press, where the writers had made out they'd had trouble with Linux/Ubuntu, now I wonder if these articles weren't ahem sponsored by Microsoft!?

2009-10-08T17:30:00.002Z

Solution: PHP Form Not Working in Internet Explorer (IE)

What happens is that fill out the form click submit and the form page is returned totally blanked, however works just fine if Firefox etc. Now are you using an IMAGE instead of the default gray submit button? YES then BINGO you are probably checking in your code to see if the submit button has been pressed and you didn't know that IE as usual does it differently. IE only returns the X,Y co-ordinates of where you clicked on the Image Button, it appends _x and _y to the submit button name. So say the button is called submit_button

So IE returns submit_button_x,submit_button_y

While FF returns submit_button AND submit_button_x,submit_button_y

So Browser proof PHP Code :

if( isset( $_REQUEST["submit_button"] ) or isset( $_REQUEST["submit_button_x"] ) )

This has caught me out several times!!

2009-09-21T12:21:00.003Z

Replace/overwrite files in a hierarchy

I needed to replace a file in a hierarchy with a new version:-
Here is a script which works in most shell variants bash, zsh etc but apparently not csh.

for f in */include/dbcommon.php; do;cp dbcommon.php $f; done

2009-09-08T14:01:00.003Z

The Nokia E71 Smart Phone, Finally My Perfect Mobile Gadget?

I have bought so many Gadgets and Gizmos in my time all have ultimately disappointed me. An early Psion which of course had no connectivity. An early laptop with no hard-drive just floppies, then another with a hard disk. But I got fed up of transporting these around along with the box full of cables, spare batteries, power cable. I then bought the first Notebook PC which cost a fortune, but battery life was miserable. Then I bought an expensive Nokia Navigator about the size of a glasses case, connectivity was still poor and I never really got on with it.

My latest toy though the Nokia E71 Smart Phone seems to have it all, compact, Internet, Wi-Fi, email, camera, music, radio but very importantly for me "Easy Note Taking Ability" . This is because it has a Qwerty keyboard. this is the great difference with iPhone which concentrates on providing as much screen as possible and making everything touch control which is great for browsing.

So while sitting in a waiting room, or my favorite cafe I can now write to do lists, write bullet points for a presentation, write draft reports etc, and all that with the minimum of fuss a few clicks and I can start. I can then transfer my notes via the memory card, or by preference email.

Click below to see my review of the E71 , my diary reporting the learning curve and my progress, and whether it really is the perfect mobile all-in-one information! system

My Review and Learning Curve Using the Nokia E71 Smart Phone

2009-09-02T18:51:00.009Z

A Neat Customizable CSS Box for your Blog

Use the box to highlight a quote, an important paragraph, a sales message or a block of code

2009-08-21T12:42:00.004Z

GoToMyPC allows me to have a longer Vacation
In fact I had a whole month, I was able to check my emails, pay bills, do my work as a technical web designer and still pass the late afternoons at the beach. In fact I rely on GoToMyPC to check out my emails and handle service issues for my various Internet businesses when I am away for a few days or visiting relatives.

Now there is one tip I have learned over the years; you need someone with a key access to your office who can occasionally restart your PC after a powercut, reset your router etc.
Try GoToMyPc for free here

2009-08-20T14:42:00.004Z

Happy 40th Birthday Unix

Unix, Linux is more than an operating system for us Techies it's a kind of way of life. I get great intellectual pleasure from finding clever ways to write scripts using Bash, Zsh, Perl, AWK or whatever. These days I spend more time using Cygwin on Vista which kind of gives me the best of both worlds. I would like to abandon Microsoft completely but have to work with so many clients that just have Windows.

I've recently had some fairly horrific experiences of using Microsoft software Visual Studio, ASP etc and found myself having download 100's of MB of code just to set a few miserable flags. Everything Microsoft do seems to overloaded with bureaucratic heaviness, endless series of black boxes, wizards where I feel I control very little.

Anyway thank heavens for LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl and the wonderful community of users that surround it

2009-08-19T10:32:00.004Z

Periodically Reviewing Which Files you Backup

It's not good enough just to regularly backup your files, you ALSO have to double check that the crucial files are being saved. You do this by periodically retrieving your backed-up files and checking all is well.

I use a backup script to automatically zip up my important files, I found that this wasn't up to date as several files had changed location or name in between times. Remember the shock horror and disappointment you will feel if you need to recover files from a backup only to find they are corrupt, missing, or out of date is equivalent or worse than finding that your car's spare wheel is flat on a rainy night on a deserted road.

Backing up files is such a thankless task that it is easy to skip or say I'll do that when I get a spare moment. The weak part of backup systems is when they require human intervention, that's why I use a totally automatic Internet backup service . This back's up about 2 GB of my files at 3am every morning. Mozy provide the service which is free up to 2GB, you can learn more about this service here . Internet backup also solves the proble of ensuring that your backup media say DVDs are off the premises!

2009-08-10T15:24:00.004Z

Solution: IE8 does not connect to the Internet

There are many complaints that IE8 (a recent automatic upgrade) does not connect to the Web, ie cannot access any website.

People have been dismantling their Firewalls, virus checkers but no success. Happily there is Firefox so we can browse for a solution.

Here is the solution that worked for me:-

in IE8 go to Tools->Internet Options->Advanced

and click on both Restore Advanced Settings and Reset Internet Explorer settings, you might want to see if pressing just the Advanced Button is good enough.

Then restart IE8

This warns that you about to lose all your settings but that was no no problem for me as I have very few, being mostly a Firefox or Opera person

Hope that Helps

2009-08-06T13:00:00.004Z

Useful ZSH Commands

vi *(.om[1]) # vi newest file
vi -p *(.om[1,3]) # open 3 newest files in tabs (gvim)
vi *(m0) # re-edit all files changed today!
ls *(^m0) # files NOT modified today
ls -l *(m4) # list files modified exactly 4 days ago
vi **/main.php # where ever it is in hierarchy
ls (x*~x[3-5]) # list files x* except x3 to x5
vi !$ # vi last parameter
vi !-2:2 # second parameter of second but last command
vi !$:r.php # vi last parameter but change extension to .php
^mian^main # modify previous command (good for correcting typos)
^php^cfm # modify previous command replace php by cfm

more zsh tips and tricks here

2009-08-04T14:23:00.004Z

PHP CURL Based Twitter Feed for websites when fopen() is not allowed

<?php
// twitFeed.php
// curl based twitter feed
// 04Aug09
$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=thesuccess';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
print "<pre>".curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
?>

2009-08-04T14:17:00.003Z

Twitter Feed for Older Versions of ColdFusion (ie without CFFeed)

<cfset feedurl="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=thesuccess" />

<cfhttp URL="#feedurl#"
Method="get"
THROWONERROR="NO"
>
<pre>
<cfoutput>#cfhttp.FileContent#</cfoutput>

The output is an XML feed

2009-07-24T13:15:00.003Z

F11 Key Useful Full Screen Mode
Previously I've considered the F11 Key which puts your Browser into Full Screen Mode as only a way for looking at larger images. Recently I've realised that it's extremely useful when editing say in Wordpress or any other CMS to toggle into Full Screen Mode. This is especially true as I have an increasing number of Browser tool-bar add-ons.

P.S. I'm concentrating all my technical tips MySQL,zsh,vim, etc at http://zzapper.co.uk/

2009-06-07T19:47:00.004Z

SEO and Link-Building Strategies

SEO is a black art or at best an inexact science where the rules change all the time. This said you might even think that it's not worth bothering with it at all but when SEO is done effectively and you get on to the first page of Google for your relevant keywords the rewards are unlimited. Not being on the first page of Google is increasingly considered as a major embarrassment by many companies, Managing Director's increasingly demand top ranking from their website.

Anyway because SEO is such a difficult area we as a Web Design company no longer provide in-house SEO. When clients require Search Engine Optimisation we either out source it or better simply provide the contact details of competent companies. Status Media are one of these companies they use a range of SEO techniques both on website and more importantly off-website with link building strategies including use of Web 2.0 including Twitter, Blogs and Facebook.

Status Media are a link building company uk who have successfully improved ranking even for companies whose in-house web designers had applied every already commonly known SEO technique without success. They use a complex combination of proven link building tactics which deliver top three rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEO also requires keyword optimisation and very close monitoring of results so that it can be noticed when a particular Adwords campaign is weakening. Sometimes time of day placing of Adword campaigns can be critical. The bottom line of course is ROI (return on Investment), increased ranking, increased visitors and most importantly increased sales (it is quite possible to achieve high -ranking for keywords that bring little qualified traffic.

Many companies have lost a fortune with ill-considered PPC campaigns failing to optimise keywords, have a proper strategy, failing to create effective landing pages which causes very poor sales conversion not even noticing that they've exceeded their budget without increasing sales.

2009-06-06T21:45:00.004Z

FireFox Web Debugging Tools

I normally work from home as a technical web designer anything PHP,MySQL,Perl,ColdFusion,CSS,JavaScript,XML etc etc and think myself pretty up to date, well for the past few weeks I've been working on a contract with another programmer Hanif and he's showed me the Error Console in FireFox which lists and indicates HTML,CSS and Javascript errors, when I said how useful I found that he then showed me the FireFox add-ons FireBug and web Development which I found sensational.

What I'm trying to say here is how useful it is to co-operate with other experts and also of course how wonderful Firefox is

2009-06-03T22:45:00.004Z

Filezilla Best FTP Client

After paying for and using WS_FTP for years until they ruined it with a disastrous new GUI, I turned to FileZilla which was very good but lacked the old WS_FTP's wonderful feature "Remember current local and remote" directories, very useful when working on large multi-directory websites. But not now the latest version of FileZilla incorporates "Bookmarks" which allow you to save and subsequently return what ever directories you specify; eg you can name a bookmark images or css and then go directly to the relevant directories.

ALSO you can specify "Use synchronized browsing" which means that changing a directory in window causes to change simultaneously in the other!!!

http://filezilla-project.org/ and it's free, isn't open source wonderful!!

2009-05-03T11:17:00.004Z

Solve Your Techie Problems at stackoverflow.com

I was told that http://stackoverflow.com was now preferred to Experts Exchange probably because it's totally free. I certainly got an answer to my MySQL problem in less than 15 minutes.

eg

Hi I have a table with one record per person and per item of clothing

so

peter, jumper,blue
peter,trousers,green
sue,dress,green
peter,jumper,red
gordon,jumper,green

I want to write a query to select all people with green jumpers but only if they have no other color jumper

So in the above case it would ONLY select Gordon not greedy old Peter

The solution provided by lc was a sub select or multiple select query

SELECT *
FROM myTable AS t1
WHERE t1.clothing = 'jumper' AND t1.color = 'green'
AND NOT EXISTS(SELECT *
FROM myTable AS t2
WHERE t2.person = t1.person AND t2.clothing = 'jumper'
AND t2.color <> 'green')

2009-04-19T19:29:00.005Z

XAMPP or WAMP

I've been using WAMP for my one-stop Apache/MySQL/PHP/PHPMyAdmin install.

Recently I've been introduced to XAMPP which also has installs for Linux and Macs etc

In fact I had to XAMPP as it was a requirement for the project I was working on, I can confirm that it was absolutely painless to install, I think I just had to choose which directory I wanted to install into. The Admin dashboard seems to have less functionality that that of Wamp but it is too early to say more.

Just How do you Create More Ideas?

2009-04-01T17:47:00.002Z

Choosing Your Web Hosting Provider Wisely
You may know the feeling, you have a brilliant idea for a website and before you know it you've bought the domain and got your hosting; takes just a few minutes. Like many things if it turns out you were too hasty and hadn't got hosting with the facilities you require it is usually very difficult to reverse your decision.

This problem is getting worse as the variety of features offered by hosting companies is constantly increasing. The main decision is usually Windows or Linux Server as a lot of the other features are dependent on this. So do you want ASP or PHP scripting?, what type of Database Access or MySQL?, do you want password protection?, do you want cheap hosting or 100% reliable uptime? do you want to resell the website? Would it be cheaper to get your own server? Do you want pay yearly or monthly?

I'm with Hostgator but didn't understand at the time that I needed the reseller option so that I can resell websites I create and hand them over to the new owner as a completely independent website ie not sharing my web space.

If you are getting the idea that there is a lot to consider then why not try the following website web hosting choice ? This goes though the options in a clear and concise fashion. They list my favorite provider Hostgator but I'm not up to date and JustHost is the current hot web hosting company.

2009-04-01T16:57:00.004Z

FireFox Overtakes Internet Explorer and my Frustration with IE8

Sometimes I think my frustration with Microsoft is irrational just my jealousy of their success blah blah and then they come along and remind me why.

Anyway to qualify FF3 has overtaken IE7 in Europe, but of course IE still leads all versions. This is mostly because although all the savvy users have FF there are millions of Mom and Pop users who simply use the pre-installed browser on their PC.

Anyway I updated to the latest IE8 beta as I need to see sites I create in IE as well. Anyway IE8 simply refuses to see the Internet although it was OK at first. I tried to downgrade but it wont let me, I cant be fagged to uninstall this time I may just say goodbye IE it wasn't nice knowing you (I've got it on other PCs if need be)

2009-03-12T22:17:00.003Z

The FIRST EVER Web Page by Tim Berners Lee

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/

(It's not very exciting by the way)

2009-03-12T22:00:00.004Z

Two Programmer's Traps

I was writing some PHP and inadvertently wrote '\r\n' for a carriage return for email when it should be "\r\n". The first case produces an unwanted 'literal' string of 4 characters whereas the second produces the the desired control characters and is seen as two characters.

The second trap I fell into was reading some XML if there was only one data element (in this case image names) then it returned a variable if there were more than it was an array, pity it doesn't default to forcing the first case to be an array with just one entry.

2009-03-09T21:45:00.005Z

Is Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf?

Google revolutionized search by actually listing the sites that you were most likely to actually want. Before Google I remember that searches seem to throw up practically random lists of sites with very low relevance.

What Wolfram appears to offer is to actually answer your query intelligently, ie not simply to point you at a site which might contain what you looking for, but just give the answer... kind of frightening really

Is it something to do with Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf"

....

2009-02-19T12:36:00.004Z

Redirect your old site to your new site with 301 Redirects

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

PHP Redirect
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

CGI PERL Redirect
$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Get redirects for other scripts from http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php