Helpful Coder

I used to be a big fan of GoDaddy - I used them both to host my own domain names plus many client domains. But lately I've been soured by ongoing stupid problems. The main one is that there seems to be some bug in there contact tracking - for some reason old and incorrect email and other contact info keeps getting into their database for my domain names! It's very weird - yesterday I was renewing a domain for a client, and noticed that the tech contact was actually set to the address of a company I worked at six years ago! This domain was registered years after I'd left the company, I see now what that the address info could've gotten in there. I've also had problems with the email address info refusing to be updated. I'll go through and change all the domains to use a correct email address, and a few months later I'll notice some had reverted back to an old email address for an ISP that I left years ago. As above, often times these are domains that I'v

Well, on the most popular forum I run I've finally bitten the bullet and done to manual moderation of all new members. The damn spammers go through the captcha like it's nothing these days, and despite an ever-increasing banlist of IP ranges and email addresses, they keep coming. I'm using phpBB (not the new one) so my moderation tools are pretty limited. I'm sure that's there's modules and whatnot out there, but I figure since I'm likely going to be upgrading to the new version at some point, there's not much point in messing with that. Plus I have a fair amount of customization on the forum, and I'd rather not mess that up until needed. I think there's a few different things leading to this new storm of spammers. First, I think it's obvious that they've figured some way around captcha style "prove your human" tests. Or they're just hiring "sweat shop spammers" to do it manually, and training them to decode the ca

Making CSS changes to a live site can obviously be problematic. Obviously any change you make will be viewed by everyone. It's even trickier when the change will be a "limited time" type of change - i.e. adding a special ad for one day, etc. You're only real option is to create a special page on the site where you can test the changes - but what if you don't have that sort of access? Often a designer will have to work on such a change, but has no real access to see how the changes will actually look on the live site. Firebug comes through again in this situation! I was working on changes to a site that would only be live for one day, but I need to see how these css changes will affect the live site as it stands now. So, I uploaded the images involved to the server, and then used Firebug to add the CSS within style tags in the head of the page. This css only exists on my local machine, so it doesn't affect the live site in any - but it lets me test the actual

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in

(ok, fine I know it doesn't rhyme. I'm a coder, not a poet!) If you're still screwing around uploading and downloading your code to your web server using FTP, it's time you gave the command line a try! Not only is it more efficient to edit your code directly on the server, you'll also find the that the command line tools on your average linux install are quite powerful when it comes to web development! 1. You're on the server - Think how much time you spend dragging/dropping files in FTP, connecting and reconnecting when the FTP connection dies, etc. With a command line you're more saving time already just by avoiding all of that! 2. vi/emacs - These are the two biggies, but there's many, many other text editors available to use on the command line. I'm a vi guy, and it's definitely more powerful than the various GUI-based text editors I've used in the past. The built-in regular expressions alone are great! Sure, there's more than a li

Found this helpful cheat sheet and thought it might help someone else out there. I'm in the middle of converting the first of what will be several perl-driven websites to PHP so they can be moved to a new server. This is not because of any problem with Perl (which I still prefer) but because at their new home the policy is only PHP-driven websites, for ease of maintenance, which I think is reasonable. But the conversion is kind of a hassle - I've been doing Perl for so long that I can pretty much sit down and write it without needing much reference - not so for PHP. And worse, the two are so similar that I keep thinking something will work in PHP only to run into weird (to me) syntax issues. So it goes. At least I'm paid hourly.