PayPal button to hide your e-mail address

Thursday, August 16, 2007

If you want to use PayPal 'buy now', subscription or shopping cart buttons on your website, PayPal very kindly generates the code for you to use when you fill in your details.

Most of the time, you can probably use their inbuilt encryption, but if you want to use certain options, you'll find the encryption can't be used.

This means that your e-mail address is lying unencrypted in the code of your website for any spammer or spambot to come along and find. This is a BAD thing and vastly increases the chances of you receiving offers for all kinds of products you never even knew existed.

So how do you overcome this? Very simply actually. In a post on e-junkie, I found a very quick and easy solution:

Log in to PayPal and generate your button code, pasting it into your webpage where you want the button to appear. Don't save just yet.
Scroll down to the bottom of the PayPal page and you'll see a link called "Referrals".
On this page, you'll see a link like https://www.paypal.com/row/mrb/pal=xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Copy the xxxxxxxxxxxxx part of the code and paste it over your e-mail address in step 1.

Labels: programming, spam, webdesign

Nifty widgets for your website

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

JS-Kit is a site that I found today that easily allows you to add polls, ratings and commenting to any page on your website - no coding required.

All you need to do is select the feature you want, copy the two lines of code and paste it into your website.

Further customisation is available and all instructions are clearly explained. For example, you can change the colour of the stars in ratings, or allow multiple ratings on one page.

Labels: programming, webdesign

Importing large files into phpMyAdmin

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Okay, so I moved to a Hostgator server earlier this week. It's gone fairly smoothly, and as I have unlimited addon domains, it means I can host all my sites on the one package. There are reasons not to do this if you're heavily into using one of your websites to promote the next which I'll cover in a different post.

In the meantime, one site had a MySQL dump file of 57,571 KB which is quite large. It's bigger than the allowed upload limit for phpMyAdmin and the thought of manually pasting it filled me with dread - it would take several hours, perhaps too much caffeine and definitely not much fun.

A quick Google search threw up 'bigdump' - a single PHP script that you input your database variables into, create a folder in your hosting account - 'dump' for example, and upload the large mySQL file in question to it.

The database to import to must exist, and if the dump file doesn't contain 'drop' commands, you must manually do this first in phpMyAdmin.

For more details, see this post I found called "How to Import Large MySQL Data Files" with a much more detailed explanation. And if you don't know what I'm talking about...lucky you!

Labels: hosting, programming

Creating RSS feeds on your website

Thursday, March 22, 2007

If you've used the Internet for any length of time, you're bound to have come across the term 'RSS' which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are basically a simply way of letting other people subscribe to your content or display it on their website. You can even use it to show your latest blog posts on another part of your own website, or to promote one of your websites on another.

If you use any blogging platform such as Blogger, Wordpress etc...then RSS feeds are automatically generated and if you visit a site with a feed you'll probably see a little blue or orange button somewhere that says 'RSS' or 'XML'.

There are plenty of ways to display an RSS feed on your site - just search Google. However, most of these use JavaScript and you might not want to use this on your site.

Here's how to do it with Open Source software using PHP:

Download MagPieRSS from Sourceforge.
Unzip the files - there's lots of useful documentation but you only really need five files:

rss_cache.inc
rss_fetch.inc
rss_parse.inc
rss_utils.inc
extlib/Snoopy.class

Upload these five files to your website into a directory called 'rss'
I like to create files on a modular basis, so that if I create the RSS feed file once, I can then re-use the code wherever I like on my site. Some people like to create the feed instructions exactly where it will appear in the site. This is up to you. These instructions are for the modular version.
Create a new file called rss.inc.php - go to notepad and save the file as "rss.inc.php" including the quotes where it asks for the filename.
In this file put the following code:

EDIT: in the above code
foreach ($rss->items as $item)
should read
foreach ($items as $item)

Taking it step by step - in the first two lines (after the PHP opening tag) you are telling the script exactly where to find the files it needs. In the third line, you put in the RSS feed you want to display. The fourth line limits the number of items to 5 (want to show 10? Just change the 5 to a 10!). The following line says that the results are going to be shown as an unordered list. Then the for 'loop' shows the RSS item for entries 1 t0 5 in the feed. The last line closes off the unordered list.
In the loop, I've specified that the list item should consist of the RSS item title ($title), hyperlinked to the item itself ($link), and that the description ($desc) should follow. You can display the information in any way that you wish, using the three $link, $title and $desc variables.
What if you don't want to limit the number of items? Just take out the line

Upload rss.inc.php to your rss feed folder
To integrate the feed on your website, decide where on your PHP page you want the feed to go.
Insert the following code:

...And that should be it! Obviously this is just a very brief guide to outline the basics and I can't guarantee that this will work on all hosting packages. RSS feeds can contain a lot more information than just the title, link and description that I've outlined above so for more detailed information see MagpieRSS.

For "The Anatomy of an RSS feed" - see http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/feeds/ and if you're wanting to create a feed 'on the fly' with PHP and MySQL see http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/custom_feeds/

Labels: programming, rss

Blogger Classic Template Labels Hack

Friday, December 29, 2006

I've spent quite a while (and am taking a short break from) labelling all my posts in the new Blogger. However, I use my own template (classic blogger style) and can't make use of the widgets that new blogs can in layout mode.

As it is, someone can click on one of the labels at the bottom of a post and see all other related posts, but what if someone wanted to see a list of them?

A bit of lateral thinking later and here's your answer (many thanks to JavaScript Kit for their dropdown menu code):

<form name="labellist">
<select name="labels" onchange="go()">
<option value="path/to/your/blog/labels/here">label name</option>
etc...
</select>

<script type="text/javascript">

</script>
<input name="labelgo" value="Go" onclick="go()" type="button">
</form>

<noscript>
<p>
<a href="/blog/labels/adsense.htm">label name</a><br /> etc...
</p>
</noscript>

Just paste this code into your template where you want the labels to go. You do need to know a few things first though - where your labels are kept (should be a subfolder of your blog folder), and the names of all your labels so you can list them.

This method works whether your blog visitor has javascript enabled or not - if they do, they'll see the dropdown box and select from there. If javascript has been disabled, they'll see a list of all your labels.

Labels: blogging, programming

PHP and MySQL tutorials for beginners

Monday, December 11, 2006

If you are wanting to start using databases to drive aspects of your websites, I thoroughly recommend two tutorials.

The first - http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql assumes absolutely no knowledge and walks you through setting up the database, inserting information, displaying data, selecting specific records, error trapping, updating and deleting records. It's very straightforward and surprisingly simple.

The second is at http://www.tizag.com/mysqlTutorial/ and again assumes no knowledge but covers everything in more detail and continues to a more advanced level. I probably refer to this more often than the first tutorial now.

Tizag also has a great PHP tutorial if you need a starting point there.

And of course, you could always refer to the PHP and MySQL manuals.

Labels: programming, webdesign

Scheduled tasks without cron

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

If your web host doesn't allow for cron jobs ("scheduled tasks") this can cause problems for some scripts you might want to run.

Help is at hand however - SmartScripts.com have a free fakecron script that you can install on your server.

It is cgi-based and very simple to setup - just follow the installation instructions. The only bit which you may need help on is the time syntax. The fakecron script uses traditional crontab settings which can be difficult to get your head around e.g. a task scheduled to run at midnight every day will look like:

* 0 * * * http://yourdomain.com/scheduledtaskname

However, again, help is at hand - HTMLBasix have a fantastic free crontab generator that is simply to use. Just remember to remove /dev/null from the 'send results to:' box as this will not work in fakecron.

Labels: programming, resources, webdesign

PHP Scripts Don't Have to End in .PHP

Sunday, November 26, 2006

by Robert Plank

If you tweak your site to perform better in search rankings then you practice the science of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It's possible to start using PHP scripts on your site without losing that high ranking of yours.

You've probably noticed your site rise and fall in search engine rankings quite a bit. That's just how it goes since search engines such as Google like to change their algorithms around.

If one day you decide to rename all the files on your site you can be sure your Google listing will moved off page 1 of your target search keyword onto the back-listings of page 67 and beyond.

When you rename a file on your site, and another site links to that file, anyone coming to your site thru that particular link will get an error. When a search engine crawler sees this, it decides your site and decides either to lower your ranking or delete the URL from its search results entirely.

Search engines don't want to send their visitors to Not-Found pages... makes sense, doesn't it?

Okay, so let's say you don't want to have a ton of broken links across your site, which will cause you to drop in the search results, but you want to tinker with PHP a little bit.

There's an easy fix for that. You can actually name your PHP scripts so that they end in .htm or .html, and have them run as PHP scripts on your webserver. So from the outside world it'll look as if your site is full of "updated-by-hand" content.

All you have to do is add this line to your .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

If you don't have an .htaccess file, all you have to do is put that line of code up there into a new text file, save it as ".htaccess" (with the dot in front) then upload it to your web server.

As soon as you set this up, try going back to your site. Everything should look exactly the same, with the exception that your HTML pages are all now PHP-enabled.

So you could setup a simple script like the one here:
http://www.jumpx.com/tutorials/1

... And put that on any HTML page of yours. It will work exactly the same as if the file ended in .php instead of .html. Neat, huh?

You could even go crazy and change that line of htaccess code to add in more weird file extensions, for example:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .ezine

This would parse any page ending in .html, .htm, or .ezine as PHP. So you could name a file something crazy like "subscribe.ezine" and it would work as a PHP script, or in other words as an HTML file with PHP tags in any place you want them.

For thank you pages sometimes I like to make the extension .thanks or .order just to make it harder to guess.

If you wanted to go totally nuts, you could even put something like this in your .htaccess file:

DefaultType application/x-httpd-php

With that, any file without an extension (so if you named a file "download" instead of "download.php") will be "assumed" to be a PHP file. Any unrecognized extension would default to PHP.

The reason I say you can go totally nuts with this is because now you can now name a file to something that isn't already used -- like site.blog, or form.feedback, subscriber.area or bonus.page.

About the author

Experienced PHP/JavaScript Tutor
Solves 19 Of Your Most Frustrating
Direct Response Sales Page Hang-Ups
http://www.salespagetactics.com/littlefish

Additional note by Emma:

If you are going to use this method, but already have pages listed in Google that end in .php, you will need to add some extra lines into your .htaccess file. This will ensure that Google redirects the traffic from the old .php to the new .htm or .html page:

Assume that www.yourdomain.com/index.php was listed in Google but you wanted to change it to www.yourdomain.com/index.htm.

Add the following line to the bottom of your .htaccess file, making sure that you hit the 'enter' key at the end of the last line of text, and to change 'yourdomain.com' to your actual web address:

Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm

Labels: programming

Quick AdSense Font Tips

Sunday, October 29, 2006

There's loads of advice on how to legitimately increase your AdSense click through rates on the Internet, and most of this tells you to try and integrate your ads as much as possible into the rest of your site.

This means matching the colours, font size, font family and line height.

The colours can be controlled through the AdSense code generator, but the font size, typeface and line-height can only be changed by Google themselves.

However, you can change the rest of your site to match the AdSense code through the use of stylesheets:

font-family - arial,sans-serif
font-size - 11px
line-height - 13px

Labels: adsense, programming

Help I lost my password!

Friday, October 13, 2006

If you've ever had that sinking feeling when you've realised you've forgotten your login, don't worry, help could be at hand. If your password is MD5 encrypted and is stored in a MySQL database to which you have acccess, this post will help.

If you are unsure about the MD5 encryption, follow the instructions below through to step 10 - if the password consists of 32 letters and numbers, then carry on, if not, find another plan! If you are very lucky (and the program isn't as secure as it should be), the passwords won't be encrypted at all and you can see what your password is.

Here are instructions for doing this in cPanel using phpMyAdmin:

Login to cPanel and click on the MySQL icon.
Scroll to the bottom of this page and click on 'phpMyAdmin'.
Select the correct database from the dropdown box on the left hand side.
In the left hand side list that appears, click on the name of the table that holds your password. NB - unsure of which table? First look for tables called 'user' or 'admin', then start browsing through each table (see step 5) until you find the correct location.
Click on the tab at the top of page that says 'browse'
Further down the page that appears there is a small table that shows users and their corresponding passwords.
Click on the checkbox next to the correct user
Click on the pencil icon.
On the page that appears, you'll see a table that you can edit.
Highlight and copy the 32-digit sequence from the password box and paste it into a new text document. SAVE THIS as a backup.
Back in the password box, delete the existing contents and type the following in instead: e5f0f20b92f7022779015774e90ce917
You are now able to login to your admin panel using the password temppass
Now change your password to something else and don't forget it!!!

WARNING - You are manually editing a database which underpins your script or software. This is not recommended. Do this at your own peril and ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS keep a backup of any data that you change (see step 10).

Labels: programming, security

AdSense on your website when testing

Thursday, October 12, 2006

When building a new site, it's quite common to make a few tweaks, save and upload the page, and load it into your browser to see what your changes look like 'live'. This process can be repeated many times.

Google AdSense rules (also referred to as TOS - terms of service) say that you can only put AdSense code onto pages that are launched and functioning. In other words, not on test pages or those with 'under construction' on them. In addition to making repeat requests from the AdSense server, you also run the risk of accidentally clicking on the ads.

However, it's useful to see the AdSense code to keep track of the overall picture. So what can you do?

Easy - make two simple changes to the AdSense code whilst you're finishing the page and then reverse the changes once the page is live. The second line of AdSense code normally looks like:

google_ad_client = "pub-your 16 digit id here";

But change it to:

google_adtest = "on";
google_ad_client = "ca-test";
//google_ad_client = "pub-your 16 digit id here";

Once you're done, just change it back to the original - simple!

Labels: adsense, programming

Free Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express Software

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

If you go here you will find the links, and information for:

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express
Visual Basic 2005 Express
Visual C# 2005 Express
Visual C++ 2005 Express
Visual J# 2005 Express
SQL Server Express

If you download them before 7th November 2006, they are free for life and registering your software gives you additional benefits:

250 royalty-free stock photography images from Corbis
Free Windows Icons from IconBuffet
Free eBooks including: Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition: Build a Web Site Now, Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!, and Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
3rd party components from VSIP partners
And more

Full information for each package from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

Labels: programming, resources

E-mail campaigns...Part 2

Friday, October 28, 2005

Last post looked at the legal side of e-mail and newsletter campaigns. Now to look at how to implement them at no cost. Using your desktop e-mail program is the simplest method, followed by a hosted solution. Finally, there are some very good free scripts out there but are slightly more complex to set up.

*** Using Outlook Express, or another desktop e-mail program ***

1) Copy your list of recipients into the BCC (='Blind Carbon Copy') field in a new e-mail. [TIP: If this is not visible, go to 'View' and select 'All Headers']

2) Put your e-mail address in the 'To' field

3) Type your message and off you go!

4) To see who you sent it to, right click on the message in the 'Sent Items' folder and choose 'Properties'.

Advantages
- No recipient can see the e-mail address of any other recipient, so you maintain privacy.
- You know that it's been sent because you'll also receive a copy.

Disadvantages
- You have to deal with unsubscribes and bounces manually.
- Limited customisation options.

*** Using a hosted solution ***

We've found Listapp to be a very simple and effective newsletter service. The setup is very straightforward, and it automatically generates the code for people to (un)subscribe, for both your e-mails and webpages, as well as letting you customise various options.

Advantages
- Simple to setup and maintain.

Disadvantages
- Limited customisation options.

*** Hosting your own script ***

If you can host your own scripts and have some experience in setting them up, PHPlist is by far and away the best free script we've seen.

Advantages
- Fully customisable.
- Automated bounce and subscribe options

Disadvantages
- Setup not for the faint-hearted! You must have knowledge of FTP, CHMOD and editing script files.

Labels: email, programming, resources, spam

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