October 21st, 2008 / 1 Comment » / by Liz Jamieson
What a clear and helpful article. I came across this article at the weekend. Anyone interested in PHP coding can benefit from a good read of this.
An ideal breakdown of all the security issues to consider when coding PHP (and MySQL) and the different types of attack a PHP website can be open to.
These include attacks such as XSS, SQL Injection and Form spoofing.
A further useful and related article can be found here – the author desribes how to sanitise database input before applying it to your MySQL database.
Posted in: MySQL, PHP, Security
Tags: form spoofing, PHP security, sql injection
October 20th, 2008 / 2 Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
The web is awash with beautiful, clean Web 2.0 style sites each accentuated by Ajax enabled user focussed embellishments.
Pages no longer need to refresh in their entirety to reflect user ineractions. Ajax – asynchronous javascript - can make this happen quickly and in front of your eyes.
Study the jQuery web site – this is an library of javascript routines that make javascript coding that little bit easier to learn.
jQuery supplies a series of easy to use APIs – one weekend of study should see you on your way to enlivening your site.
Posted in: AJAX, Animations, CSS, DHTML, Javascript
Tags: AJAX, jquery
October 17th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
Ever heard of printwhatyoulike.com? It’s a neat little web site that allows you to print the portion of a web page that you want, leaving out things like images and ads.
It’s works by allowing you to select a boxed area on the page, and then either expanding or narrowing that area once selected.
You can removes images with a single click, and backgrounds (although I think it’s true to say most browsers allow for automatic removal of background images when printing.)
One downside is that the site won’t work if the site you want to print takes too long to load.
Posted in: In the office, Tools
Tags: Add new tag, printing
October 16th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
So how long was it going to be before I found another excuse to mention Twitter? Not long as it turns out.
Have you heard of Yammer? It’s a kind of Twitter for companies.
It benefits companies where due to the size of the organisation, employees feel as if decisions and discussions are taking place without them. Implement Yammer and everyone gets to be involved.
In-house experts are able to join in and add value when something relevant to them is yammered. A real tool for improving internal communications.
Unlike Twitter though, Yammer is not entirely free. You can use it for free, but the paid version has more options. But it only costs $1 per person per month. Large companies can ask for special pricing.
Watch the product tour – it should get you excited if you are a decision maker in your organisation.
Posted in: Social Media, Web 2.0
Tags: twitter, yammer
October 15th, 2008 / 1 Comment » / by Liz Jamieson
Iceberg is a relatively new service which says it can make a professional web application building, a breeze. If it does what it says it will do, this is an amazing software development product. The company is based in Dublin, in Ireland.
The Good News
Almost too good to be true – it promises to make programmers out of us all, by enabling us to not just build web sites, (there are lots of point and click tools for those already), but to build web applications.
If you are a small business, you can use the tool for free, for up to 5 users assuming you have the right software and hardware platforms available.
There is a hosted version (I could not find any obvious reference to it on the website FAQ, but the co-founder Wayne Byrne said in a blog comment that it existed – so where is it Wayne???!) which eliminates the need for a platform of your own, but costs $10 per month per user. So not much good for that new social marketing killer app you’ve been designing for the last few months. But it would be OK for a small number of users in your company.
The Bad News
Well, it’s bad news for me.
Iceberg runs on Microsoft Windows server with SQL Server and is itself an ASP.NET application. Iceberg supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The cost per user is too high even for the hosted version. If you have the skills to code a large application using PHP say, and any associated framework, for large numbers of users, you’d be better off doing it that way.
As a long time software engineer, programmer and web developer I do wonder how accurate these claims can really be.
All my experience of productivity tools is that you substitute having to learn to code for having to learn the tool. And when you think you’ve done that, you realise you ‘ve also learned how to work around all the things the tool does badly. Then a whole support industry is created on the back of the tool’s idiosyncrasies.
The people running Iceberg say their offering is something else altogether.
Posted in: Tools, Web 2.0, Web Design
Tags: Iceberg
