Recent Posts

The Easy way for Key Based Authentication for SSH

0 comments | Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 7:22 am

Why use a key-based system?

Using a key-based system makes it much faster, and even more secure to ssh into a server, and scp files onto a remote server. To do this is pretty easy...

Automatic Backup of MySQL Databases

0 comments | Published on Sunday, April 11, 2010 10:26 pm

This is a trick that works on a Linux system, as most servers are hosted using Linux. So, you would have to figure out how to change it if you are using Windows (sorry).

What are we going to do?

We will just create a simple bash script that will backup all databases, and we will create a cron job to do it for us on automatic intervals.

The Bash Script

You may first ask me, why do this in a bash script? Why not put it straight into a cronjob? Well, I'm doing it just to make it easier if you want to run other commands, or do one file per database. So, here's the script:

#/bin/sh

mysqldump -h localhost -u mikesir87 -pPASSWORD --all-databases > database.sql
gzip database.sql
mv database.sql.gz BACKUPS/`date +mysql-BACKUP.sql-%y-%m-%d.gz`

The first command, mysqldump, does a simple dump on the database. Since we give it the --all-databases flag, it grabs all databases that user has access to. The -h flag is for the host, which will probably be localhost. The -u flag is the username for the connection and the -p flag is for the user's password. Note that there is space between the flag and the password. If you're not familiar with Unix command lines, the > is what is called an IO Redirect.

Protecting Images using PHP and htaccess

17 comments | Published on Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:40 pm

Sources to check

In this article, we're going to tackle a few different tactics to safeguard images. But, let's first think about what ways people can get images.

  • Direct path - if a user knows the path to an image, they can simply go straight to it, and download the image.
  • Drag and drop - in most browsers today, you can simply drag and drop an image right onto your desktop.
  • Hotlinking - another website can link directly to your image
  • Screenshot - a visitor can simply take a screenshot of your page and crop the image.

How to fix them

So, now that we've established where our problems are, how can we fix them?

A few SEO notes

9 comments | Published on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 8:16 pm

Introduction

There are a lot of different tools and methods to use to help your site be noticed and found. Of course, I'm still working on some of these myself, but here's a few things I've learned so far. Post a comment about any other things you might have to offer!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a pretty powerful suite to help you understand the experience of your site's visitors. To get an account is free, and only requires you to add a Javascript file to your site pages. Most CMS's have plugins that make this easy.

Some of the features I look at are the sources of the visits. Google Analytics gives you a nice chart to help you get a quick glance of the source of the visits... such as this:

You can click on the graph to get it broken down. If you go into the Search Engine section, it'll even tell you what search terms were entered to get them to your page (helps having Google providing the software!).

CSS3: Drop Shadows

6 comments | Published on Monday, October 12, 2009 8:58 pm

CSS3 is exciting stuff. I really like the drop shadow feature because I was tired of always having to create new PNG files just to get the effect. Also, it's a pain trying to get the bottom lined up, and the right side of a div to all look right with the shadow. What a relief it is to let the browser figure it all out!

So, what are the tags?

Just like the CSS3 rotating text, each browser has its own tag. I haven't figured it out for Opera yet, but I'm sure that's ok. Very few people are using it anyways, right? So...here's the tags.

	filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(sProperties)
	-webkit-box-shadow: 10px 10px 25px #ccc;  
	-moz-box-shadow: 10px 10px 25px #ccc;

The first one, the filter is for IE (details), the webkit tag is for Chrome and Safari (details), and the moz-box-shadow tag is for Firefox (details).

Properties

Webkit and Mozilla

The properties are pretty simple. They pretty much go as follows: