The following entries were made in the “November, 2006” time-frame.
Archive for “November, 2006”
Securing PHP Include Files
One of the great things about the PHP server-side scripting language is the ability to “include” files. Using includes you can share files across several pages. For example, if you’re not using a functions library to handle global page sections, you can create a file called header.php, put some variable hooks in it to handle a dynamic title, keyword set, and description, then use this one file for all your web pages. This can save a tremendous amount of initial work when creating a site, plus it can greatly reduce maintenance down the road if you want to make changes. But the web being what it is, it is possible to access some includes directly and thus you may want to secure them.
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It’s Shaping up to be a Good Day
Here’s another short story from the old fiction department. I like writing stuff like this sometimes. Forgive me. This is a light-hearted tale and I hope you enjoy it. 
I got up pretty early. I hadn’t slept well. I dreamt a lot. I dreamt of rabbit hunting for some odd reason, when actually I had never even seen a rabbit. But you know how dreams can be. The last glimpses of my dream quickly evaporated into daytime reality as they usually do. I yawned.
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Message Rules for a Cleaner Email Inbox
Tired of trying to find important email messages in your cluttered Inbox? Establishing a few simple “Message Rules” can help make your wish a reality. If I’ve lost you already and you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about but can relate to the cluttered Inbox syndrome, I’m about to make your day. In this tutorial I will show you how to set up a message rule for a mailing list you may belong to using Microsoft’s “Outlook Express” client-side email software. Specifically in this exercise I will create a rule to capture mailings from the Web Standards Group (WSG) mailing list.
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Directories Set to 777 are Safe/Unsafe?
I will first say this as a disclaimer: I’m not a hacker, cracker, or a server security expert! This post is more of a question than an answer. Okay, now that that’s said I can get on with this short article. To the best of my knowledge, and after doing some research on the subject, and reading eighteen million conflicting versions of this information, I must tell you that manually setting directory permissions to 777 is not safe! Or at least I don’t think it is? I’m pretty sure if you set directories/folders on your server to 777 you can be cracked and probably will be, eventually — unless said directories were created with a server side scripting language thus taking ownership away from “Apache,” “Nobody,” or whatever the common default owner name on your server is.
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Beast-Blog Reaches 10,000 Downloads
I’m happy to announce the Beast-Blog theme has exceeded the 10,000 downloads mark — and that’s just from my site. There are also download mirrors such as the Themes.WordPress site (where it’s been downloaded over 2200 times), plus it comes in different languages. It’s really nice to see that this thing was/is so well received. It was voted by users the number one two-column theme and the number two of all themes for a long time, but about a week after I found out about it some dude gave it a crappy grade for an include error that really wasn’t even my fault so that shot that all to hell. Oh, well, that’s the way it goes. The download number says a lot more than its current rank anyway… people seem to enjoy it.
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WordPress Titles & Descriptions for SEO
I recently made some modifications to this blog to help get its articles indexed more quickly (for SEO reasons), to help users identify one article or page from the next with greater ease, and to make it easier for people to Digg articles, mark them in Ma.gnolia, etc. If you see your browser’s title bar you’ll now notice that the individual article pages show the name of the article more clearly, and on the “blog pages” the position of the page name is better. You’ll also see I modified the title separators. These modification also apply to the META “description” as I tried to make them more distinctive as well (good article titles help). It was pretty simple. Here’s what I did and how can do it, too.
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