Entries Tagged as “General”
Decrease your spam by address munging
I think we all would agree that spammers must die! Okay not literally, but the spam does need to stop. I recently closed down an email address that received over 5,000 junk emails a day. I had the address for the better part of 6 years or more. Part of the spam problem was created when I put my email address online unprotected. This is a common practice still employed today because many webmasters either don't know how to munge an email address or maybe it's just too much work.
I don't believe there is a silver bullet for becoming spam free. However, in the last year or so I have done two things to curb my spam. So far it has worked nearly perfectly. I now only see one or two emails a week that are junk mail.
→ Respond NowTags: Accessibility · General
IISPassword can play well with others
In my last post I mentioned briefly that I was having a lot of problems for a few days with my site not responding, being locked out, or not linking to articles. I had a heck of a time chasing down the problem. I eventually did figure it out. The solution is pretty easy but certainly was not too obvious at first.
I am using ISAPI_Rewrite 3.0 for url rewriting. Then needed to add password protection to a folder. I hate creating accounts on windows as it's such a pain in the ass. I really liked IISPassword by IIS Tools. Unfortunately, both programs use an .htaccess file and neither one understand each other. Every time I changed one setting, it would overwrite the .htaccess file and this went back and forth for a few days.
There is a solution and I think it's pretty easy to make both applications work in harmony. IISPassword allows you to change the file where the settings are stored. They must have anticipated these types of issues and accounted for it.
To change the file used by IISPassword, simply follow these steps.
- stop the IIS server. Open the IIS Manager
- Select your "Web Sites" node and right click to open it's properties.
- Select the tab for IISPassword.
- Check the radio button for "Create new". In the textfield for "Access File Name" change the file to .iispassword
- Click the change button. Give it a moment to propagate for all your sites.
- Start IIS and thats it.
It's so easy but the docs don't mention anything about it. So if you need to password protect a folder through the system then IISPassword is a really great application and easy to use baring any issues with other .htaccess files.
→ Respond NowTags: General · Software
iPhone Detection Scripts
With iPhones being all the rage these days, I am wondering if mobile versions of your pages might be useful. Viewing a site on an iPhone looks exactly as it does on your desktop. This is all well and good, but sometimes pages can be bloated with images, javascript libraries, and other markup that is not as important to your visitors. I am also a bit upset that the iPhone ignores the css media type of handheld. I wish there were an option to force Safari to render handheld styles as default, but I could not find any option for it. So I set out on a quest to find some alternatives for my iPhone experience.
Coldfusion – I was sure there was a way to get something from the cgi.http_user_agent but not sure if it would just read the agent as webkit. I didn't want to kill Safari desktop users, that would be bad. The Awesome Coldfusion Jedi Ray Camden already had a solution so here it is: (Sorry for the comments around the actual code. Seams that MangoBlog wants to parse the code and run it causing an error. So remove the comments from the cfif statement to make it work. I hope to get a fix for this soon)
<!--- detect iphone --->
<!---
<cfif findNoCase("iphone", cgi.http_user_agent)>
<cflocation url="iphone.html" addToken="false">
</cfif>
--->
Javascript, PHP, and MVC – I ran across a site called iPhone Toolbox that has a ton-o-info on developing for the iphone. (I will be spending some time here for sure.) There is a set of scripts linked up there dealing with how to detect an iPhone users that pretty much covers the rest of the developers. Here is that code
Client-side (javascript):
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPhone') != -1) {
/* iPhone user */
}
Server-side (example is PHP):
if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone')) {
/* iPhone user */
}
For sites that use an MVC coding pattern where the programming logic code is separate from the template, the following example is useful:
if (stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone')) {
$template = 'home/iphone.html';
}
else {
$template = 'home/index.html';
}
If you have any other cool resources, I would love to hear about them. I did run into another site with some code to detect iPhone's and iPod's, but I couldn't make it work, so I have no idea if you have to detect them separately or not. It does speak to the reason why Apple should have an option in the settings pane to make an iPhone or iPod use a handheld stylesheet. But for now at least there is a work around.
→ Respond NowTags: Code · ColdFusion · CSS · General
10 Sites to Waste Your Day
As if we don't already live in a environment that is filled with enough distractions, that we need yet more things to waste our time. However sometimes on those rare occasions, a need arises and we need to disconnect - unplug from our daily grind and clear our minds. Maybe you have time to kill and want to goof around for a bit. This is not a luxury I personally get to enjoy all that often. I would like to believe that someday I will have more time to goof around. In the meantime I will continue ro bookmark pages so that when that day does comes, I will have plenty of options. Below are 10 sites that you can waste your time with starting today if you like.
→ Respond NowTags: Freebies · General · Inspiration
Text Selection Color
CSS3 brings some cool new features to the web. Some features are highly discussed like rounded corners, borders, and layout control. I am really looking forward to these items becoming standard in the near future. However, I am happy that my two favorite browsers Firefox and Safari already support many of the CSS3 specs. This gives me the ability to use some lesser known items without killing my design for IE. I enjoy some of the simpler things, like the ability to change the text color and background color when text is selected on the page. IE does not currently support this but thats ok… I don't care that much for IE anyway.
Want to add this effect to your site? It's simple. Add this code to your css stylesheet.
*::-moz-selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR MOZILLA */
*::selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR SAFARI */
If you want to know more about this tag check out quirksmode.org for additional info and examples. A word of caution must be noted here, If you must validate for css level 2.1 then you will want to forgo this trick as it's not CSS2 compliant.
→ Respond NowTags: Code · CSS · General
