MySpace Likely To Open Platform To 3rd Party Developers
Great! An application known for its buggy code and bloated site is going to open it up to third-party developers? With all of their attempts to block out existing widgets, who is going to want to code for these losers?
Why does it always seem like the class idiots end up beating us all in the end?
Popularity: 21%
I have written several times about debugging a live site and posted snippets for working on the themes of a live Wordpress install. One trick I haven’t mentioned is using the PHP error log.
PHP on any production site should be configured to not display errors. I see all too often on random sites that PHP has been configured to show errors (sometimes even in Google results). This gives away too much information about your application and server.
On the servers and applications I work on all of the time, I configure PHP to log errors to /var/log/php_errors. Simply tailing this file through a console will quickly show any errors caused by the edits.
To enable logging, check these two variables in your php.ini:
To tail the log file from an SSH console:
Popularity: 26%
These are all useful when trying to track down an open formmail script.
List bounce messages
Freeze bounce messages
Freeze messages from user@domain.com
Find out what user your webserver runs as. Use this as the email address to key on. For example, my Apache runs as nobody so I want to freeze all messages sent from the user nobody@domain.com so I can look through them to see if I can deduce where the insecure formmail script is.
Delete frozen messages
Popularity: 27%
I created the two URL shortening services: emailURL.com and anonURL.com several years ago as a side project to support another side project. It’s a great service that allows you to create short URLs that don’t break in email messages. How many times has someone replied to an email saying the link you provided doesn’t work. In most cases its a matter of manually copying and pasting the parts of the link that were broken by the word wrapping. With emailURL.com its simple to create a short url that works everywhere.
I use these services every day but I never made it easy for someone else create shortened URLs. Today, I added a bookmarklet on both site’s home pages to facilitate usage.
To make it easy to integrate into other projects, I have built a SOAP API to call the create functions remotely. Stay tuned for more details after we complete beta testing.
Popularity: 12%
Recursively chmod only directories
Similarly, recursively set the execute bit on every directory
The +X flag sets the execute bit on directories only
Recursively chmod only files
Recursively chmod only PHP files (with extension .php)
Popularity: 32%
Windows users, please don’t use the Inbox in Outlook Express as a repository to store years of mail. I was recently called out to a client’s site to debug several email issues. Errors sending mail, errors receiving mail, this folder cannot be displayed.
After Googling a few of the error messages I found most of the fixes were directed at cleaning and rebuilding the Outlook Express default folders (Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items).
The basic steps are:
More information about the file corruption may be found at Microsoft.com
Popularity: 19%
 |
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged |
 |
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon |
 |
Jeremy D. Zawodny: High Performance MySQL |
