Useful Tools »

Have you ever wondered how websites actually get hacked? For someone with moderate PHP and mySQL knowledge it can actually be quite simple. So how can you protect your website? One of the best ways is to learn design features that are commonly exploited by hackers. A few days ago I came across an article covering common techniques hackers use to hack into your website. It’s full of information that website owners should know.

The article covers some basic SQL injection techniques, backdoor, automated, and remote injections. If your looking for ways to improve the security of your blog, this article may give you a few places to start.

Tech News, WordPress »

WordPress 2.5 was released to the public today in an announcement apparently made at WordCamp Dallas. Along with the public release comes face lift for WordPress.org. I’ve still got a little work to make sure all the plugins I’m using will work in 2.5, but I’ll be upgrading as soon as I can see what the damage is.

The new WordPress version sports a very customizable admin interface, improved security, image gallery options, and more. Have you upgraded yet?

Announcements »

I just wanted to apologize for letting a whole week go by without updating! I’ve been fortunate this past week to have had a break from classes and have been working on three website design projects. One was a personal site for a friend that went pretty quick, one is a small business that I’m still working on, and another is an online store which uses WordPress and the the Market Theme to make quite an interesting store. I’m not quite done but it has been quite a learning experience. I’ve become much more familiar with custom fields the customizing pages then I was before!

Also, I’m working on another plugin for WordPress. I’m making it mostly…

Tech News »

WordPressers will be happy to know that WordPress 2.5 RC2 has been released. It’s important to note that this is a “release candidate”, meaning it’s not the final stable version. For those not yet ready to try out 2.5 quite yet, Matt has uploaded a 17mb screencast detailing some of the changes in version 2.5, including the new gallery system. I’ll be trying out this new release on my local installation to check the compatability with my site’s current plugins. You can download the new version directly or check out Matt’s announcement. I’m diggin’ WordPress’ new threads, are you?

Useful Tools »

I installed a new WordPress plugin today that I’m very happy with. It’s called WP-Syntax. As the name suggests, it lets you easly apply common syntax highlighting to many different code languages on your WordPress blog. Common languages that it support include html4strict, PHP, javascript, java, CSS, XML, perl, and many others.

Usage is very easy. Simply enclose your code in the following: <pre lang="LANGUAGE" line="X">Your Code Here</pre>. Replace LANGUAGE with the name of the language your code is in (CSS, PHP, etc) and replace the line="X" with the line number that you want the code box to begin with. Installation was a breeze, and after adding the suggested CSS values to my theme’s stylesheet it worked…

Useful Tools »

For the past few months I’ve been reading books and going through CDs on how to program in PHP. During this time I’ve come across some useful snippets of PHP code that I’ve had use for in some of my projects. I present to you six of them here. These are very basic scripts that PHP beginners may find use for.

Useful PHP snippets

Include a PHP File

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<?php
 
   include "yourfile.php";
 
?>

Usage: This script adds the contents of “yourfile.php” to your current file. Simply replace “yourfile.php” with the your desired file name. This is a great time-saving tool when you have many pages that use a common header or footer.

PHP Redirect

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