Review: Ibvpn VPN service – Giveaway of 2 accounts
Posted in: review | ( 14 ) Comments
10 Jun 2011ibVPN.com is giving away 2 full year accounts for codediesel readers. ibvpn provides a paid VPN service for web anonymity. A VPN is one of the essential elements of modern networks; besides helping companies connect geographically distant networks securely, a VPN also allows one to overcome online restrictions and bypass internet censorship from anywhere and anytime. Normally I do not use a VPN, but recently I decided to try ibVPN.com, who generously offered me a trial account for testing.
With a proliferation of mobile devices, web applications now need to be able to detect if it is being viewed on a mobile platform. The mobile detection library here can help you in these matters. Obviously I’ve not tested it on all available devices but it worked on a few I’ve got.Sample code and a quick demo are shown below.
Grabbing website Favicons using curl and php
Posted in: php,tip | ( 3 ) Comments
27 May 2011Searching server files using GREP
Posted in: linux,php,tip | ( 2 ) Comments
25 May 2011During debugging the majority of my time is spent in searching for specific text. Searching on the local machine is a breeze via a IDE, but if I’ve an application hosted on a remote server then it can get difficult and slow, unless of course you have access to SSH when you can use good-old Grep. But many times the server does not have SSH access at which time I have to rely on using Linux commands though PHP.
So for example the following will allow me to recursively search all the files in a directory for the string ” mail”. I just upload the file to the server directory from where I need to make the search. Here I’m using the PHP backtick operator that allows me to escape to the shell, execute the specified command, and return the result in the variable $output.
Build a shopping cart in 20 minutes
Posted in: libraries,php | ( 3 ) Comments
24 May 2011Shopping carts are one of the most frequently used parts on the web. But for a programmer creating them has never been easy. Even for a few items the programmer has to create a database and other support files to create a functioning shopping cart.
EasyBasket takes a different approach at creating a shopping cart; although technically complex in its execution, it is extremely simple for the user to install. With EasyBasket you can quickly insert a shopping cart anywhere on your web page with a single line of code. No need of installing a database or a dozen class files. Google Checkout and PayPal Checkout are integrated into the code, all you need to do is change the credentials and your cart is ready to go.
Adding HTML5 Geolocation to your web applications
Posted in: html,javascript | ( 5 ) Comments
12 May 2011One of the interesting and useful addition to the HTML5 specification is the Geolocation API. The Geolocation API allows users to share their location with web applications so that they can enjoy the benefits of various location-aware services.
Geolocation enables you as a developer or website owner to figure out where a particular user is located on the planet. This can be helpful in various web applications; for example in social networking, where you can find out where your various friends are currently located or in advertising where you can display targeted ads based on the users location.
If you’re designing a web application, you may think that developing it in English will be quite enough. Remember, though, that only 22% of internet users speak English as their native language, and 85% of ecommerce consumers won’t buy a product if they can’t read about it in their native language, which leaves only one question to be asked: are you prepared to miss on those millions of potential customers?
Software developers worldwide know that a web application will only work the way it’s supposed to for its target market. Even if two countries speak the same language, there are plenty of other things to consider when it comes to localising an app. Take, for example, the UK and the United States. The date format in the UK is day/month/year, while the US uses month/day/year, which could be cause for problems if an app is not localised for its specific market.
Data filtering and validation using Inspekt
Posted in: libraries,php,security | ( 2 ) Comments
25 Mar 2011Most web security glitches are caused by insufficient input filtering and validation. Despite a large number of validation libraries being available, input sanitization is usually bypassed due to sheer laziness or the idea that your site is somehow immune from bad input data. Inspekt is one such library that has a small footprint and is very easy to integrate into your application.
Easy thumbnail generation using PHP
Posted in: libraries,php | ( 2 ) Comments
20 Mar 2011One of the frequent requirements in web design is that of thumbnail generation. Although there are many libraries out there I found PHP Thumb simple and quick enough to implement in a recent project. PHP Thumb is a light-weight image manipulation library aimed at thumbnail generation. It offers the ability to resize, create custom crops, or square crops from the center, and rotate the image. If the need arises you can also easily add custom functionality to the library through plugins.
phpthumb uses the ‘gd’ library to process the images, so you will need to have gd installed on your system. You can use phpinfo() or the following to quickly check for the same:
