Category: "News"

http://know-waste.com has moved to http://web-notes.wirehopper.com

The registration for the domain name know-waste.com expired, the credit card number had changed, and the most cost-effective solution is to run this blog as a subdomain.

Contribute and Share

Participating in a forum related to professional issues is a great way to learn and share. Whether you need help, or answer requests, you will almost always learn from the other posters.

I like ProgrammingTalk (link above) - there is a wide variety of web-related material. Another excellent forum is http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/.

LinkedIn is also great, the topics span a wide spectrum and you can really learn a lot from the other members.

One caution - every post you make should be professional. If a sarcastic comment comes to mind, or silly response, type it in Notepad and save it on your desktop. Don’t post it publicly. And, respect others, don’t ask for help for a site that people may find offensive, remove any identifying content and focus on the technical issue.

Thank You Malwarebytes

I don’t often “surf the ‘net", visiting unfamiliar sites. Most of my Internet access is in search of LAMP/RIA technical resources and answers, as well as contributing my own through this blog and on the appropriate sites.

Recently, I was checking a search engine for entries related to a site and I clicked on htxx:–aolpsycho.com-d-www.stkc.org (the xxs and -s are there to prevent it from being a real URL). It infected my computer with a nasty virus. Key filenames: brastk.exe, beep.sys, delself.bat, bnokdcme.exe, as well as others and registry corruption. It prevented execution of autoruns.exe, although renaming autoruns to a different name allowed it to run. It put a little red X image in the taskbar, prompting me to click to download ‘Antivirus2009′.

I won’t describe how the files were identified, or any of the other resolution tactics - to avoid assisting the authors. However, if it shows up on your computer, the posted link solved the problem on this machine very nicely.

Sincere thanks to the author and I will purchase a copy of the product.

Blog Organization

A blog without any categories may do well with search engines, but it won’t help site visitors find related content.

If the objective of the blog is to provide a collection of helpful material, organization is vital. Create appropriate categories and identify posts accordingly. Add new categories as the blog matures.

Key Site Architecture Considerations

Virtually every site or web application should consider the following:

  • Multilingual capable - even if the content is not immediately available in other languages. Retrofitting translation into a site is extremely costly.
  • Common components - any code that will execute in more than one place should be shared through includes or other mechanisms.
  • Hierarchical templates - this provides a more consistent interface and more efficient code. Templates must be general enough to support this.
  • Appropriate user assistance - help, at both the field and page level
  • List of browsers supported - you can’t support every browser. Identify those you will.
  • Graceful error handling - don’t just issue a print or echo and die
  • Security - close the windows and doors into your application. Ensure error handling prevents disclosure of code and database elements
  • Configuration - database access constants should be sourced from a single point, as should all other configuration directives. This ensures all elements of the application, including backend/offline scripts. Otherwise, the constants can’t be changed without risking the integrity of the system.
  • Server configuration - prevent access to areas the site visitor should not see at the server level.
  • Multi-mode deployment - only put the code required on the server. Set up the distribution/installation process accordingly.
  • Use mod_security.
  • Let the web server be the only reader of script files. This makes it more difficult for hackers to get to the web code.
  • Use robots.txt and meta tags to keep things out of search engines unless necessary.
  • Change off port 22 for SSH, or close it entirely from public access
  • Enforce these practices across the entire team, and audit for them during development
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