web notes - a blog

If you are considering a web company, check their site. Do you like it? Does it look good? Does everything work well?

If you don’t like their site, you may not like the one they build you.

If you do like the site, ask them the following questions:

About how many person hours went into the site?
If they can’t answer this, they may not manage their projects well. Usually, the company site is handled as an informal project, interleaved with client projects. Professional service organizations are selling labor, and should be tracking ALL hours - whether they bill them to clients or not. That’s good business.

About how much would you charge a client for a similar site?
This number should be reasonable, and in line with the earlier answer.

What percentage of the project hours are management/overhead?
High caliber technical teams need less management.

The web is constantly changing and keeping applications on servers which can support them may be difficult, as hosting companies upgrade the servers to improve security, the applications may fail.

Most web companies are extremely careful and use strategies such as running PHP 5 through php5 extenstions, and leaving PHP 4 as the default, but there does come a time when the server has be upgraded. In addition, it is the responsibility of the application installer to ensure the application is maintained for security and performance.

This creates an excellent business opportunity for web companies, especially for powerful applications with complex hosting requirements, such as eZ publish. The key is careful identification and management of the opportunities.

Once identified, one must look at the site to try to assess the quality of work. Upgrades can be difficult, so the offer to upgrade an eZ installation should be made carefully - so all parties understand the risks and estimated costs.

Bear in mind if the application is running from a subdirectory, this strategy may not work. That’s okay, there are lots of other sites. :)

This approach will work for any application that provides identification information in a publicly accessible area (either the headers or the HTML). It is especially valuable for applications with steep learning curves.

Use curl or wget to get the site headers or HTML.

Using RPMs to install open source toolkits such as dojo, Smarty, and Zend Framework allows hosting companies to create a cost-efficient architecture to offer clients servers ready to support RIAs and sophisticated sites.

This may improve security by allowing the hosting company to prevent clients from modifying open source products. Access to the code can be provided easily through the use of symlinks. Account setup can be automated with server management/admin software like WebHostManager and Plesk - by customizing the account setup scripts with additional RPMs.

Advantages:

• Significant savings in disk space
• Elimination of installation at the account level
• Permission management performed at the server level
• Ease of toolkit maintenance, a single installation can be upgraded for the whole server
• Offering an RIA ready server is a valuable service that may be delivered in a cost effective manner. It may be an offering that makes one hosting company more attractive to clients than another, in other words, good business sense.

Disadvantages:

• Changes to the toolkits will affect every site, thus they cannot be changed easily, and upgrades may be disruptive. However, based on the assumption that this code should not be modified, and upgrades are often security related, synchronizing the toolkits across the server is reasonable.
• An excellent understanding of the server architecture, software, and RIA toolkits is required for a graceful implementation.

Web applications are traditionally distributed with tar files, but they can be packaged as RPMs.

A web application in an RPM should have a tar file with the source. The tar file should have the files from the top of the application file tree, to make it easier if the target directory needs to change. The only parts of the .spec file that really need to be defined are the install, which will copy the files from the build root into a target directory, and clean, to delete the files after the RPM is built. Use tar tf to list the files from that tar (don’t list the directories or warnings will be issued for duplicate files). Be sure to encase the filenames in double quotes, write them to a file and then include them into the files section with the -f option. Using the -f option allows all the files for the tar to be specified, automatically, and ensures additional packages can be defined for the same directory with minimal conflicts.

The group for most web applications is Applications/Internet

RPMs can be created to allow the files to be relocated, another excellent approach would be to use symlinks into a single installation on a server, with account level configuration/access and databases.

During development, a script which creates tar files from the modules can be used to support both the RPM packaging, and create quick distribution packages for updates from a version control system.

The following URLs may have the md5(’just_a_test_code’):

http://honamfishing.co.kr/phpmysqladmin/libraries/nov/uyowuwi/
http://kamini.biz/a/onodin/bb/aqileka/seleyuy/&pb=1
http://mojazubarka.sk/test/admin/sicaqe/jufoxir/
http://mslayouts.ws/icons/administrator/components/com_menus/etotag/qeba/
http://sans-packing.ru/img/jipeqap/ehudute/
http://stoneproperties.co.uk/album/includes/nohul/zojaz/
http://targi.pc-tuning.pl/images/news/aqa/cib/
http://www.antwerpsupporter.be/soccerstats/images/gumiseq/nila/
http://www.boomerbible.com/instapunk/MType/archives/ajuq/avu/
http://www.channelnewsperu.com/imagenes/publicaciones/fotos/emesuki/lewu/&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.elettrodataservice.it/foto_articoli/pivafof/mibi/
http://www.eloge-du-bien-commun.be/blog/bundled-libs/Net/ocoqen/goqe/&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.filter-international.com/webservice/aro/pefosi/&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.foicr.org/work/mulito/yiqosu/
http://www.heaven-house.kz/templates_c/omoj/edexuq/
http://www.interkonet.com/galeria/modules/albumselect/ucu/yixipuz/&paged=2
http://www.jyvaskylankirjastot.fi/yhteistyo/wd/muji/renula/xejado/&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.landi-sempach-emmen.ch/aktionen/image/zafecez/roxovef/&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.obrasmecanicasch.com/omch/img/anawuho/ohuhiru/&pb=1
http://www.oriolmanya.net/nautilus/phpBB2/language/lang_english/ifekeri/cekogah/
http://www.pattibus.it/phplib-7.2b/pages/godot/olule/
http://www.sibstro.ru/dom/domimg/pife/egemo/&paged=2
http://www.stomol.ru/catalog/rivoz/ifewaf/&tb=1&pb=1
http://www.tcmforum.com/layout/oxiqade/onese/
http://www.thoseguysfilms.com/forums/templates/subSilver/images/timuji/jaborat/&paged=2
http://www.unduetretoccaate.it/codice/fog/biko/
http://www.uxbridgerotary.org/survey/tmp/isefa/nowu/yocav/
http://www.vlopezalvarez.com/Personal/Fotos/Viajes/xaj/ocaceg/

To check if the file is on the server, click on the link. If something similar to:

<?php echo md5("just_a_test"); ?>

is displayed, the file is still there, and the entire server (all accounts) should be checked.

If you own any of these domain names or servers, you should address the issue.

If a 404 (page not found) error is received, the file has been removed.

This blog has additional posts related to the issue, you may use the search feature.

Information derived from server statistics, non-authorative.