web notes - a blog

Using a site’s home page as an error document is a good way to prevent people and ‘bots from learning more about the site architecture. Routing all error requests to the home page, or some other page, will reduce information leaks, such as ‘file not found’, ‘access denied’, and script failures which could display error information.

It is important to monitor the server error log to see what errors are occurring. Be sure there is a robots.txt file, even if it is empty. Check the log and stats to see what files people are requesting.

Be careful not to confuse legitimate users - if you remove pages or update content frequently, you may want to use 301 redirects for those pages to alert site visitors and search engines of the change.

Cool scripts that are worth buying. The purchase price is far less than the cost of the time you’d have to spend to write them yourself, and, in my case, the code’s much better, too. :)

http://jetscripts.com/sanitizer.htm - This is a much improved version of script that’s been shared and used by many people. It protects your code, data, and server. I’m using this on several systems.

http://jetscripts.com/geotool/ - This script allows you to prevent people from various locations from visiting your site. If your target market is the United States, and you don’t sell to or serve other people, there’s no need to serve pages to the rest of the world. You can customize the interface so the message.

http://jetscripts.com/captcha/ - Most people don’t like CAPTCHA forms - the images are difficult to read, and the code can be bothersome to integrate. This one’s easy to read and easy to work with.

http://jetscripts.com/jetbanners.htm - Awesome. Check it out.

This script reads a .CSV file with a field order of email address, domain, password, and quota and issues messages to distribute the new passwords.

<?php
$sData=file_get_contents('email_accounts.txt');
$aData=explode("\n",$sData);
foreach ($aData as $k => $v)
{
        $d=trim($v);
        /* Disregard blank lines */
        if ($d!=='')
        {
                $m=explode(',',$d);
                $sMessage='Your new email account password is '.$m[2].PHP_EOL.PHP_EOL;
                $sMessage.=file_get_contents('message.txt');
                $headers = 'From: webmaster- @ -example.com' . PHP_EOL .
                        'Reply-To: webmaster- @ -example.com' . PHP_EOL .
                        'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
                mail ($m[0],'New email access',$sMessage,$headers);
        }
}

?>

Sample message.txt

The new server is scheduled to go live at DateTime.

You will have to enter the new password to use your email after DateTime.

You may change the password, after DateTime, by logging in to http://example.com:2095, with your full email address and the
password above, and using the ‘Change Email Password’ feature.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Your name
email
Phone

Creating rounded rectangles has become a bit of a quest.

This blog links to a utility that lets you create a rounded rectangle image that can be used in a page to help organize the content (http://wirehopper.com/design/rounded.php). It has a link to an approach that allows you to create nine images and use them to display a rounded rectangle using CSS and XHTML. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work (http://www.wirehopper.com/design/rr/). So far, the nicest implementation of rounded corner rectangles I’ve found for page layout is eZ publish’s ezwebin (http://now.ezpublish.no/).

Another approach I tried was to use dojox/gfx, which uses javascript to draw on a page.(http://docs.dojocampus.org/dojox/gfx#rectangle). This works really nicely, however, if you want to place text in the rectangle, you must be creative. The approach I tried was to use divs to position the rectangles, then use absolute positioning of additional divs to put text in the boxes. To be dynamic, the dimensions of the rectangles must be adjusted to work well with the content they’ll surround. This can be done fairly easily with javascript, by getting the dimensions of the text div using screen.clientWidth and screen.clientHeight.

After investing a significant amount of time in this fundamental layout issue, I have come to the conclusion that if you have a framework or library that has themes (http://docs.dojocampus.org/dijit-themes), you should choose one and use it, and if not, unless you’ve already found a great way to do rounded rectangles, or you really have to have them, it’s probably not worth the effort.

Rounded rectangles are excellent learning tools for web designers and developers, because they include several skill areas.

• Proper image format. .gifs are probably the best for simple rounded rectangles, including those with transparency, .jpgs or .pngs would be good if there are gradients. It’s worth checking the file sizes and checking how they look on the page.
• CSS layout and dimension control. Depending on the implementation, you may have a three by three block. Each ‘row’ will float, and between the rows, there must be a break. Browser compatibility must be tested.
• Page construction. Computing the bandwidth required for each rounded rectangle is another good exercise. The bandwidth required includes the XHTML, CSS, and all images. Reusing CSS and images can reduce both bandwidth and the number of requests.
• Server-side support. I looked into using PHP to help set up the dojox/gfx rounded rectangles, but abandoned it due to time constraints. Using a server-side technology, or template engine / taglib may be helpful.
• Appreciation of complexity. Many people mistake the simplicity of the XHTML language as an indicator that web work is “easy”. It’s not.
• Cost of labor. As above, it is good to understand that if a task takes longer, one must consider the cost. Spending many hours on rounded rectangles will undoubtedly reduce the time available for other, more important, tasks. In the business world, time is money.

This ends the quest for rounded rectangles. I learned:

• Rounded rectangles are not simple.
• Even if you invest a lot of time, sometimes, there isn’t a ‘graceful’ solution. Bear in mind this is a subjective definition - others may feel that some of the offered ideas are perfect.

• A lot about ImageMagick (http://imagemagick.org). Including …

  • How to draw a rounded rectangle
  • How to crop pieces out of an image
  • How to tint an image
  • How to apply a gradient to an image
• The CSS border attributes and how to apply them
• Rounded corners on images look really nice with ezwebin
• Many other people have posted cool ideas about rounded corners and rectangles - it’s a popular pursuit, or a necessary one. :)
• Rounded rectangles just aren’t that important to me anymore

Additional posts in this blog:

http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/07/05/imagemagick-rounded-rectangles
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/06/07/smoother-imagemagick-rounded-rectangles
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/05/11/imagemagick-rounded-corners
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/11/19/ez-publish-rounded-image-corners
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/11/06/tint-with-imagemagick
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/06/27/round-image-corners-imagemagick
http://web-notes.wirehopper.com/2009/05/17/imagemagick-rounded-corners-images

Most browsers send the prefered language to servers when they access sites. This can be used to select the appropriate content, using Apache’s mod_negotiation.

Sample .htaccess file

Options +MultiViews
LanguagePriority fr en
AddLanguage en .en
AddLanguage fr .fr

Files

$ more req*
::::::::::::::
request.html.en
::::::::::::::
Hello
::::::::::::::
request.html.fr
::::::::::::::
Bon Jour

If no preference is given, the page will display Bon Jour, otherwise, English readers will get Hello, and French will receive Bon Jour.