So, there is one great free resource (and a few paid resources) to get browser screen shots. One of my favorite is browsershots.org. It’s free, until you can wait in a line a few minutes. But it get’s annoying to wait after small css fix and after waiting to find out that this fix didn’t worked.

So I’ve found a great solution: there is http://www.spoon.net who gives availability to run all major windows browsers from browser. Just install little plugin and go to http://www.spoon.net/Browsers/. Here you can run Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 6,  Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3 and Firefox 2,  Safari 4, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera 10 and Opera 9 without installing them to your PC.

Oh, ant spoon.net gives app integration to other websites. Look, you can run Google Chrome from my blog ;)

(somehow it does not work from my blog. And I cannot find support contact. Well at least it works in their page :)
How all spoon stuff works you can read in their info page.

Wish you a painless css hacking!

Every programmer makes mistakes. It especially hurts when security hole was found and used. So it is important to test security before launching a project.

There is really nice and open web security resource on the web. It is called OWASP. It is open, not affiliated with any commercial structure, so its cool and free :)

You can jump and start reading whole security guide here: OWASP Testing Guide. Have a lucky testing ;)

As you can see there are list of allready uploaded images, a file upload form fields and a remove buttons. So, If you hit Save button, you get uploaded new images, replaced old images if there are specified files and removed unneeded images. It looks like ease to use interface, but there is one bug: you have as many file uploads as files are uploaded. So after client added 20 images, all upload stuff stopped working. Why? Because PHP limits not only file size, but even a file count. In current server  max_file_uploads option was set to 20. So it is possible to upload 20 files at once.

Fast decision was to remove file input fields from uploaded images. It will not be able to replace current image with a new one, but it is not necessary in my case.

But sometimes even these are not enough. So what to do? I suggest you to give a chance to a framework. There are a bunch of these: CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Kohana, Symfony, Yii, Zend and much more! I think http://www.phpframeworks.com/ will help you to choose framework for your taste.

Personally I have tried two of them:  CakePHP and Kohana. CakePHP was “first date” with a MVC framework. As I was young and inexperienced, it didn’t give me a very good impression. Even sample given with documentation didn’t work. Oh, I even didn’t understood why I need it. :)

But time passed, and I started to understand – using MVC is great option building bigger webapps or websites. So I gave another chance to a framework called Kohana.

Kohana is a PHP 5 framework that uses the Model View Controller architectural pattern. It is Originally based on CodeIgniter.

Why MVC? Well About MVC you can read here: Model-View-Controller. Usually in Model you write database queries, return them to a Controller which handles given data and returns it to a View. In a View goes all data layout or simply – template. But that’s not a limit, you even don’t need to use database sometimes to use MVC and so on. That’s great when application logic is separated from layout!

So, if you choose to start learning KohanaPHP, begin from great tutorial – Kohana 101. It is tutorial written by Oscar Bajner and shows how to write basic webapp using Kohana PHP framework. You can read it here: kohana 101 or Download it here: kohana101.

After reading and completing your first web site by yourself, go straight to Kohana documentation page, here you will get all needed help, also they have informative and helpful forum.

Okay, Kohanians, off we go… ;)

As I’ve changed CMS from etomite to wordpress, friendly url’s are changed a bit. Essentially  shortened URL and removed “.html” from the end.

But what to do  with old links? I had two options:

1. Create redirects to updated URLs
2. Make use of 404 error page

I’ve chosen 2nd option, as it is more elegant and requires a few work – more automation.

So, I was thinking: how can I redirect users comming from old URLs to new ones? And here I thought – if link is old one, I get 404. Here I can get that old link and redirect to a new one. Of course that idea is not new, so I’ve googled a bit and found ready made solution:  Adding Search results to Wordpress 404 pages

This is more better than moving automatically, because not all 404’s would be from old links and if someone mistypes address – he/she will get search results.

In my experience to-do list one of points are “To know regular expressions better”. But until I can write regexp with my closed eyes, I use very useful resource on web:

RegExr

P.S. Sorry comments does not work. Something changed in new etomite cms. In a future I should migrate to wordpress I assume :)
Update: Wordpres is here ;)

Thats how it looks like:

Have a nice bottleneck finding!

If your website, blog or portal gets bigger with time, or has/will have huge traffic, you need to find its weakest spots.
This free online tool is very useful, when speach comes to speed. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/.

Pingdom tools – a free webtool, which checks your website’s loading speeds. It shows which javascript/image/css loads longest and so on.

There is small article on MySQL optimisation in linuxformat.co.uk wiki

What I did learn from this article:

• SELECT password FROM users WHERE Username = ‘myuser’ LIMIT 1;

  Always select just fields which you will need in current situation, SELECT * … is not good in most cases. If field by which you filter data, is unique, use LIMIT 1 statement.

• Create fields with as small data types as it is possible. Good example with age field. It is better to use TINYINT UNSIGNED than INT (who lives negative years and reaches 255 year old? )
• When database has lots of data, you can check is your schemata is optimised with query:
  SELECT * FROM table PROCEDURE ANALYSE();

  It will show you optimal field data type by analyzing records (look at Optimal_fieldtype column)

• Add Index to most searchable columns:
  ALTER TABLE tablename ADD INDEX name(column)

  MySQL Index is similar to book’s index.

UPDATE: seemes, that www.phppal.com is dead allready :/

You can download the class from my page: XMLParser.zip
To use this class simply copy it in /usr/lib/php directory or if you dont have root permissions, copy in the same folder as your php script.

I had some problems at first, because I was not familiar with data structure after parsing, so I used such code to view, how objects and arrays was formed:

That’s all. It is much simplier than i thought to work with XML :)
More info at php documentation: http://lt.php.net/manual/en/ref.xml.php

UPDATE: As PHP5 has much better XML support, you can use now it’s features Read on Zend article