(alecs)

In a recent post on Google’s Webmaster Center Blog (by the way, if you own any site, that blog is a must for your feed reader) it seems that they are really into creating a relationship with site owners. What is now only a test will eventually evolve into constant alerts about potential vulnerabilities in websites. So we will have another reason to log in and use Webmaster Tools (the place that includes the Message Center) to check what Google “feels” it’s vulnerable.

Personally, I don’t feel that they can make a difference with this. Apart from nagging everybody to keep their scripts updated with the latest versions what can they do?

After some unsuccessful searching for a website thumbnail service I found SnapCasa. The free version lets you use 100000 thumb requests per month without watermarks. If you combine this with some server side script to cache and serve the image directly from your server you have nothing to worry about. Another thing I needed was the ability to get screenshots of inner pages (other services such as Girafa’s free version only allow captures of homepages). SnapCasa has that too.

The website looks and feels pretty new and sloppy. Although some account pages have “Untitled Document” as the title and other sections lack content, it does the job.

Oh, and support is quite responsive. Didn’t take any time to receive a reply.

Here are some comparisons (only found them after setting up snapcasa):

• http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2007-08/23-free_website_thumbnail_services
• http://designerside.com/article/8-website-thumbnail-generation-services-compared

A couple of days ago I placed a new forum-like message system I’ve been working on at dirpedia.ro. At the moment it’s pretty much a basic “guestbook with categories” but there are some nice features such as dynamic permalink generated for each thread/forum based on its title. I’ve tried to keep AJAX to a minimum and focus on the core features. And because I normally throw another custom js function for every form I use (bad practice).

Behind the scene I made use of more OOP than my other PHP scripts. It’s really nice when everything works together and the code is not cluttered. On the other hand I miss all those little code hints displayed by Netbeans (in Java). Many times all the errors were dealt with even before compiling the project. Unfortunately Aptana lacks such features.

Just hope I validated all the data sent and don’t endup with a nice SQL injection

Today, my new mobile phone arrived (with a 2 day delay) from emag. Maybe I’ll post a review in the following days about it, but now it seems like a good moment to look back at my old one and write a few words.

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This is going to be a guide for begginers, so don’t take it personal if I go into dumb details. I am assuming that you have a basic LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with a web administration interface such as cPanel.

All the following scenarios will require you to edit the .htaccess file in your root directory. Htaccess is an optional configuration file used by Apache to handle all incoming requests. You will also need support for mod_rewrite. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I went out for a quick shopping spree. As I passed a small Orange shop I decided to have a look at their offer since my current phone has far passed it’s “throw away” date. After a few moments, while trying to convince myself, I finally agreed to make the purchase.

Now comes the problem. I could not pay by credit card because they didn’t have a POS terminal! What kind of IT shop doesn’t have the means to accept card payments? It’s 2008!

Of course, their solution was simple: I was just supposed to walk to the nearest ATM and have the money withdrawn

I guessed I could live with my old mobile phone a a few more days and walked away.

I’ve just stumbled upon a really useful site for cleaning stuff. The “stuff” being everything from household items to laptops, cars or pets. As far as the design, it’s is very clean and uncluttered, with pictures on each article.

URL - http://www.howtocleanstuff.net

No doubt the biggest hype around the web these days is the launch of Google’s own web browser: Chrome. Introduced as a sleek and very fast web browser (in terms of rendering), it follows the simplistic lines of Google’s other products. There are only three toolbars: the tabs, address and bookmarks (yep, no title bar :)).

Everything seems to work smoothly. Tabs can be dragged out of the main window to create a new one and back. The download manager is nicely integrated in a small bottom toolbar. Almost every toolbar that appears or disappears has a smooth motion tween.

A big difference from other current browsers is that each tab runs as a different process. Should one tab crash, it will not take all the rest with it.

There is good news for web designers. Chrome doesn’t have its own rendering engine; instead it uses Webkit (also used by the Safari browser). So it is one less browser to worry about.

As for its usefulness, although it is a breath of fresh air, Chrome is still in Beta. Firefox still has a huge advantage given by the use of add-ons. I can’t imagine not having Firebug or the Web developer toolbar among other things at my fingertips.

Google Chrome screenshot

Links

• the official Google blog entry
• download Google Chrome

On a side note, I wonder how much traffic is sent to other “chrome” websites that have nothing to do with Google’s browser: www.chromebags.com (1st on Google for “chrome”), www.chrome.com, etc. I would very much like the next Google product to be named Ylipsis :).

Recently, I signed up for an ebanking account at ING. The first thing I’ve noticed was the digipass (scroll down for pictures) they gave me free of charge. It seems they don’t trust their clients enough to let them use one static password for account access. But that is… a good thing — although I’d rather not have to use this device each time I log in to my ebanking account. Probably many ebanking users can’t tell the difference between the authentic ebanking login site and a phishing page.

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It seems Microsoft had a hard time marketing Windows Vista upon launching. Otherwise they wouldn’t creating the following website: mojaveexperiment.com. Basically, a group of people that already had a bad opinion about Vista without trying it out for themselves were shown some of the features of the new Windows Mojave. After being amazed they were told that Mojave was in fact Vista. Most of them rated the Mojave version higher than Vista.

Of course, things would have been different if they were left a couple of days/weeks to really explore the “true power” of Vista with all those “fast” response times.

The problem with this type of surveys is that the people are selected in a manner that will ultimately will only prove the intended point of view.

Let’s have a look over another example: a video on  YouTube entitled Why people believe Americans are Stupid. What are the odds of a random person walking down the street not knowing how many sides does a triangle have? Of course, you won’t see all the positive responses in the final video, just the extreme ones.