TJSoft developments

Form submission with alert/confirm

2012-01-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

This has been a perennial issue for me. I'd have a form with multiple submit buttons; and on one or more - but not all - of the submit buttons I would want a confirm dialogue. 'Save' or 'Amend' might go straight through but 'Delete' would be intercepted for a confirmation. I used to put a section in the form response page setting up another form with a confirm button. But I think I have found a more elegant solution, below (though it does rely on JavaScript being enabled).

In the form add a hidden field and submit button as follows:

<input type="hidden" name="confirm_delete" id="confirm_delete" value="0" />

<input type="submit" name="delete" value="Delete" onClick="confirmDelete(this.form);" />

Add a JavaScript function like this:

function confirmDelete(form) {
var answer = confirm("Are you sure you want to deleted this?");
if (answer == true) {
form.confirm_delete.value = 1;
form.submit();
}
}

Then you can handle the confirmed deleition by testing the hidden field

if($_POST['confirm_delete'] == 1){
// do whatever needs doing
}

SEO advice

2011-12-19T06:19:00.000-08:00

Gave some today that is worth capturing:

Use title and description meta-tags, ideally varied page by page. Google has an issue with multiple use of the same text for some reason.

Google ignores the 'keywords' meta tag but other search engines pay it some attention so it is worth keeping.

A good 'description' meta-tag is essential.

Also title could be a bit longer (up to 65 characters including spaces)

Get as many people as you can to link to you from blogs, other websites, articles and so on.

Let's see if that elevates c-a-mayer-memorial.org.uk

Yesterday's outage

2011-12-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by last night's short outage. GoDaddy said they had a communications issue with a number of servers so I am relieved that it was not a user error or a DOS attack. In all it lasted less than ah hour I think.

Lysandra Press now live

2011-11-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

Today we launch the site of a new ebook publisher, lysandrapress.com. Please go have a look and buy some books...

Ajax

2011-11-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

How brilliant is this. I cannot believe I have not found this solution before. I have so many pages that depend on a user input to connect the client and server sides of a site, not Ajax can do all of that for them, so fewer clicks. Now to remember where they were and go upgrade them...

cPanel

2011-09-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

With some trepidation I am moving my server and control panel. So Bye-bye Arizona and Plesk and Hello Europe (still not sure where GoDaddy's base is!) and cPanel. No doubt there will be teething troubles, but Plesk has never been that friendly to me and the newer fancier server will assist now that I am hosting more sites and more particularly for paying customers/partners.

New client

2011-08-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

Today saw the first steps towards building a new site for Portsmere, with the purchase of the domain name portsmere.com. Now to make a great site for them.

Morethanpictures.co.uk

2011-03-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Is now live. I am rather pleased with it; but, more important, so is the client. I had fun working with images in a bit more depth and applying dynamic drive's Ultimate Fade-in Slideshow and Lightbox 2. See it here

Secure MySQL connection on Godaddy virtual dedicated server

2010-07-28T08:41:00.001-07:00

The Godaddy instructions on this are pretty hard to find and the default settings for open_basedir and directory permissions make it hard to do; so here is what I have done that works. You will need to be using SSH and your control panel (I use Plesk, but I doubt this is much different with cPanel and others).

The key security point is that your access codes to your MySQL database really should not be in your httpdocs directory. That is accessible to the world and although it is hard to grab the information from a .php file, it is not impossible. If the file sits above the httpdocs folder, it cannot be seen from the web.

So using SSH create a folder (one per domain, but if you use only one database for a number of sites it could be one for all) called mysql with

mkdir mysql

then still in SSH change the ownership to the normal owner of the domain with

chown [user] mysql

Now open up the conf directory to the same user with

chown [user] conf

Go to your control panel and create these two files

1. a file in conf called vhost.conf (content below) and

2. a file in mysql called mysql.php (content below)

Finally, either in SSH Restart the server with

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a -v

or you can do it from control panel.

content of vhost.conf (where x is the domain)

php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/x/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/x/mysql:"

</directory>

content of mysql.php

<?php

THIS IS THE MASTER DATABASE CONNECTION FILE

IT SHOULD BE STORED ABOVE THE ROOT DIRECTORY IN MYSQL

AND SHOULD BE USED FOR ALL MYSQL CONNECTIONS

mysql_connect("localhost", "[username]", "[password]") or die (mysql_error());

mysql_select_db("[database_name]") or die(mysql_error());

To connect to the database add this in the relevant php scripts

include '/var/www/vhosts/[domain]/mysql/mysql.php';

Hope that helps someone save the time it took me to work it out...

Tjsoft.info revamp

2010-03-27T00:45:00.001-07:00

Started a major rewrite of this site using a lot more CSS and fewer tables. Still a lot to do but the base is now there.

Server upgrades

2010-03-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

Latest server configuration:

httpd 2.2.8-1.fc7
mailman 2.1.9-5.3
mod_perl 2.0.3-9.1.fc7
mod_python 3.3.1-3
mysql 5.0.45-6.fc7
perl-Apache-ASP 2.59-0.93298
php 5.2.6-2.fc7
plesk 9.3.0
postgresql-server 8.2.9-1.fc7
ruby 1.8.6.114-1.fc7
samba 3.0.28a-1.fc7
spamassassin 3.2.4-1.fc7
SSHTerm 0.2.2-9.278624
tomcat 5.5.26-1jpp.2.fc7
webalizer 2.01_10-32

IE non-compliance

2010-03-21T00:54:00.000-07:00

Right, that's it. I am no longer going to support IE as a suitable browser for my sites. Microsoft's continuing lack of acceptance of internationally agreed standards makes the developer's life a misery and, while it may be cool to know all the little work-arounds needed to make your site work, just, with IE, why should we? There are much better browsers that do accept the agreed standards that work, are free, are faster, more secure - need I go on.

So I have developed a little code to spot IE users and give them a warning. They can accept the limitations of IE or switch browser. I rather like it and think all web developers should follow suit...

Upgrade to PHP5

2009-10-04T23:20:00.000-07:00

I decided to upgrade to the latest version of MyGedView, which has some nice features over the previous version, and to do this I needed PHP5. This in turn meant a server rebuild to Fedora Core 7, so basically I had to start from scratch. The server is now re-built and running sweetly, but I am still part way through restoring all the previous material/sites. It is a good way of giving the server a good spring clean!

crontab tips on GoDaddy

2008-02-12T22:42:00.000-08:00

This was nowhere in the GoDaddy documentation so, I though I would share a working solution.

The objective was to create a single php script which a set of scheduled crontab tasks could execute from my GoDaddy virtual dedicated server. I wanted something that ran hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.

The steps I used were:

1. Create your script in the normal way. The key element is the $_SERVER['argv']['1'] variable, which is passed from the crontab line. You could pass more than one. The second would be $_SERVER['argv']['2']. You might add this for a checksum to prevent the script running if the search engines find it. I then used the first variable in a switch group to establish the start and end date for a MySQL query that runs later. So:

switch ($_SERVER['argv']['1']) {

case "hourly": // RUNS AT *:00
$d2 = date("Y-m-d H",time()).":00:00";
$d1 = date("Y-m-d H",strtotime($d2) - 3600).":00:00";
$num = 1;
break;

case "daily": // RUNS AT 00:20
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 24 * 3600);
$num = 2;
break;

case "weekly": // RUNS AT 00:40
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 7 * 24 * 3600);
$num = 3;
break;

case "monthly": // RUNS AT 01:00
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 24 * 3600 * 365.25 / 12);
$num = 4;
break;

}

$query2 = "SELECT *
FROM `".$type[$j]."`
WHERE DATE(`".$col[$j]."`) > '".$d1."'
AND DATE(`".$col[$j]."`) <= '".$d2."'";

2. Chmod this file to 'rwx r-x r-x' to allow it to be executed by the server.

3. Add a scheduled task like this:

10 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php hourly
20 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php daily
30 0 * * 1 /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php weekly
40 1 1 * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php monthly

I have the file in a directory called cron, but you can put it where you like.

Any HTML output your script creates will then be sent to the email address set in the preferences tab where you set up scheduled tasks. This is for error reporting so make your script produce no HTML if it is working fine.

Server migration complete for garfagnana-food and soane.net

2007-11-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

I have closed the old server. Some, non-active, sites still need to be loaded on the new server, but I took the decision to complete the move as an incentive to get everything in order. All the domain routing now works, but some of the sites have to be loaded. I am gradually working my way through them.

Server migration

2007-10-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

I have taken the plunge and started the migration to a new GoDaddy server (http://72.167.97.186/). New details:
CPU GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU 5148 @ 2.33GHz
Operating system Linux 2.6.9-023stab044.4-smp
Plesk version 8.2.1_build82070918.10 os_FedoraCore 6

I was forever running out of memory on the old one and this will give me more speed and a supported Fedora operating system (Core 6). Also added Plesk 8.2.1, which will give me a bit more functionality over domain hosting, etc.

Transferred my parked domains yesterday.

Will move the active sites over the w/e probably, before closing the old one. Meanwhile all should be as was on the old server.

Now I just need to get to grips with Plesk...

Gallery2 added to soane.net

2007-08-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

Great piece of free kit this, which enables you to publish your own photos. LINK

OverLIB incorporated into garfagnana-food

2007-05-25T06:36:00.000-07:00

Another great freeware product, thanks to Erik Bosrup. LINK

Google maps integrated into garfagnana-food

2007-03-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

What a brilliant application this is. Just could not resist integrating it into the site. It slows the whole thing down a lot though so I have put it a bit more in the background now. LINK

Soane.net redesigned

2007-03-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

A full make-over to simplify and smarten up what had become a bit of a mess. Hope you like it... LINK

Switched host to GoDaddy virtual dedicated server

2007-03-12T03:29:00.000-07:00

Finding shared hosting a bit too constrained and in particular preventing me from providing a service that a client particularly wanted, I took the plunge and bought GoDaddy's virtual dedicated server. So now I have 10GB of a linux box in Scottsdate Arizona, running Red Hat Fedora Core 4, Apache 2.0.13, PHP 5.0.4, MySQL 4.1.20. LINK

Started development of garfagnana-food.com

2006-10-22T02:51:00.000-07:00

This is a good food guide for the Garfagnana region of Tuscany. I could never remember what was available, when it was open and I found myself not trying different places as a result. So the idea was selfish, but I thought it might have wider benefits. Still developing, though the basics work. LINK

Shared hosting by GoDaddy

2006-10-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

CWH unable to offer the flexibility I was looking for on sub-domains, I bought some shared linux capacity with GoDaddy. So far so good.

Club-host basic launched

2006-01-28T04:58:00.000-08:00

Prompted by an enquiry from a club, I developed a "out of the box" or "plain vanilla" starter site for clubs looking for a really cheap entry into the www with no programming or HTML skills needed. The terms can be found on club-host.com. LINK

Designed and implemented sew-linda.xnet.cc

2006-01-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

This was a commission for my sister-in-law who makes brilliant curtains and furnishings and wanted to start a business. LINK

Designed and implemented juniorpenguins.club-host.com

2005-11-13T02:41:00.000-08:00

This was a clone of the main penguins site but for the junior section. Having built it, there was not much interest and it really never took off. LINK

Purchased xnet.cc

2005-08-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

I was having trouble with an extranet application and decided to have a go at fixing it myself using this domain. LINK

Designed and implemented mailer.club-host.com

2004-10-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

This was a specific application to allow clubs and societies to communicate more easily by email, giving the user the choice over what to receive when and taking the maintenance chore out of mail lists (a problem I had constantly at Wandsworth Swimming Club). LINK

Designed and built club-host.com

2004-04-08T02:47:00.000-07:00

The idea here was to help clubs and societies to join the 'information age' with the expertise I had developed with Wandsworth Swimming Club's web site. LINK

Hosting by Christian Web Host

2003-08-12T03:56:00.000-07:00

Bought a linux shared server package with CWH. Absolutely delighted with the support and service. LINK

Bought workster.org and workster.info

2003-08-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

Confidential project still under consideration.

Re-design of wandsworthsc.com

2003-05-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Complete makeover of the site, moving away from frames (on the advice of a fellow developer), loads more material added, easier to follow hierarchy, etc

WSC site refreshed

2002-01-01T04:43:00.000-08:00

Wandsworth Swimming Club's site, which I run, has had a make-over. Using Frontpage 2002, I have added new menus and easier navigation, plus a new look and feel.

Purchased thesoanes.com

2000-10-28T02:00:00.000-07:00

There was a time when it was fashionable to have a .com domain name and there were rumours of them running out. I bought this domain so as to jump on that bandwagon. I let it lapse because it was serving no purpose at one point, only to discover an important email had gone to it and I had missed it. So I bought it again so no others went astray. LINK

Desiged and implemented wandsworthsc.com

2000-06-17T02:27:00.000-07:00

This was my son's swimming club at the time and I was membership secretary. The web site (and some other promotion) grew the membership of the club from 100 to 300 (capacity) in a little more than a year. Originally on a free virgin.net host, it was soon moved to its own domain and a shared host provided by easyspace. LINK

NB In 2003 I handed it over to the current management of the club. I therefore take no responsibility for the current design, even though the underlying design was mine.

Purchased soane.net

2000-03-16T02:20:00.000-08:00

I wanted to have a short, meaningful, transferable email address for myself and others in my family. Since soane.com was not available, I went for this. LINK