melbourne chapter

If you need to nicely align and image in a line of text here’s how you do it

.inline-img {
 
/* Firefox */
vertical-align:middle;
display:-moz-inline-block;
display:-moz-inline-box;
/* Everybody else */
display:inline-block;
 
}

Presto!

When publishing a number of email addresses to a web page you run the chance of a spam bot scraping your site. There are a number of alternatives; such as using a mail form, obfuscating the mailto link with JavaScript or even converting the address to an image. While mail forms will conceal your email address from spam bots, they also conceal your address from the users who may simply want your address for other correspondence. Obfusticating your mailto link with JavaScript is also pretty useless since, being client site any spam bot can “resolve” the link much like your browser. And last but not least using images to display your address takes away the linking functionality. So I suggest a different alternative - Why not use Flash to display the address?

Using Flash, we can load the address client side in parts; “username” “domain” and form the address in a Flash textfield. Then we can simply use the getURL() function OR better use the textfield htmlText with an anchor to simulate our mailto link.
Here’s a hardcoded example of how I do it:
1. Create a 200px x 18 px document (FPS doesnt matter)

2. On Layer 1 add a textfield to the first frame, setting it to type dynamic, and give it an instance name of address_txt
3. Create a new layer above the previous layer for your Actionscript and add the following:

address_txt.htmlText = (username != undefined && domain != undefined) ? '<a href="mailto:'+username + '@' + domain + '">'+username + '@' + domain+'': "no email";</a>

4. Now using Publish your document (making sure you publish a html page in addition to your swf file)

5. Open your published html file in Dreamweaver or your favourite editor and append the querystring “username=joebloggs&domain=gmail.com” to the

<param movie="..." ></param> and <embed src="..."> </embed> tags:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="200" height="18" id="mailto" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="mailto.swf?username=joebloggs&domain=gmail" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed xsrc="mailto.swf?username=joebloggs&domain=gmail.com" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="200" height="18" name="mailto" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

6. Finally run your movie in the browser and you should see your email address in the Flash textfield!

Bit of an interesting post on Google prefering dashes and underscores: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Ugly URLs…
Querystring style URLs like below are synonymous with dynamic systems

http://www.mysite.com.au/catalog.php?category=cartridges&prod_id=33

While URLs like this are completely functional, there are a few issues with URLs like this you should consider before going live:

1. The underlying technology is exposed such that script kiddies can inject their own data - such as an sql injection.
2. The URL contains ampersands which, when unescaped will affect the XHTML compliance of linking websites
3. Search engines will avoid indexing dynamic pages like this
   

So without refactoring the application how can you make more freindly URLs? A simple solution for Apache based users is to utilize the mod rewrite module.

mod rewrite to the rescue!

Note: mod_rewrite is not loaded into Apache by default, to do so open your httpd.conf file and uncomment the module load code

Apache’s mod rewrite module can rewrite requested URLs on the fly, meaning you can substitute ugly querystrings with meaningful URLs, which address security issues, compliance and SEO. So how does mod rewrite work?

Basic rewriting

Typically mod rewrite directives are added to a htaccess file in your web root. Here’s a simple example to start with:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old_page.html$ new_page.html

This rewrite transparently redirects a request for old_page.html to new_page.html. The first line enables the engine (only required once per htaccess file):

RewriteEngine on

This next line basically tells the server if there is a request matching oldpage.html, then substitute it with new_page.html. The caret ^ and dollar $ sign signify the start and end of the string used for the match.

RewriteRule ^old_page.html$ new_page.html

If you want to actually do a more traditional redirect and show the location of the page in the status bar just add [R] to the end of the RewriteRule.

Easy enough? That was a pretty simple rewrite. The real flexibility of mod rewrite requires some knowledge of Regular Expressions, which can get quite complex. However, the functionality and flexibility Regular Expressions offer in PHP make them well worth learning. So lets take a look at some common rewrites and the expressions used to make them happen.

Unleashing mod rewrite with Regular Expressions

With the help of Regular Expressions we can create RewriteRules which match a set of URLs and redirect them to their actual pages. Consider the products pages in our fictional Shopping Cart app which only vary in category name and product id. We can identify requests for products page by specifically matching the PHP filename, something representing a category name, forward slash, then something representing a product id. And here’s how our rule looks:

RewriteRule ^catalog/([a-zA-Z0-9-])/([0-9]+)/$ /catalog.php?category=$1&prod_id=$2

The parts in square brackets are known as ‘ranges’. In this case where allowing anything in an alphanumeric range (case insensitive) for our category name, then anything in the numeric range for our product id. We’ve also encased these regular expressions in parenthesis so we can ‘back reference’ our matches to pass the values onto our PHP page. Back referencing is done via indexing each set of parenthesises, $1 for our first parenthesises, being our category name, and $2 for our second parenthesises, being our product id.

Well this is the end of my tutorial on how to use mod rewrite to create freindly URLs. If you have any questions please feel free to post a comment. Cheers!

Welcome to the final installment of our 3 part series “Setting up a PHP Development Environment”. For those of you who haven’t installed Apache or PHP please checkout Part 1: Installing Apache and Part 2: Installing PHP4 tutorials on our site.
Setting up our Database Server…

For PHP we typically use the MySQL Database. MySQL is a open-source database built primarly for the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python.) but it’s very flexible, running on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX and Netware (source: http://www.mysql.com). In the case of this tutorial we will be setting it to run on Windows XP.

Requirements:

• PHP 4 or later

(more…)

Often when we create complex pages with lots of content it’s advantageous to use popups for smalls bits of information such a “Help” text. However since the introduction of popup blockers this once simple task has proven to be a tedious job. For example, by default the IE 6 Popup Blocker will block active scripting opening windows without user clicks i.e. using onload() in the body tag for instance. Higher security settings in IE will even prevent scripted popups running off user clicks. So what’s the answer? I came up with a few ideas, my initial thought was to try and detect if my window would be blocked. To do this I would check whether window.open returned a reference to an object:

function popUpWin(url, width, height) {
 
if (window.open) {
window.open(...);
} else {
alert('It appears your browser is blocking popup windows');
}
}


<a href="javascript:popUpWin(disclaimer.htm, 450, 500)">Read Disclaimer</a>
Although sites use this today it’s not a viable solution because it primarily validates the browser and ultimate won’t provide the user with a working link. Instead the user is expected to go off and adjust their browser settings and re-launch the window. Worse still they might potentially miss important information you were trying to provide in that popup (i.e. a disclaimer).
My next more user-orientated solution is what I use today. Employing the JavaScript onclick() function we can call our popUpWin() funcion, and at the same time we can still use our href attribute to supply a normal link if the javascript fails:

function popUpWin(url, width, height) {
 
if (window.open) {
window.open(...);
}
}

<a href="disclaimer.htm" onclick="popUpWin(this.href, 450, 500);return false;" >Read Disclaimer</a>

Part 2 assumes you have a working installation of Apache 2.0 please refer to Part 1: Installing Apache if you haven’t already done so.

Requirements

• Apache 2.0.x

1. Download the PHP 4.3.x Windows Binary zip package from http://www.php.net/downloads.php .
2. Run a virus scan and an MD5 checksum to verify the integrity of the download, then unzip to the same root directory as your Apache installation. I have Apache under C:\Apache2, so I have unzipped PHP to C:\php4 .

3. Now edit your php.ini file:

Rename C:\php4\php.ini-dist it to php.ini

Open the php.ini file, locate doc_root and set it to whatever your Apache DocumentRoot is set to. Mine is doc_root = “C:\public_html”

Note: Remember that when adding path values in the Apache configuration files on Windows, all backslashes such as c:\directory\file.ext must be converted to forward slashes, as c:/directory/file.ext. A trailing slash may also be necessary for directories.

Scroll down to extension_dir = “” and set it to the location of the ext directory of your PHP installation extension_dir = “C:\php4\extensions”

Since where using windows we also have to set the session save path to an existing directory so we can use PHP’s sessions functions. I recommend using the Window’s temporary directory session.save_path = “c:/windows/temp” OR for Win2k session.save_path = “c:/WINNT/Temp”

4. Next edit your Apache Conf file (hppd.conf )

For PHP 4 add the following line and copy your php4apache2.dll file from the sapi directory into the php4 root directory:

LoadModule php4_module "c:/php/php4apache2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

For PHP 5 do something like this:

LoadModule php5_module "c:/php/php5apache2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

And for both configure the path to the php.ini file:

PHPIniDir "C:/php"

5. Now test your installation - first restarting the Apache server - by creating a simple phpinfo file: