Allthingsdev.com

A Simple Way to Protect Your Uploads Folder

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:28:17 +0000

I found a simple way to protect folders that need to be writable. Its a simple htaccess file placed in the writable folder that disallows a script such as PHP, Pearl or the like from being executed.

Here’s the contents of the htaccess file:

AddType text/plain .pl .cgi .php .html .asp

It’s that simple. This line causes Apache to treat any files with extensions found in that list as if they were text files an thus making them not executable.

If you have custom extensions set up in your Apache configuration file, just add those extensions to the list and you should be good.

Obviously, if you have a script that is located in that folder, you would need to move it somewhere else and update it to accommodate for its new location. It is never a good idea to place your scripts inside a writable folder anyway.

5 Ways to Grow Your Email Subscriber List

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:23:53 +0000

A properly managed Email newsletter can be an extremely powerful tool. With some companies reporting a return on investment of over $40 for every dollar spent on Email marketing, you can see why this is an increasingly popular means of direct marketing. The only catch is, you’ve got have subscribers to send an Email to first! Here’s a few quick tips to help increase the number of email subscibers.

Make It Visible

If visitors don’t notice the sign up form, you might as well forget it. Place it near your content such as at the end of a blog post or product description. Visitors that took the time to read the entire post are more likely to be interested in signing up then the visitor who is on your home page and noticed the form just hanging out in your sidebar.

Tell Them What They’ll Get

Honesty is the best policy here. If your going to be sending an Email with every new post, tell them. Maybe you’ll be recapping all your content for the day / week / month. Whatever it is your sending, make sure your visitor understands what will be in their inbox. Don’t be afraid to put a little spin on it to make it enticing!

Reassure Them This Isn’t a Scam

It is always a good idea to reassure your visitors that their personal info is safe. Tell them up front that you won’t be sharing their info with 3rd parties. If that is your intent, tell them or consider creating a second newsletter specifically for this purpose.

Consider a Free Gift for Signing Up

It is no secret that people love free stuff. A relevant gift to what your website provides or some form of discount on your product or service is a great way to increase your newsletter subscriber count. Just don’t be surprised if they only sign up long enough to receive the gift.

Spread the Word

I think this step is often overlooked. Don’t be afraid to send an email to friends and colleagues notifying them of your newsletter and ask them to forward the message along to others they think might be interested in signing up. Whatever you do, don’t assume your friends want your newsletter and add them to the list without their permission!

Web Based Schema Designer

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:43:35 +0000

I ran across this great web based database schema designer a while back and thought I’d finally share it. WWW SQL Designer allows you to design database schemas which can be saved and then exported as SQL.

I know there are tons of applications out there that do the same thing. What I like so much about WWW SQL Designer is its simplistic interface and that its web-based. Web-based software is nice.

The software supports many common database features such as keys, foreign key constraints, comments and indexes. It is offered under a BSD license and takes some digging to get it installed, but you can’t beat the price! Check out a live demo of WWW SQL Designer.

Make changes to your putty configuration stick

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:42:41 +0000

Being a LAMP developer, I spend a good portion of my day SSH’d into servers via Putty. For those unfamiliar with it, Putty is a free telnet/ssh client for Windows and Unix operating systems. The problem with Putty, or maybe me, is the text is really hard to read. By default Putty displays white text on a black background in 10pt Courier font. It is very hard on the eyes, especially when you spend any significant amount of time using it.

It had become a routine that anytime I opened Putty and connected to a server, I would set the font size to 14pt and bold but the settings never stuck. A while ago I had searched around looking for a remedy to this problem, but I always came up with nothing. Finally today I was so tired of altering that setting that I went searching for an answer and happend to stumble onto Dag’s article over at Field Commander Wieers about Improving Putty settings on Windows.

Dag explains that before you setup any sessions in Putty that you should make your changes to the default session settings first. The changes will be replicated to all other sessions you create and save you seconds, if not minutes of your life changing settings for each session.

Once you’ve made all your session changes click save and you’re off and running.

Improving Putty settings on Windows via Field Command Wieers

Why Redesigns are Necessary

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:19:16 +0000

I’m currently in the early stages of redesigning a local newspaper’s website. I’ve been compiling statistical information such as the most trafficked pages and what time of day is the busiest and also where users are clicking on each page. Crazyegg.com allows me to log click activity and compile that information into something useful.
What I’ve noticed is that while the home page has links to almost all of the current edition’s articles, very few people users are venturing past the page fold. Also, over 60% of the clicks occurring on the home page are on four links.

In my eyes, this is the perfect example of why this website needs to be redesigned. This website has had this layout since 2005. The users have grown accustomed to its layout and have learned the fast way to get to the exact content they want. This is fine, as designers we want our users to be able to get to their destination with as little hassle as possible, but in this situation, I can’t help but think that so much content is being ignored because users see no need in scrolling down or even visiting the left side of the page.

Here’s a few quick points when redesigning your own website(s):

Spread out the most popular links
Spreading out the most popular links will draw attention to other sections of a page and hopefully get your users more involved with other offerings you already provide.
Move the search box closer to an area you really want to emphasize.
The search box is easily the most sought after element on a page. Placing it close to specific section of your page is a simple and effective way to attract attention.
Move content up.
The closer your content is to the top of the page, the more important it appears to your users. If there is something you want to draw attention to, move it above the page fold.

I’d love to hear how you prepare for a redesign. Here’s a screen capture of the entire crazyegg heatmap test.

Domain Parking Update

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:42:32 +0000

A while ago, I wrote a quick blurb about my decision to park some of my domains I’ve been sitting on. I figured I’d do a quick recap and look at the money made over the past six weeks.

I’ve parked six domains:

In the month of October, all 6 domains combined for 479 views and resulted in 12 total ad clicks for a whopping (drum roll please) $1.42 in revenue. Yep, drinks are on me. November’s stats are even smaller, and therefore not worth mentioning.

I’m averaging a 2% click through rate, which is above average from my experience. Granted the entire page is an advertisement.

All in all, domain parking may be a shady business, but for those of us who have legitimate intentions to one day use these domains, it is a viable means to lower the cost of domain registration prices.

Read my previous post about domain parking.

CakePhp is Definitely….Cake

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:43:49 +0000

I’ve been playing around with this PHP framework called CakePhp. CakePhp is designed for super fast php development, and I must say, fast is an undestatement.

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I only recognize about 12 words in that blockquote. 5 of them have 4 letters or less. Nevertheless, I ran through a few tutorials tonight (out of boredom) and was amazed at how fast “rapid” really is. Check out the blog and the online bookmarks manager I created, both in less then 30 minutes.

I’m currently parting out ideas for my next web project and I definitely will be using CakePhp to speed up the development time.

php, development, cakephp, web development, framework,

Great Mobile Testing Website

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:53:01 +0000

So I’m reading through Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design, which I love by the way, and came across a few mentions of Ready.mobi. So I thought I would check it out.

Ready.mobi allows you to test your mobile website against common problems and short comings that mobile web users have. Such as page size, display abnormalities and loading time and then gives your page a score from 0 – 5 (5 being the best). Also, while the software is crawling your mobile site, they display some very helpful mobile web design tips. What nice gentlemen.The scan runs several tests to make sure your mobile website is as optimized as possible for all mobile web users. Here’s a list of some of the tests it runs:

MIME types
Character encoding
Pop up windows
Alt texts
Image maps
Specify image sizes
Page title
Use of stylesheets
Stylesheets dependency
Redirection
Default input mode
Page size limit
Large graphics
Caching
External resources
Avoid free text
Structure
Form submit buttons

A visualization module is also provided. So you can see your site loaded in a handful of popular mobile phones.

Ready.mobi is a quick, simple and cheap way to test your mobile website against many different variables we face as web designers.

Tags: mobi, mobile, mobile web design, web design, web standards

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:02:43 +0000

You’ve probably seen many reviews on Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design around recently. I thought I’d add my own.

I purchased Cameron’s book on Wednesday and have been thumbing through it off and on. I find it extremely enlightening. Not only is the book well written, he provides links to some very informative pages about mobile standards and good mobile design practices. I’ve added quite a few new feeds to my reader after reading this book.

The book is 104 pages long, comes in pdf format and will set you back 19 dollars. This book is well worth the small fee. Cameron has posted a sample of the book(pdf). I suggest taking a gander, you won’t be disappointed.

FYI: If you purchase a copy of the book by September 14th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an iPhone.

Domain Parking

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:48:39 +0000

I own a ton of domains. I’m not sure how many, but I know it is a lot. I purchased the majority of them for projects that I never got around to doing. So many of my domains sit idly in my godaddy account collecing dust. Or collecting money for godaddy because their parking page is still on them. If you are unclear as to what domain parking is, there is a great Wikipedia article that will explain everything.

I was bored today and thought I’d look into this whole parking thing and see if I couldn’t at least recoup the yearly registration costs of these domains.

After a quick search, I settled on sedo.com. Don’t ask me why, they just looked trustworthy, and godaddy charged a monthly fee. Sedo offers the service for free, but takes 20% of your earnings. No big deal, I highly doubt I’ll make anything off this anyway. 20% of nothing is, well … nothing.

I’ll keep you posted, both of you. When the millions start rolling in, we’ll go to Vegas! My treat.

Here are the domains:

Tags: domains, sedo, godaddy, domain parking, squatting