Open id or open identity is another means to secure passwords by using centralized standards. It allows users to log into various sites that use Open-id by using a single digital identity or digital signature that is provided by the Open id providers. In layman terms, Open id is logging in and providing a password only once, and still being able to log into other sites without providing the password to all of them. It is only the Open id provider who keeps the password and provides an identity to the user and also, authenticates the identity whenever a website needs to authenticate the user. Thus, since the password stays with the Open id provider, it is more secure and effective.

Now, a word (actually, many words) about the technical aspect of Open id.

Elements or parties associated with Open id:

• End user
• Identifier
• Identity provider or Open Id provider
• Relying party
• Server or server agent
• User agent
• Consumer

For a complete cycle of accessing a site using Open id, an end user has to first register with an Identity Provider or Open id provider to obtain an identifier. The identifier can either be a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or an Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI). The identifier identifies each end user uniquely. When a user wants to access any page of a Relying party (a relying party is basically a service provider whose service is needed by the End user, but securely), he/she enters his Open Identifier (which can be URL or XRI). The relying party login page, does not ask for username and password, it only asks for the Open id. Now, the relying party visits the web page located at that URL to verify the Id entered by the user. After that, there are two modes by which the relying party can communicate with the Identity Provider.

• The relying party requests the provider not to interact with the user
• The relying party requests a mode where the user communicates directly with the provider to control the interaction.

The mode where the user interacts directly with the provider is used more commonly on the Web.

The provider first verifies whether the relying party is genuine or not using a ‘Shared Secret’. Then the provider asks the user for his Open id password, and then asks whether the user wishes to trust the Relying party. If the user declines, the Relying party is notified that authentication has been rejected. If the user agrees, the Relying party is assured of the authenticity, and the Relying Party then verifies whether the authentication came from a valid Provider. The connection is complete, and the user can now use services of the Relying Party.

There are a number of benefits of using Open Id. Apart from providing security, it also saves login time. Also, there is no need for remembering multiple usernames and passwords. Most importantly, one can have a greater control over their activities over the Net. There are also various versions of Open Id available which provide secure communication in different ways, but ultimately perform the same task.

As of December 2009, there are 1 billion Open Id’s on the Net and around 9 million sites support Open Id’s. Some of the Open Id providers are AOL, Orange, and VeriSign etc.

Look around you will find open id everywhere (Google, Yahoo, AOL), photo stream (Flickr) or blog (Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal)

SAFE BROWSING!

Stay digified !!!

Nitish jha

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A webmaster is always curious to know about the visitors on his website such as the number of visits, pageviews etc. Another important thing which needs to be taken care of is when do the Googlebot or crawler visits your website. Albeit, this information can be collected from Google’s webmaster tools but in some cases we need to know instantly when the google bot visits  your website.

So for that insert the following PHP code on your webpage. You can insert this code on the index page and it can be inserted anywhere on the page, may be in the header or footer. This code simply detects the term “Googlebot” in the useragent supplied and then shoots an email to the specified email address. You can also extend that code to store the information to the database and can analyze afterwards.

<?php
if ( strpos( $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Googlebot' ) !== false )
{
// paste your email address here
  $my_email = 'your_email_address@email.com';
// notify via email
  mail($my_email,'[Notification]Googlebot Visit', 'Googlebot has just visited your website WEBSITE_NAME: '.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>

Just a note, anyone can easily fake the useragent to pretend as Google bot and can send mass mail to your email address. So its a best practice to do some validation before you implement this script, you can try inserting the IP of the user in the database with corresponding timestamp.

This script is not limited to only Googlebot, you can replace the useragent “Googlebot” with Yahoo, MSN etc if you are interested in knowing when their crawler(s) visit.

Next time Googlebot visits your website, you will be pinged to welcome it.

Hope you learnt something new.

Stay Digified !!

Sachin Khosla.

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Wonder what are the best SEO techniques ? Wonder what should be the font-size of your blog, title etc. Well now you can take guidance from none other than Google.com. YES ! Google has shared its SEO report card last week, which shows that Google itself practices SEO techniques to get better ranking in its search engine. Sounds funny though !

But if you analyze the results , you will get to know lot of new stuff about SEO and its practices. You can download the report directly from here.

Hope this helps.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla.

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<?php
 
function utility()
{
  //your function definition goes here
  return true;
}
?>

Not many of you might face this problem since we use classes and functions are sandwiched inside them with some scope. But to avoid this kind of error you can define the same function in the following fashion,with a check before defining it.

<?php
if(!function_exists('utility'))
{
  function utility()
  {
    //your function definition goes here
    return true;
  }
}
?>

As you see we just check if the function already exists with the help of a PHP’s inbuilt function function_exists(). Hence by using the above methodology you can avoid this fatal error and your code won’t break.

Hope that helps.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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1) Go to control panel from start menu or simply type “control” in the run menu and hit enter. If you are having category view then click on programs and then click on “Turn windows feature on or off”, as shown in the screenshot below.

2) Next, you will see a list of programs available in windows that can be turned on or off. Expand the options and check the one which you require.

3) When windows finish the update process, open your browser and type http://locahost , it will show you the following splash screen of IIS, which is stored by default at C drive inside inetpub>wwwroot

Install and enjoy your development on IIS7.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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Today I am going to show you how you can make an element draggable or moveable on your webpage. This webpage element can be either image, div or even input box. We are going to use simple Javascript, CSS and HTML for this purpose. You can see a working demo on this page and can save the file from there or just copy paste the code from below.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Simple Drag</title>
 
    <script type="text/javascript">
 
      //object of the element to be moved
      _item = null;
 
      //stores x & y co-ordinates of the mouse pointer
      mouse_x = 0;
      mouse_y = 0;
 
      // stores top,left values (edge) of the element
      ele_x = 0;
      ele_y = 0;
 
      //bind the functions
      function move_init()
      {
        document.onmousemove = _move;
        document.onmouseup = _stop;
      }
 
      //destroy the object when we are done
      function _stop()
      {
        _item = null;
      }
 
      //main functions which is responsible for moving the element (div in our example)
      function _move(e)
      {
        mouse_x = document.all ? window.event.clientX : e.pageX;
        mouse_y = document.all ? window.event.clientY : e.pageY;
        if(_item != null)
        { 
          _item.style.left = (mouse_x - ele_x) + "px";
          _item.style.top = (mouse_y - ele_y) + "px";
        }
      }
 
      //will be called when use starts dragging an element
      function _move_item(ele)
      {
        //store the object of the element which needs to be moved
        _item = ele;
        ele_x = mouse_x - _item.offsetLeft;
        ele_y = mouse_y - _item.offsetTop;
 
      }
    </script>
    <style type="text/css">
      #ele{
        background-color: #797979;
        color: #fff;
        width: 300px;
        height:100px;
        cursor: move;
        position: relative;
        padding: 10px;
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body onload="move_init()">
 
    <div id="ele" style="left:50px;top:60px;z-index: 5;" onmousedown="_move_item(this);" >
      <h3>My draggable element</h3>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Albeit, the above code is self explanatory, due to the presence of inline comments, but still for the depth view, here is a small description of the above code.

As soon as the body loads (onload event) a Javascript function called move_init() which binds the functions _move and _stop on events onmousemove and onmouseup respectively. When the element is not clicked for dragging the _move keeps updating the position of the mouse pointer in the variables mouse_x and mouse_y. Now when the user clicks the element which he wants to drag the function _move_item() is called which updates the _item variable with current elements object, from which we can easily grab the offset positions of the element.

Now that we have the offset position of the element and mouse positions, we simply need to change the position of the element using the CSS property of the element. Make sure the styles are defined inline and the position of the element should be relative, otherwise the script will not work.

If you have any questions/comments, you can holla back by leaving a comment below.

Hope that helps.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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You are totally “Googlefied” when you use Gmail as your email client, Google reader as RSS reader web application and Google Buzz for updating your social network accounts. But there is a reward which Google has to offered for its loyal users and the reward is called “ease of usage”. An example of this easiness is performing search in these application right from one place and that is Google chrome browser.

Yes, this is right, you can search Gmail inbox, Google reader and Google buzz from chrome browser. Apparently, as long as you are signed into these application(s). Let me show you how you can add these search engines to your browser and search these applications for content without having to actually open them.

Search Gmail from Chrome :

1. Open Chrome.

2. Right-click the address bar and select Edit search engines.

3. Click the Add button.

4. Input  Name as Gmail, keyword as gmail and use the following for the URL box:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%s

To start searching, type “gmail” and press tab it will show “Search Gmail” (see the image below) in the address bar, now type the keyword to search.

Search Google Reader from Chrome :

Repeat the above 3 steps. (see the image below)

4. Input  Name as Google Reader, keyword as reader and use the following for the URL box:

https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#search/%s

To start searching, type “reader” and press tab key it will show “Search Google Reader” in the address bar, now type the keyword to search.

Search Buzz from Chrome :

Repeat the above 3 steps. (see the image below)

4. Input  Name as Google Buzz, keyword as buzz and use the following for the URL box:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#buzz/search/%s

To start searching, type “buzz” and press tab it will show “Search Google Buzz” in the address bar, now type the keyword to search.

Happy Searchingto you.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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Planning to update your application to a new level. Or thinking to add some new features to your current website. Well whatever you plan, do not forget to make it more intelligent. YES ! You can make your website more intelligent by making it enable to detect current location of the visitor visiting your website.

If your website is content related you can provide specific content related to visitor’s current location. That sounds little difficult at first but when you will see the real implementation you will come to know that how blessed day it is for you.

You can detect  visitor’s current location using a simple javascript function. This javascript function provides you the current latitudinal and longitudinal values of user’s location. These values are based on the hosting devices IP address. This technique may or may not be accurate but upto some level it is very helpful.

Geolocation on all browsers is becoming very common and popular. Today almost every browser is trying to implement geolocation. Even W3C has a standard for the geolocation now. The code to know the latitude and longitude is given below and a demo can be tested on this page.

<html>
<head>
<title> Know your current location </title>
<script type="text/javascript">
  navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(getLocation, unknownLocation);
 
  function getLocation(pos)
  {
    var latitde = pos.coords.latitude;
    var longitude = pos.coords.longitude;
    alert('Your current coordinates (latitide,longitude) are : ' + latitde + ', ' + longitude);
  }
  function unknownLocation()
  {
    alert('Could not find location');
  }
</head>
</script>
</html>

The above function getCurrentPosition requires names of two arguments, which are function references. You can either write the name of the callback function or can also write inline anonymous functions to process the location information. On successful detection of location, the function getLocation is called to which object containing the location information is passed. You can store the values in variable and can do a Ajax call, display it on a map or whatever you like to utilize it with.

The second function,unknownLocation , is called just in case the location is not detected by any means. It can be a denial by the user or may be that the script is unable to detect the location. When the location of the user is shared, it first confirms from the user if he/she wants to share the location information or no. This is done at the browser’s end, as mentioned in the W3C API standards.

Currently the above script only alerts the location or failure, but you can utilize whatever the way you want to.

Hope you like this post and you learn something from this.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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Well, one simple solution to this is installing Samba Client on your Ubuntu machine. For that, use the command line.

sudo apt-get install smbclient

Make sure you are connected to the internet and proxy configuration, if any, is done on the command line. If everything is well, it will install Samba Client on your system. After this, use the command line

shares-admin

This will open a neat graphical utility to share your files and folders. After unlocking this window by entering your system password, you can simply drag-and-drop your files to share them. You will also get the option to uncheck the Read Only check box to make your files and folders writable by other users on the network.

Happy sharing!

Tanay Mathpal

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Always wondered what could be the API which lets you interact with Google Talk ? Well I guess there isn’t one yet other than just creating bots. But what if you want to show the current Google Talk or GTalk status on your website or want it to use somewhere else like updating on twitter as well ?

Well in that case all you can do is just trick Google with its own tool. For this example we are going to use Google’s talkback badge. Please note that Google doesnt provide any authentic way or API to grab Gtalk’s status. This is a trick which grabs your latest status from the source of the Google badge( I know that sounds spooky ). We are going to use cURL, and other string function in PHP.

All you have to do is to repeat the following steps carefully !

Step 1 :

Grab the badge code by visiting the Google badge page. Make sure you check the “Show your status message” option, otherwise it will only show Available/Not Available.

Step 2 :

Now copy the embed code from the textarea and paste it in notepad. Analyze the embed code closely and copy the source of the iframe mentioned in the script tag. Look below to see example.

<iframe src=”GRAB_THIS_PART_OF_THE_CODE” allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="60" width="200"></iframe>

Or if you can paste this code into Microsoft Word, then you have to copy the portion which gets underlined or link from the above code.

Step 3 :

Paste the URL in the following script (line #3), which you just copied in the Step 2.

<?php
//replace with the URL wich you grabbed from the badge page
$URL='PASTE_HERE';
 
$tmp = explode("tk=",$URL);
$semi = explode("&amp;",$tmp[1]);
$uri = $semi[0];
 
$data = get_data($URL);
 
$end=substr($data,strpos($data,$uri));
$tmp = trim(strip_tags(substr($end,21)));
echo $status_message = substr($tmp,strpos($tmp,"\n"));
 
/* grabs the data from the URL */
 
function get_data($url)
{
  $ch = curl_init();
  $timeout = 5;
  curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
  curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
  curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data;
}
?>

This method is not always fool proof, but I have tested this script many times and with different status messages. There are many scripts available online which use the same badge code to get the status message. But most of them use fopen function of PHP which is not supported on most of the servers. However the above script uses cURL to get the data from the URL, so its more robust than other scripts.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla !

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It is as simple as 1-2-3 ,

Go to the url  www.ustream.tv .

Create or login with your ustream account (OPEN ID won’t work ).

Connect your camera to your system. On the upper bar of your ustream account click on “your shows” . Fill in the name of your show and click on broadcast now . Once done it will ask you for camera and microphone access rights click on allow. Now you will see a console, manage your camera settings like brightness, focus etc, once done you can click on start broadcast.

YOU ARE LIVE !!!

Your friends can visit the site and search for the event with the name that you created it and can actually be part of your event from their home

Well you need to keep few things in mind, first you need to have decent internet connection. What ever you webcast, its public. Everybody and anybody can watch it. Do not post content that may embarrass you later.

There are many exciting features like live poll, where the audience can actually participate in a live poll. You can even upload live video from your mobile phone . Apart from this you can also catch live videos on your iPhone .

Go on guys , webcast anything , shows , proposals to clients , your newly built house, from anything to everything . So next time you have a party at home or friend’s wedding on the other part of globe, watch it live streamed.

Hope that helps !!!

Stay Digified !!!
Nitish jha

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You have already learnt “How to update your twitter status ?” and also learnt how to interact with twitpic API to successfully upload images. Today I am going to show you how you can send direct message on twitter using the Twitter API and PHP. This piece of code will allow you to send not only single direct message (DM) at a time but also you can send direct message to multiple user all at once. Please note that using the web interface of twitter you can send DM to only one user at a time.

For those who do not want to mess with this API thing and think this API, PHP words are alienated for them, then there is a web application which allows you to do the similar task. TweetGuru is a web application which uses twitter’s secure OAUTH to send multiple direct messages. All you have to do is just authenticate this application and you are good to send multiple DMs.

There may be instances when you need to send multiple direct messages, for example  you might want to send some invite for a party to some particular friends on twitter, then you can write their twitter handles in the comma separated  form to send the same invite message, as show in the image below.

As you can see in the image, this application has a limit to send direct message to 12 users at a time. But if you use the following code with all the pieces on its right place, then you can send it to more than 12 users at a time.

To successfully send the multiple direct messages, download the twitter DM class file and include it in your PHP script. Please note that you have to save the file as PHP file to include it in your PHP script file. I have kept the name MultiDM.php for this example.  You can give any name to the file but the class name should remain the same as MultiDM, as long as you do not change the contents of the file.

<?php
require_once('MultiDM.php');
 
if(!empty ($_POST))
{
  $credit=array(0=>"username",1=>"password"); //credential array
  $api = new MultiDM($credit); //pass the credentials
  $users = explode("," , $_POST['friends']); // create an array from the csv
 
  foreach($users as $user)
  {
    $sent = $api->dm(trim($user),$_POST['msg']); // send the direct message to array of users
    if($sent === false)
      $failed [] = $user; // if not sent push into the failed array
    else
      $success [] = $user;
  }
  if(count($failed) > 0) // display a list of user to which message is not sent
 
  {
    echo "Unable to send direct messages to <strong>".implode(", ", $failed)."</strong>";
    $api->output();
  }
  if(count($success) > 0)
  {
    echo "Direct Messages successfuly sent to <strong>".implode(", ", $success)."</strong>";
    $api->output();
  }
  unset ($api,$success,$failed,$credit,$users,$user); // in the end unset all the vars
}
?>
<!-- HTML to display form which send multi DM -->
<style>
  label {font-weight: bold;display: block;}
</style>
 
<h3> Send Multi-DM to your friends </h3>
<form action="" method="post" >
  <p>
    <label for="friends">Friends</label><input type="text" value="" name="friends" id="friends" />
  </p>
  <p>
    <label for="msg">Direct Message to be sent:</label><textarea rows="5"  cols="25" name="msg" id="msg" ></textarea>
  </p>
  <input value="Send DM" type="submit" />
</form>

So in the above example, you have a HTML form similar to what you see at TweetGuru. Provide the comma separated names of twitter handles and the message, hit submit and the direct messages will be sent.

Hope that helps !!

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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Planning to buy a game console and trying which one should you buy when there are many options available.The most common questions while deciding your new gaming console can be:

• Which one is value for money ?
• Which has better graphics ?
• Above all which one is better ?

What I am trying to tell you is that, these are two different concepts altogether. What you need to decide is which one suits your gaming needs?

Price – To start with XBOX 360 starts around 350 USD where as Nintendo Wii console with 1 pair of remote and nunchucks is available for 199 USD. Again there can not be any comparisons made just on the basis of price.

Game Market & Development – When it comes to gaming experience, Xbox has large variety of games and targets audience from small kids to core gamers, whereas Wii games are mostly limited to couple games, family games but very few hardcore games. Though the number of game developers and downloads for Wii are increasing day by day . Motion Sensor – Taking about the motion sensors, Nintendo Wii is a clear winner here because of sheer brilliance of the technology being used. Xbox 360 sensors are far more feeble than Wii . Wii has definitely taken motion gaming to a new level all together .

Graphics – Do I need to even say that ? Presently nothing is anywhere even closer to Xbox’s crystal clear and such vivid graphics. Xbox brings your gaming experience leap ahead of others just because of its real time high definition graphics. When it comes to Wii, graphics performance is not that bad as people generally think, what they talk about is motion sensing games. There are variety of other options available in Wii. I have played fifa 10 and Resident Evil on Wii and the graphics are very sharp and much like that in Play Station 2.

Online & Multiplayer Gaming - When it comes to multimedia playback or online gaming, Xbox 360 supports multiple file formats including mp3, one can use it to listen to music, see images, do live video chat etc. Online gaming option in Xbox360 is diverse but comes with a subscription. When it comes to Wii you can still download music and movies but what’s missing is the online gaming part.

Original Image link

Red ring of death - Well I think this only fact can make Wii a clear winner for few of you. Your console will never crash. when it comes to Xbox 360 there are congregated problems of crashing . There is an accusation that games make you lazy . Try Wii and you need not to worry about the thought that playing games make you lethargic and effects your health. Wii also has Wii-fit which is complete aerobics cardio exercises that you will always need. Now when it comes to deciding the better of two I will again menton that it depends on your personal choice. if you are fancy about high definition graphics, online features go for Xbox 360 . But if you prefer real time gaming experience and want to try something that you have not played before Wii is for you.

ENJOY !!!

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Google buzz is now available for everyone and is almost enabled in every Gmail Inbox. But just like my brother there are many others who do not like to have their Gmail inbox buzzing. For some people Gmail should be just a web application for sending & receiving emails and hence they want to turn off or disable Google Buzz. Well its pretty simple to do so, all you have to do is just log into Gmail and point to its footer. In the footer you will see a link saying “turn off buzz” as show in the screenshot below, click on that link and you are ready to roll without buzz.

You enable or turn on Google buzz anytime when you like from the same place. Well too much buzzing for now.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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It allows you to publish updates automatically on updating the claimed website/blog. It also has an option to ask you what to publish. So to add these updates complete the following steps.

1) Add NetworkedBlogs App application if its already not there.

2) Once registered click on the feed settings present on the networkedblog’s homepage.

3) Under the fan pages section, click on the configure button in front of the Fan page which you want to configure. Now click on the Install to install the networkedblogs app on the fan page.

4) After installing you can publish the test post to check if it has been configured properly or no.

Now whenever you post on the configured blog/website it will get published automatically on your fan page and profile (as configured). Hope that solves your problem.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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