Hercco

I think the way you did that fading colour, or gradient, sounded rather complicated compared to doing it with a single tool in Photoshop. I believe in KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) but I also believe in using the best tool available. More often than not people end up doing things in more difficult manner when they opt to use very low learning level basic tools. An example from my real life: I used to do programming with just a basic text editor and command line compiler. I knew about IDEs and tried them but didn't really bother learning to use them and I felt that text editor & command line compiling was easier for me. Then when I started doing Java programming on my Win2k workstation I realized that I really need to use an IDE here. Messing with the files and running javac from command prompt was a complete chaos. I installed NetBeans and couldn't have been happier. Now, where ever possible I go for IDE. The only exception is C code which I will always and forever write with vim and compiler from command line.

Generally speaking all "ready to use" cables are ridiculously expensive. This goes from computer and networking cables to audio cables. These are things that the average customer buys really rarely, usually only when they buy new equipment. At that point people don't really care about paying 20€ for a cable when they have purchased a 200€ device. All they care is that they get to use the new gadget and make sure it works. Have you guys ever bought a cheap DVD player? And did it come with a cable? I'm guessing not. I bought a DVD player for my sister, it wasn't one of those who use computer dvd stations that aren't nowhere near balanced but of the bit higher price. Anyways the cable I needed for it ended up costing 15% of the players price...

I was looking for an insightful post in whih you would have compared the two databases, their usage, technical specifications and performance. Instead I find the promising thread title again, this time with a type and attempt in question form by adding the question mark to the end. Mods!

The superglobal for sessions is $_SESSION not $_session or let alone $session. Latter two are just normal arrays created when you assign values to them. So change the lines $session['name'] = $user;$_session['status'] = "0"; To $_SESSION['name'] = $user;$_SESSION['status'] = "0"; And your script should work. Also you do not need to use session_register() function. Simply assigning values to the superglobal array ($_SESSION) suffices. Session_register() works but it's usage is not recommended anymore.

Easiest way to do this is by "stealing" the code from other software. Go to a website running a phpBB forums (it's open source) go to a posting page and click View|Page Source. For the "code inserter" you only need javascript and if you have at least some skills with it it should be no brainer to code it by your self. With javascript you can simply pull the contents of a textarea from a single variable (something like window.document.formname.textareaneme.value) and then do the what ever manipulations you need and again store the updated string to the same variable.

I guess you are looking to get asta-hosted... Once you get your asta account you can easily set up own system like that, without need for any programming skills. In Fantastico you can install this phpforgenerator which among other things can do email the form contents. Then there are couple of perl scripts, including formmail clone, that can be installed easily through the control panel. And again, you don't need any programming skills.

Quite neat... Now only if it could override the database functions in PHP so that you could use existing scripts with this.Anyways this is a nice thing to have if you're going to do a script that supports both text files and databases. Helps a lot if you can use the same queries, just changing the functions. Otherwise... If I'm doing a system that uses text files as database I'd rather bother writing the parsers for XML. Depends on the application of course, but having files as XML has several benefits and the possibility to view them without extra software isn't the least of them.

I don't thats insane. That's actually quite sane thing to do. session_destroy() does not unset the variables, it just destoys the data. There is a difference. Registered globals makes a lot of headache. Perioid. I strongly recommend everyone be it admin or web developer to go for registered globals off. I condired scripts that require registered globals on such a garbage that they deserve not to work.

You can turn the session ID transmission from URI off using a .htaccess file and php flags. I've done this as I feel it's lot handier than adding the lines to every page header. Just in .htaccess file put the following lines: php_flag session.use_trans_sid offphp_flag register_globals off Although the code you specified should in my opinion work. Well, try the htaccess method and if it doesn't work let's figure out something else.

Don't say that to security specialists. They might get violent... There is no such thing a perfect security and not even "almost perfect". And I wouldn't regard Gmail as secure in anyways since Google's way of operating is quite questionable. It is quite obvious that they use Gmail for profiling. Some people might not consider that as a security issue, some people do. I think this kind of solutions will be popping up more in future. Spam is a serious issue and keeps constantly growing. It is a problem to these big email providers, delivering, filtering and storing spam takes a huge chunk of resources which means more expenses. They'd like to find some solutions to it and why not do a little money with it? The basic idea is quite good. You don't get much pointless mail in snailmail and the reason is that sending snailmail costs and is lot time consuming to do. You can't really make email sending more time consuming so that leaves making it cost something. Well we all know that this kind of system just wouldn't work. Not all people are willing to pay for their email it's no surprise. Why start paying for something that's been free for years? Its now our fault that there is spam. The solution has to come from somewhere else.

I had just quick glance through your code so I hope I didn't miss anything. I understood your question is how you can limit the printing of content of the variable $p[4] (or an array element....) to certain length? The answer is bloody easy use function substr substr($p[4], 0, n); Where n is the number of characters you want to print. And it seems your newsfile contains a news item per line. Right? Just make another script for showing a complete news item and pass the correct line number as parameter to it. Then in this new script read this line and show the news. You might wish to do a length checking in the original news file if a link to this full news item should be displayed. So if the news content is shorter than n the link ("more" for example) wouldn't be displayed. I hope this was what you were after. And have fun coding.

You can disable right clicking with Javascript. There are thousands of scripts avaiblable online so there no need to repeat it here. Just search "disable right click" and "javascript" with your favourte search engine. Basically how it works is that it catches all right clicks on the page are and displays a message for example. The idea is just to override the browsers default behaviour (opening the right click menu). You could just have the script doing nothing.However this system is rather fragile. Anyone knowing even slightest of scripting and website design realizes that you implemented the feature with Javascript and by just simply turning off Javascript can do "Save as...".Anyways you can do the thing with Javascipt all though I don't see much point.

CrazyPensil explained there how sessions work and how you do authentication with sessions, in the very basic level. I've been writing about this in the forums countless times but it always seems worth to repeat: simply setting a session variable that indicates that the user has been authenticated is a very low security authentication system and I would use it only for loading page settings or something... It doesn't matter how well you do the actual authentication (the checking of username and password), the simple session variable isn't just secure as sessions can be stolen easily. And in fact often just by an accident. The session variable can be used as an idicator that more checking for the user needs to be done, meaning that if the variable is not set the server wouldn't even bother further checking. Further checking could include checking the users IP address for the one stored in a database when the user logged in, checking if a random value stored in a cookie and in the database match (you could create a new pair everytime the login is verified) and so on. And one more thing... Never store actual passwords in the database, always use hashes.

That would make quite complex regex wouldn't it? I mean you'd have to have every kind of "similarity" in the regex or am I completely missing something? I think these features are done using functions that calculate a value for word similarity. I'm not a MySQL guru but I don't there exists functions for word similarity. I'm just going with hasard here... Maybe you could do a system that matches quite loosely with SQL LIKE. For example you could require there that all of the different characters in the search string would appear in the database values and that they would have to be in the same order. So with regex just allow any number of characters between the search characters. Or something more efficient. After the loose LIKE you could run the results through a better word matching algorithm and only display the words or phrases that you consider close enough.

To my knowledge, Xisto allows any kinds of discussion board systems on hosted site.Personally, I would recommend SMF. I have lot of experience with phpBB and I got fed up to it because of the security issues (need for constant upgrading) and the lack of basic features that I think a BBS should have (for example, sub categories). PhpBB has mods for nearly all possible features but they make upgrading a living hell.VBulleting and IPB are nice systems but they cost money while at least for me SMF more than enough. Why pay for features that you don't need.

.htaccess is a quite safe bet to do, alhough it's not very "hip" with the standard browser password dialogue and so on.PHP sessions works fine but are not very safe unless you know what you do. Using just basic session is a very poor system and I'd recommend adding database storing and checing as well. A good thing to store to that database is the users IP address. This makes session stealing a bit harder thing to do. You might also wish to add a cookie (in addition to the session id) for more depth in the security. Then one important thing to remember is reasonable session lengths. The shorter the sessions, the safer your system is. Then again requiring re-logging in constantly isn't very nice for your users.

You got to remember that not all people can change their borwser. They might not have the skills to install software, they are scared of downloading new software or simple they are not allowed to: you usually cannot install new software on that office PC. I don't like IE, and I'd like to educate people to change their browser. I used to have that kind of warning for IE but I decided later that it's not that cool. I bet it annoyed more people than it converted. Instead now I have Firefox and Opera download logos on the bottom of my site. They don't get on people's face but some people will notice them and undestand that I recommend these browsers and that my site functions well with these browsers.

How well do you know C/C++? If you are familiar with C, you'll find PHP easy to learn. At least I did. Basically all I did was read a magazine article that got me interested and then I started doing some simple scripts and used PHP.net as guide. Anyways if you don't have much C experience I'd recommend getting a book.

Well it seems that AppForge is the tool you are looking for. It allows you to develop in VB and compiles to S60. Then again I do not know how good it is... I've programmed very little with Visual Basic (mainly because I didn't like it) and let alone tried this IDE plugin. I've done Symbian C++ developing and I know it is really nicely done platform: the memory handling is done absolutely foolproof. Certainly, if you learned C++ you'd be able to do much more and more efficiently, but if VB is your thing and you don't plan on doing anything huge then I'd try that AppForge.

I've never used templates. Designing the site layout, picking the colours and doing testing is the most fun part of doing websites. That's why I never have felt the need to use ready templates. Full CMS's have their benefits with good integration of the different parts of the site, and naturally you have to take care of lot less things. But then again they tend to limit your options. I've never used a CMS, I rather try to integrate my own systems to forums and so on.

I've always had a message board on my websites. Sure when I first started doing hobby and music related websites for fun I used free ad powered services as running software on hosted websites wasn't really common and to be honest I wouldn't have had skills of doing or installing a discussion forum that day. Remember that in the nineties they were far less easy to use than today and tended to hog lot bigger percentage of server resources than today. None of my message boards has become huge, they always were an addition to the other site, partially a channel for my visitors to give feedback, partially another section for my site to keep visitors coming back but the most important thing for me always has been that the forum helps you to know your visitors better. After all, people visiting your website are likely to be very like-minded with you and can make good friends. I still keep contact with couple of persons I have met through my own website in the nineties. Those website are long gone but friends have remained. Also my current website's discussion board has become kind of a meeting place for my real life friends. We live in different cities and the forum is a real nice way to reach everyone (well all who happens to read it in time..) with minimal bother.

You shouldn't do this. And it should be obvious why. You see, anyone can put anything in the URL, loading and executing any file with .php extension on the server. If you are on a shared hosting space some one could easily set up a malicious script to his own home directory and just use the section variable to navigate to right place and run the code. With your scipt... To make things even worse, with PHP5. flle_exists works with URLs too. So with this script it is possible to load any script from anywhere inside your page. And please don't forget that PHP can be used to run system commands, meaning that doing practiacally anything is possible. For instance it would be easy to delete your entire website. So how this should be done then? By allowing only pre-defined files to be included. You could put the allowed files (the PHP files that make up your website) in an array and use the array index in the URL GET variable to include the right page. For secions you could use multi-dimensional arrays or multiple arrays. Other option would be just use control structures like if() or switch() to load only specific pages: like this switch($_GET['page'] ){ case index: include(index.php); break; case links: include(links.php); break; // etc...}

I used to be a PsP man. I did all my website graphics and other random stuff with it. I think the first version I ever used was 3 and then kept upgrading to version 7 (I think). Than I decided to try Photoshop. Everyone talked about it so I thought I guess I should give a go and as I'm going to be working in the IT industry I thought learning the basics of Photoshop would be nice. So then I tried and fell in love. Paintshop Pro is a good editor, with enough features for many users, but it just isn't as good as Photoshop.

Or better yet, use the CODE tag to enclose the program code.

Gmail is well implemented and working system. Its a whole other issue if you trust google or not. I use gmail for forum registrations and such: for stuff that doesn't send me very personal messages. I know Google uses gmail for profiling and I just don't want to give any more personal information to them. For the record, I use Gmail with a separate browser, which I don't use for anything else. Gmail requires cookies but I don't want it allow google.com to set them for browsers that I do web searches with. So google can't really connect my searches and email usage .