Editing Files Remotely in Linux with gEdit and Others

20th
Aug
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The flexibility of the Nautilus file manager on GNOME allows you to easily access remote filesystems via FTP as if it was mounted as a local directory. Firing up gEdit got me thinking “Can I use gEdit’s file browser to edit remote files?”. Yes you can and in theory you should be able to open and edit any remote files with any application on Linux.

Regional Inlinks (from Yahoo!)

20th
Aug
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I stumbled across this accidentally but I noticed the number of inlinks reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer decreased when using the UK and Ireland version.

Changing MODx Managers Document Tree View Nodes

14th
Aug
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A small niggle I found with MODx was the document tree view that’s displayed in the left hand side of the manager. It displays the “resources” title (aka the page title) which is bit confusing like shown below. After a quick browse through the source I changed it to display the resources alias.

Whats Next for SEO?

3rd
Aug
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The era of meta spamming has been over for a long time now thanks to the introduction of Google. The emphasis for a while now has been on votes (or inlinks) but “What’s next?”. That’s a pretty ignorant question I know as there are always new factors being taken into consideration and implemented by the major search engines.

GIMP Crashes on Windows Vista

29th
Jul
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As a Linux user I was quite surprised to see GIMP crash on Windows Vista when using certain features like “Colourise”. I’ve never had a problem with GIMP on various Linux distributions so I wasn’t sure if there was a bug in the Windows build or something up with Windows in general. With no updates available and nothing on Google I started thinking it was something to do with Windows and permissions.

HTML Country List for Select Drop Down

25th
Jul
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A list of countries for using in select drop-down lists in HTML forms.

Image Formats and Saving Images for Websites

23rd
Jul
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I was recently asked (by my girlfriend who’s learning HTML) what image formats to use on websites. After trying to explain things such as transparency in GIFs I thought it would be best just to write it up.

PHP URL Rewriting Without Apache and mod_rewrite

15th
Jul
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Recently I was put in a situation where I had created a dynamic site that, prior to launch, needed Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s. Without any admin access to the IIS server I was working on, no IIS modules/filters and extremely limited access in the control panel I came up with a method of URL rewriting purely in PHP without Apache and mod_rewrite.

5 Essential Web Development Addons for Firefox

12th
Jul
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Firefox excels when it comes to addons and there is over 121 million on the official website. Shifting through them I’ve come up with 5 essential addons for web development that are available cross-platform, some you’ve probably heard of but nevertheless important to put down.

Search Engine Friendly (SEF) & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): The Difference

2nd
Jul
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As a website developer I was confusing the practice of SEO with what I like to term SEF (Search Engine Friendly), something which I believe is a common misconception out there. I thought I would help define the clear differences by writing this as it’s something of great interest to me at the moment.

Embedding Flash with valid XHTML Strict

2nd
Jul
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A quick example on embedding Flash objects in valid XHTML Strict.

MD5 and SHA1 “Decrypting” with PHP / MySQL

30th
Jun
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In this reference we’re going to look at how to “decrypt” (or more accurately “collide”) MD5 and SHA1 hashes by creating a resource of pre-hashed words.

SQL Injections: Introduction with PHP/MySQL

29th
Jun
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Providing you know SQL you can perform SQL injections on websites that perform unescaped queries. In this reference we’ll use a hands on approach and start by performing our own basic injections based on website user input and then looking into prevention methods.

Mapping Linux (ext3) File System for use in Apache under Windows

26th
May
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After setting the Windows hard drive as the primary boot device I set out to not only read the Linux filesystem (ext3) with all my work but to also continue it in Apache under Windows which, to my surprise, was actually very easy. By the end of this reference you should be able to use your Linux filesystem within Windows and use Apache to read and use the website related content off your Linux filesystem.

A Basic Introduction to chmod for Linux

21st
May
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chmod (short for change mode) is a shell command for Linux (and other Unix-like systems) for changing file and directory permissions. With Linux being a popular server solution it is an important command to learn and understand especially for the likes of website development on Linux based HTTP servers.

URI Rewriting Alongside WordPress’ PermaLinks

18th
May
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With the release of this Journal I decided to use Wordpress’ permalinks, which basically provides an easy hassle-free option for rewriting Wordpress’ URI’s. When uploading my most recent site there was a conflict with .htaccess and my rewrites simply weren’t working.

Changing Device Driver for NetworkManager (nm-applet)

17th
May
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As Ubuntu’s NetworkManager applet (nm-applet) has no option to change the driver you’re required to do it manually, which this reference will demonstrate. As an example we’ll be changing the default driver (rtl8180 for me) to use ndiswrapper.

PHP DOM Document Class

17th
May
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The PHP DOMDocument class in PHP allows you to manipulate HTML and XML files by getting elements, creating elements, validating pages, saving pages and more.

In this quick example we’ll use the DOM Document class to extract links from a remote page, something I’ve had to do recently.