JEMGames Launched

June 6th, 2008 by Aaron

JEMGames has finally joined the 102 Degrees network. JEMGames is an experiment comparing the successfulness of a custom programed websites versus off the shelf open source PHP scripts.

No More “The Triangle”

June 6th, 2008 by Aaron

Well, I’ve officially resigned from “The Triangle.” Don’t worry, I’ve got a new place to keep bring experience to this blog. I look forward to my new opportunities.

Prototype JS - form elements need names, not just IDs

June 6th, 2008 by Aaron

So, I got stuck on this bug for an hour - so I thought I’d write it down.

I was using prototype js’s serialize command on a form. I was also using a strict xhtml doctype. My form elements had IDs only - and did not have names. Well, serialize kept coming back empty. Turns out that prototype requires there to be names on each of the elements.

UPDATE: Der - according to W3C, the ‘name’ attribute of the ‘form’ tag is deprecated, not the name attribute of the form elements…
*hits head with hand*

Finally - PHP has NoIndex on phpinfo output

June 4th, 2008 by Aaron

Security Issue?

A big issue with PHP security had been the developers creating a php info page and not removing it from a production site. As you may know, phpinfo() will dump a ton of useful information (for the developer - as well as the cracker) to the screen:

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phpinfo();

I can’t imagine how many versions of that are out on various servers…

Actually, let’s take a look with this google query…

More than a million returns (granted they’re not all phpinfo() calls… but it gives you a good idea…)

There is Hope

With the release of 5.2.1 of PHP, phpinfo() now outputs the following meta tag:

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<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,NOARCHIVE" />

This will slowly but surely stop compliant robots (see: google, yahoo… not crackerMcCrackenstein.com) from archiving these… yes!

PHP Script Configuration Class with Logic built in

June 2nd, 2008 by Aaron

Sometimes we have static configuration options, such as the name of the company or the location of a particular partner’s website. Other times, there are more dynamic configuration options - such as the current location’s URL or database connection credentials.

For this article, I wanted to build on my previous article here, and make a config class that could still get all of this information from a static method, while making decisions to create accurate config options.

Continue reading PHP Script Configuration Class with Logic built in