Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

How to install an SSL cert on WHM purchased from GoDaddy

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

Was trying to install a new cert for a client the other day. I bought the SSL cert on GoDaddy and wanted to install it via WHM. I haven’t done it in a while so I googled it to get a refresher course. i found this great site that does it step by step.

Link: Installing Godaddy Turbo SSL Certificate w/ WHM

How to use an image to prevent comment spam – Captcha

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

I recently designed and developed a website for AValive/Triangle Visual Interactive and the owner of the site was getting frustrated with all the comment spam he was receiving. The website has several forms and people were either wasting their time, visiting the site and putting in junk, or the site was being hit by a spam bot. Spam bots crawl the internet looking for sign up forms, comment forms, blogs, etc., and put in junk data and submit them. Junk data is usually in the form of some advertisement for Viagra, Real Estate deals and porn.

So I did some research on the net to try and find out how to prevent comment spam. I’ve often signed up for things on the net and been required to type in a text field some numbers or letters that I see in an image.

Luckily, I came across a great site that described how to implement this Captcha image in like 10 minutes. It also shows you how to do an audio clip so that site users could listen to a recording and then they would type in what they hear.

To use this technique, you need at least PHP 4 compiled with GD 1 or 2 (Image Generation) and FreeType text support. It should work fine with Linux, Mac OS X or Windows based systems although you will need to change the default temporary file storage directory specified when using with Windows. PHP session support is also required. The audio CAPTCHA requires the Flite text to speech synthesis engine – more details on set up below.

Some other features of this technique:

  • Multiple random TrueType fonts
  • Character rotation
  • Optional chararacter shadow support
  • Optional site owner display text
  • Random custom background images
  • Font size selection
  • Greyscale or colour lines and characters
  • Character set selection
  • Integration of validation function for checking the user entered code with the generated code

Hope this helps somone else.

Link: Instructions on how to install Captcha image

Tool Tip in HTML

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

I found a really nice tool tip maker for a website I’m currently finishing up.

The client wanted a nice map of the US with Flash like effects. Flash is expensive and takes forever so I wanted to try it with something else.
At first, I tried using the ever popular Bubble Tooltips that seems to be number one on Google right now. http://www.web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001717.php
It looks like this:
But, I needed the tooltip to be more customizable, so then I luckily found one entitled “JavaScript, DHTML Tooltips”
I found this very easy to use – all i had to do was insert one piece of javascript at the bottom of the page and then use a mouseover effect. The mouse effect also has a ton of custom options so that I could change what I needed like: the font size, background color, border size and color, dropshadow color and size, width, textalignment, etc.

Bubble tooltips

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

I was looking on the web the other day trying to find something. When I roll over an image on my company’s website, I wanted a nice little image or something to appear with some instructions or something.

Here’s what I did with AValive. Roll your mouse over the large image on the homepage.

I wasn’t sure what they were called but now I know they are called ‘tool tips’.

But, I didn’t want just any tool tip, I wanted the trendy bubbly kind, and I wanted the code to be handed to me on a silver platter so I didn’t have to write anything myself.

Lo and behold I found the ultimate bubbly tool tip site:

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/scripts/bubble-tooltip/bubble-tooltip.html