Webdigity tutorials

cURL: separating headers from content

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Some times I need to fetch a page with its headers. The problem is that the cURL library can return both but there is no default way to ask for both of them separate. So here is a work around which works for most of the cases.

Post an RSS feed to twitter

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A php script that you can use to post your blog's feed to twitter. The script will convert urls using the twt.gs url shortening service, and it will post it to twitter along with the post's title.

Search a code fragment in a directory recursive

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Some times we need to search the contents of many files through php. Personally I wrote this piece of code when I was using eaccelerator, and used it to search the whole server for files that are not compiled.

Measure page load time (php class)

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

In this tutorial we will create a basic php class with witch we will see in how much time a page loads

Php geotargeting techniques

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

There are many cases that we need to display different content to our users depending on the location that they are visiting our site. In this tutorial we will give some examples regarding geo targeting with php.

The fastest way to see how many people are online at your site

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Recently after a server crash, I wanted to know which of my sites have the most users online. Knowing that information would help me to determine which site is having the extra traffic, but what is the faster way to do this?

Detecting GoogleBot with php

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I came to a major problem with our server. After installing the mod_evasive to our server, the module treated Google bot like a Ddos attacker. The results is that there are thousands of pages in our sites that Google can't crawl, and that way we lose a lot of traffic.

Redirecting your old feed to FeedBurner

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I moved a feed to FeedBurner. The problem was that I wanted to redirect old users to the new feed url, but in the same time allow FeedBurner to visit the old feed in order to crawl it.

Optimizing your php code

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

In this tutorial I will try to write some basic tips on how to optimize your php code. In general those are some very basic information that can make your writing style better, and your code run faster.

Backup all your databases with one click

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This is a script usefull mostly to server admins, which will automatically detect all your mysql databases and backup/compress them.

How to create a url blacklist in your phpLD tutorial

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Bellow is a modification for the popular phpLD directory script which gives you the abillity to dissalow spammers from submiting their sites to your directory.

The script uses a blacklist and disallow submittions for every domain you want, including subdomains.

A better way to handle submitted data & protect your pages

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This tutorial will teach you how to properly handle user submitted data as well as displaying it, and even protecting the pages the scripts are run from.

Alexa ranking retrieval script

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This is a small php code snippet that helps you retrieve the alexa ranking for any web site you like.

Make your script run only from crontab

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Some times we want a php script not to be able to run from a web browser. For example a database backup script. This is reasonable as someone that knows the url of this script can easily abuse our web server.

Filter bad words from a sentence

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

This code snippet will replace bad words, that you define, to asterisks. So it will replace WORD with ****

Download files with cURL

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A snippet that helps you download files from the web, with the use of the well known cURL library for php.

Protecting your forms from SQL attacks

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

A design flaw which can have really bad results is widely spread - not checking your form fields correctly. Here's how to make it better - yet note, the used htmlentities() function has a flaw itself in apache 2.2.2 so update to 2.2.3 which contains php 5.2.0.

Additional information and how to better protect your php scripts can be found at http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/index.html

another spam protection for contact forms

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Check the user input for bad words from a textfile.

A simple way to remove spam comments

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As we faced some spam problems with the trackback bot, I thought to write a simple function that checks if a message contains "bad words", in order to prevent comment spam.

Removing comments from a perl script

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Latelly I was trying to optimize a perl script, and I realized that it had too many comments. Actually the half size of the script was comments, so I thought it would be easier for the perl intepreter if all the comments and empty lines would be removed from the script.