PayPal is currently being reported by users as widely inaccessible right now. Some users are reporting it as having been unavailable for as long as 45 minutes or an hour at the time of writing.

With the service being a key e-commerce tool, such downtime is a major frustration for both merchants and customers.

In October last year, PayPal’s systems, but not its website, suffered downtime. doiwnload firefox . This time the website itself is completely inaccessible but it’s unclear at present if backend systems are in full working order or not. We have approached PayPal for comment.

UPDATE: We’re hearing from users that PayPal’s systems can still be accessed via apps that use its API and that payments are still being processed †it’s just the website itself that is inaccessible.

UPDATE 2: PayPal’s developer blog notes that in actual fact, payments via the API are also unavailable for most customers and “At this time, there is no alternative work-around.”

UPDATE 3: PayPal’s developer blog now says, exactly one hour after it first acknowledged the fault, that it has been resolved, meaning that everything should be back to normal for all users. Social Outbreak . If we hear from the company about the reason behind this downtime, we’ll let you know.

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Rent an Office

At Home

Bedroom

Living Room

When I feel that my room feels stale or stuffy and I need a bit more space, I work in our living room. So, what are the advantages and downsides of working in a living room?

Dining Room

Do you eat while working? You may just want to work in your dining room then. When I feel my body craves for food, I just use a laptop and place it on our dining table.

Library

When we were in college, we used to stay in our school’s library. The ambiance is good and most importantly, it’s very quiet.

Coffee Shops

I remember from another freelancing job, my friends and I used to work at least twice a month in a coffee shop. This gives us different ambiance and since we love frappes and lattes, we enjoy working there.

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Sometimes you may need to retrieve user’s friend-list in facebook. Denver SEO Inc . You can retrieve user friends list in several ways. longboard deck . Using new graph api you can retrieve friend-list or you can call legacy api to retrieve friend-list.

Using graph api:

function getUserFriendList($facebook){
$friends = $facebook->api('/me/friends');
return $friends;
}

Using legacy api:

function getUserFriendList($facebook, $uid){
try {
$param = array(
'method' => 'friends.get',
'uid' => $uid,
'flid' => '',
'callback'=> ''
);
$friends = $facebook->api($param);
return $friends;
}
catch(Exception $o) {
d($o);
}
return '';
}

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longboard deck .

Today, I would like to tell you how to handle character set problem which occurs during the data fetched from PHP using Ajax mainly on the western characters(European charset).Lots of people asked me about this problem where these European charset is displayed in unreadable format after fetching it from ajax.

Problem with European Charset with Ajax and PHP

Suppose that I’ve the following code in PHP file, which output the string which contain the european characters.

<?php
  $str="€-accentuée";
  echo $str;
?>

Now, let’s use the Ajax from JavaScript using Jquery Code to fetch the data from PHP.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function()
{
  $('#charsetdiv').load("test2.php");
});
</script>
<div id="charsetdiv"></div>

If you’ve not used jQuery then you might be wondering about the ajax code, you can check the benefits of jquery from this post and download free ebook of jQuery.

After getting value from Ajax, the division with id “charsetdiv”, let’s look at the output.

?-accentu?e

Solving western Character Set problem with Ajax and PHP

The above problem is occurred because of not defining proper charset to these European characters. recycled glass votives . We can solve this problem by sending the header which define the appropriate Character Set for these characters.Let’s see, how I solve this problem just adding the header which define the charset Windows-1256 †which support Arabic as well as European characters.

<?php
  header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1256n");
  $str="€-accentuée";
  echo $str;
?>

After adding that header in PHP, you’ll get the appropriate european characters in your Ajax enabled application.

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Finding a theme for your blog is one of the difficult task a blogger has to do.There are many themes available online. Many free themes as well as many premium themes are available. Lots of good free WordPress themes are available online. Except some, most of the free WordPress themes offer minimal features and simple features. To experience all the features, regular updates, higher security and professional look, you will have to consider buying a premium theme for your blog.

Here is where Theme Junkie comes into spotlight. Theme Junkie started some years ago has turned into one of the best WordPress themes provider. Their themes are unique, attractive, contain lots of features, etc. Their themes are just a complete package for any blog!

Features Of Theme Junkie Themes:

1. Advanced Theme Control Panel
2. Auto-sized Thumbnail Management
3. Text/Image Logo Switcher
4. Fully Widgeted Sidebars
5. Advertisement Management
6. Localization Ready
7. Analytics/Stat Management
8. Built-in FeedBurner Support
9. Threaded Comments
10. Gravatar Ready
11. Custom Page Templates
12. Custom Widgets
13. Dropdown Menu Navigation
14. WordPress 3.0+ Compatible
15. Cross-Browsers Compatibility
16. Forum Support
17. Lifetime Upgrade

Best Features:

1.) Highly Featured
Theme Junkie themes come feature packed with a lot of features such as header customization, fully featured panel, wordpress dropdown menu system, stats management, social media management, etc. Everything is automatic in Theme Junkie themes!
2.) Good Looks
Theme Junkie themes bear a modern look. All Theme Junkie themes are cool, have great colors, look simple yet professional and attractive. I can’t stop praising their themes!
3.) Reasonable Price
All Theme Junkie themes come for a reasonable cheap price of $20 to $30. For the features and value they offer, the price is nothing! Further they offer All In One Themes package which offers the best value!
4.) Regular Updates & Fast Support
Your queries at Theme Junkie get answered in no time. The support team, the theme designer, the site owner all are super active and reply very fast. All your queries be it simple or advanced, they solve it quickly.
These are just a few features of their themes. Watch their themes collection to know more.

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Today I would like to share 35 plugins by that you can make your wordpress bullet proof, I mean more secure.

Blogs on wordpress is most popular today. It is used by thousands of people around the world. But because of the popularity it is getting more attention from hackers and spammers. WordPress is very secure by itself, but it is never too verifiable.

For simple users,who don’t code a lot, plugins is the best way to secure your blog. They’re free, easily usable and safe. This post to make your blog bulletproof. They’re each devised for different purposes, so you will get the best protection from each field.

Secure Your Login

1. Semisecure Login Reimagined

Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process by using a combination of public and secret-key encryption to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

2. Stealth Login

This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog. Instead of advertising your login URL on your homepage, you can create a URL of your choice that can be easier to remember than wp-login.php, for example you could set your login URL to http://www.myblog.com/login for an easy way to login to your website.

3. Login LockDown

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

4. Chap Secure Login

Whenever you try to login into your website, you can use this plugin to transmit your password encrypted. The encryption process is done by the Chap protocol. By activating the Chap Secure Login plugin, the only information transmitted unencrypted is the username, password is hidden with a random number (nonce) generated by the session – and opportunely transformed by the MD5 algorithm. In the first login there will be an error, but don’t worry is only a technical error. Indeed in the next login’s operation, if the values are correct, there will not be errors.

Admin Area

1. Admin SSL

Admin SSL secures login page, admin area, posts, pages – whatever you want – using Private or Shared SSL. Once you have activated the plugin, you have to go to the Admin SSL config page to enable SSL.

Database

1. WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to back up your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

2. Remote Database Backup

This plugin creates SQL dumps of your WordPress database. It is based on the WordPress Database Backup plugin (http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup) – but it removes some of the security restrictions in the plugin to enable automated remote backups. You still need the admin user name and password to do a remote backup.

3. WP-DB Manager

This plugin allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

4. BackUp WordPress

BackUpWordPress is a backup & recovery suite for your WordPress website. This plugin allows you to back up database tables as well as files and comes with a rich set of options.

5. WordPress 1 Click EZ Backup

EZ Backup has been turned into a simple one click operation. Click the button and watch your files and database backup be created. You can create a backup of all your webspace files or backup just your wp-content folder all from this one plugin. Unlike the Full EZ Backup plugin this one does not require any special information such as usernames or passwords etc. This plugin costs $5.

6. myEASYbackup

This plugin allows you to back up, restore, migrate your WordPress installation, both files and mySQL tables with a single click. When performing a backup, myEASYbackup creates a compressed data set file that can be stored outside the WordPress installation directory. A list of all data sets on the server is also logged in the admin area.

Spam

1. Antispam Bee

2. NoSpamNX

NoSpamNX is the successor of Yawasp (Yet Another WordPress antispam plugin) and is a plugin to protect against automated comment spam (spambots). While Yawasp changed the names of the form fields in the comment template, NoSpamNX works without these modifications, but is equally effective. By eliminating the need for modifications the form field need maximum compatibility with other WordPress plugins or browser is ensured.

3. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

4. Math Comment Spam Protection

Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Example of such question: What is the sum of 2 and 9?

5. Defensio Anti-Spam

Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your readers. Advanced features such as support for OpenID, detailed statistics, charts, RSS feed of our comments (innocent and spam) and counter widget are also available.

6. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress compatible.

7. reCAPTCHA

Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuously typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach.

8. Blackhole

Blackhole is a trap for bad bots. The concept is simple: include a hidden link to a robots.txt-forbidden directory somewhere on your pages. Bots that ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap, which then performs a WHOIS Lookup and records the event in the blackhole data file. Once added to the blacklist data file, bad bots immediately are denied access to your site.

9. Invisible Defender

This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

Other

1. Secure WordPress

Little help to secure your WordPress installation. This plugin removes error information on login page, adds index.html to plugin directory, removes the wp-version, except in admin area.

2. WP Security Scan

This plugin will scan your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and it will suggest some corrective actions.

3. AskApache Password Protect

This plugin doesn’t control WordPress or mess with your database, instead it utilizes fast, tried-and-true built-in Security features to add multiple layers of security to your blog. This plugin is specifically designed and regularly updated specifically to stop automated and unskilled attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog resulting in a hacked site.

4. TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)

TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code. As of v1.3 TAC also searches for and displays static links.

5. HTTP Authentication

The HTTP Authentication plugin allows you to use existing means of authenticating people to WordPress. This includes Apache’s basic HTTP authentication module and many others.

6. AntiVirus

Viruses, worms and malware exist for WordPress and could easily attack your WordPress installation. AntiVirus for WordPress monitors malicious injections and warns you of any possible attacks. It also has multilingual support.

7. Secure Files

This plugin allows you to upload and download files from outside of your web document root for security purposes. It can be used to can restrict file downloads to users that are logged in, or have a certain user level.

8. Replace WP-Version

Security your WordPress-Installation and eliminate or replace your wp-version and database-version on easy way with a small plugin. If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog. This plugin replaces the WP-version with a random string < WP 2.4 and eliminate WP-version > WP 2.4.

9. WP Email Guard

WP Email Guard protects your email addresses included on any post or page from being crawled by spammers. It converts every email written within your post body into a JavaScript code, so the emails is readable and can be clicked by humans only. Spammers can’t crawl JavaScript.

10. WordPress File Monitor

Monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.

11. WP Dephorm

WP-Dephorm protects your users from the prying eyes of phorm. This is achieved by setting a cookie to opt out of the phorm information mining. Your blog viewers will not have their information stored and used in marketing campaigns whilst viewing your site.

12. WordPress Firewall

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

13. Secure Contact

SecureContact is a drop in form for users to contact you, based on the WP Contact Form plugin by Ryan Duff. It offers enhanced security by using captcha images.

14. Fast and Secure Contact Form

Fast and secure contact form for WordPress. This contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Super customizable.

15. Ultimate Security Check

The Ultimate Security Check plugin helps you identify security problems with your WordPress installation. It scans your blog for hundreds of known threats, then give you a security “grade” based on how well you have protected yourself.

16. Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy prevents content injection attacks by allowing admins to specify which sites they trust to serve JavaScript and other types of content in their site. Any content which is not explicitly allowed by the policy will be blocked from loading.

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If you are a regular user of WordPress like me then you might get bored of the default user interface of WordPress. Although the User Interface of WordPress is good but there is always room for improvement. Automattic the company behind WordPress has decided to go for Open Source Design Contests to make the User Interface of WordPress even better.

Are you ready to give it a try?

Default WordPress Dashboard

In the article we will take a look on some awesome plugins that can alternate the user interface of WordPress to make it more users friendly

1. Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu

Admin Drop down Menu is one of the best WordPress plugins to change the default user interface of WordPress admin area. The plugin replaces all the admin links with super charged and beautiful horizontal CSS drop down menu. The plugin also saves you from unnecessary clicks to expand the menu and enhances your productivity

Admin Drop Down Options

An interesting feature is compact mode which only shows icons for top links and saves space in the drop down menu. The following screen shot elaborates this feature.

2. Fluency Admin 2.2

Give your WordPress an attractive look with Fluency Admin. The plugin replaces all the admin links with splendid vertical CSS drop down menu. Fluency also adds support of Keyboard shortcuts to your admin links hence enables you to control your WordPress with keyboard only. You ca n switch between full menu view and icon-only view to save the space of your dashboard area with a single click.

Fluency WordPress Dashboard
Fluency comes bundled with login page theme too which can be enabled from plugin options panel. For custom branding you can also use your own logo at the top of dashboard area and login theme.

Fluency Options Menu

Fluency Login Theme

3. Easy Admin Color Schemes

The default WordPress installation comes with two color schemes, grey and blue. This plugin adds two more color schemes for your admin panel. Moreover it also grants you to create your own color schemes. You can also export your custom color scheme to use it on other blogs. Depending upon the settings, each user can have its own customized color scheme. Have a look at the Green color scheme and the plugin’s option panel.

4. Qwerty Admin Panel Theme

Qwerty Admin Panel Theme is a nice looking Admin Panel theme. The permits you to style the admin panel and login screen for all users. The WordPress logos can be swapped the with your own logo images for custom branding.

A distinct feature of this plugin is

Limited Interface

capability that helps you in hiding different admin panels from different users of your WordPress installation.

5. Pop Menus for WP-Admin

This simple plugin will be saving you time by creating quick and easy to use pop menus for your WP-Admin sidebar. Popup menus uses jQuery and CSS to popup animated admin-sidebar links. Moreover it makes the admin sidebar sticking with scrollable page that makes it a real time saver with the help of jQuery.

6. Adminimize

Adminimize is a very comprehensive and advanced WordPress plugin that comes with a lot of features to customize your WordPress backend. The plugin has a lot of options to hide unnecessary items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. The plugin has more than 50 options to tweak the backend of your WordPress installation. The following screenshot shows the admin option panel of Adminimize.

7. My Brand

Customizing your WordPress login page can’t be easier than this. Simply install this plugin and with the help of my brand option page you can select the background color or background image for your WordPress login page. You can also upload the custom logo for your login page with the help of my brand. The plugin is very useful for multi-author blogs and user contributed websites.

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Joomla (http://www.joomla.org), the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system), today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6. Users will be able to download the latest version effective this evening from the Joomla website. Designed to offer enhanced site control and a more polished user experience, Joomla 1.6 delivers a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software.

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.”

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

·    New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.

·    Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.

·    One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.

·      Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

·      Multi-language Functionality – Allows site builders to implement a multi-language site.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers with the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We’re hard at work developing even more powerful Joomla features for the future, such as new search capabilities and new ways to leverage website content.”

Visit http://www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.6 today.

About Joomla!

Joomla is the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With 2.5 percent of the web running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create and build a variety of websites and web-enabled applications. Due to its power and elegance, it can be used by the most inexperienced user to the most seasoned web developer. Since its inception in 2005, Joomla has been 100 percent community owned and operated, and its software has been downloaded more than 22 million times. For more information, visit www.joomla.org.Similar Posts:

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Yesterday, I saw one of my friend was working on the the contact form and was filtering the user input data (posted variables) individually. He was using a function in PHP to filter the input and using  tedious approach while calling the filtering function for each variables with coding  each of them in single line . Today, I’m going to show you how can you filter the posted variables easily using callback function in PHP.

PHP function to filter the user supplied data..


function filter_data($val)
{
return htmlentities($val,ENT_QUOTES);
}

This is just a example of very simple function is PHP to filter the user ssubmitted data.But ,you can add more code according to your requirement to make this function robust.

Common programmer’s approach to filter submitted data in PHP


$name=filter_data($_POST['name']);
$email=filter_data($_POST['email']);
$website=filter_data($_POST['website']);

It was the approach which I’ve used in beginning of my career and most of the beginner PHP programmer use this approach to filter the posted variables.And, the above list can be long if there are more posted data.At that time, it will be very irritating to use the same kind of line in many places.

Using array_map() function to filter the posted data in PHP

As you know, POST variables are super global array in PHP and you can use array_map() function in PHP to filter the input using the callback  function. Let’s see how you can filter the the posted data easily,

$post=array_map("filter_data",$_POST);

As you can, each values of POST variables is mapped into another array using a call back function filter_data() which is defined above.

Now, you can access the filtered variables easilly with $post['name'] or $post['email'] etc.

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Security is a very important aspect of programming. Louisiana foundation repair contractor . In PHP, there are few useful functions which is very handy for preventing your website from various attacks like SQL Injection Attack , XSS attack etc.Let’s check few useful functions available in PHP to tighten the security in your project. But note that this is not a complete list, it just list of functions which I found useful for using in your project.

1) mysql_real_escape_string() †This function is very useful for preventing from SQL Injection Attack in PHP . This function adds backslashes to the special characters like quote , double quote , backslashes to make sure that the user supplied input are sanitized before using it to query. But, make sure that you are connected to the database to use this function.

2) addslashes() †This function works similar as mysql_real_escape_string(). Louisiana foundation repair companies . But make sure that you don’t use this function when “magic_quotes_gpc” is “on” in php.ini. When “magic_quotes_gpc” is on in php.ini then single quote(‘) and double quotes (“) are escaped with trailing backslashes in GET, POST and COOKIE variables. You can check it using the function “get_magic_quotes_gpc()” function available in PHP.

3) htmlentities() †This function is very useful for to sanitize the user inputted data. This function converts the special characters to their html entities. Such as, when the user enters the characters like “<” then it will be converted into it’s HTML entities < so that preventing from XSS and SQL injection attack.

4) strip_tags() †This function removes all the HTML, JavaScript and php tag from the string. But you can also allow particular tags to be entered by user using the second parameter of this function. For example,

echo strip_tags(“”);

will output

alert(‘test’);

5) md5() †Some developers store plain password in the database which is not good for security point of view. This function generates md5 hash of 32 characters of the supplied string. The hash generated from md5() is not reversible i.e can’t be converted to the original string.

6) sha1() †This function is similar to md5 but it uses different algorithm and generates 40 characters hash of a string compared to 32 characters by md5().

7) intval() †Please don’t laugh. I know this is not a security function, it is function which gets the integer value from the variable. But you can use this function to secure your php coding. Well, most the values supplied in GET method in URL are the id from the database and if you’re sure that the supplied value must be integer then you can use this function to secure your code.

$sql=”SELECT * FROM product WHERE id=”.intval($_GET['id']);

As, you can see above, if you’re sure that the input value is integer you can use intval() as a secrity function as well.

Similar Posts:

• Preventing SQL Injection Attacks with MySQL and PHP
• How to filter user submitted data easily in PHP?
• Solving European characters (Western charset) problem with Ajax and PHP
• Add dynamic sidebars in your wordpress themes
• Make your wordpress bulletproof