Flash gets a bad rap, undeserved in my opinion, for harming search engine visibility. Why are search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners concerned about Flash, and how can we SEO Flash content? The main problem with Flash is that search engines don’t yet understand it, and probably won’t in the near future. Flash includes logic and can take input from the visitor, but search engines are designed to handle static content. Flash is actually a running program, so it’s much harder to analyze than plain HTML code.

The leading web development tool, Adobe Dreamweaver, embeds Flash in web pages with code that fails to provide accessibility for visitors or search spiders who cannot handle Flash. Instead of using the default code, my recommendation is to hand code Flash pages with primary HTML content, and a method of automatically testing for Flash support before attempting to insert the movie. The primary HTML content can be search optimized as if the Flash wasn’t there, while the Flash provides an enhanced user experience for those visitors who have the necessary Flash player.

The April 11, 2006 release of Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer (IE) browser includes an update (”Eolas”) that prevents ActiveX-based Flash controls from working properly. When the user attempts to interact with the Flash, a tool tip appears, stating, “Click to activate and use this control.” That extra click is an annoyance. Fortunately, the programming technique described in this article solves the Flash Eolas problem. (more…)

Introduction

This article discusses a solution for session utilization and management to avoid filling the memory by unused session data. The article introduces a diagram called “Session Diagram” and a couple of simple classes that can be used with in the Session object to efficiently manage sessions.

Background

When developing an ASP.NET application, it is very common for many developers to use Session for passing data between different pages in the web application. Usually developers tend to leave Session data in memory until the whole session is closed when the user closes the window browser or sign-out; the overall result of this behavior is that Session size accumulates with garbage or orphaned objects as the user navigates in the web application.

Let us assume that we develop a simple e-learning solution, where administrator makes tasks such as “Register Students”, “Define Subject”, “Define Subject Contents”, “Define Exams” , “Publish News”. As we can see the tasks varies and some of them can be grouped such as “Define Subject”, “Define Subject Contents”, “Define Exams” while others such as “Register Students” and “Publish News” can not. In the previous example -and based on what I find developers do- they tend to create session data of objects such as Student, Subject, Exam, News and store them in session. Now imagine the administrator goes to Search Employee screen and selected on to modify his/her data. Then moved to Search Subject screen and selected a Subject and started define its contents then in the exam section of the subject the administrator added a new Exam……etc. more session data are created as we go into the web application. Now the administrator goes to the News section. All subject related session data are garbage now and waste valuable memory space with no need. (more…)

Introduction

Forms Authentication in ASP.NET can be a powerful feature. With very little code and effort, you can have a simple authentication system that is platform-agnostic. If your needs are more complex, however, and require more efficient controls over assets, you need the flexibility of groups. Windows Authentication gives you this flexibility, but it is not compatible with anything but Internet Explorer since it uses NTLM, Microsoft’s proprietary authentication system. Now you must choose how to manage your assets: provide multiple login pages / areas and force users to register for each, or assign groups to users and limit access to pages / areas to particular groups. Obviously, you must choose the latter.

Role-based security in Forms Authentication is one thing Microsoft left out in this round for .NET, but they didn’t leave you high-and-dry. The mechanisms are there, they’re just not intuitive to code. This tutorial will cover the basics of Forms Authentication, how to adapt it to make use of role-based security, and how to implement role-based security on your site with single sign-ons.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is all about role-based security with Forms Authentication, a detail that Microsoft left out of .NET for this round. This tutorial will use different techniques that are almost completely incompatible with the standard Forms Authentication, save the setup, which we’ll cover shortly.

To follow along in this tutorial, you’ll need to create a database, a web application, several secured directories, and a few ASP.NET Web Forms (pages).

Creating the Database

We will create a simple database containing a flat table for this tutorial. Using the <credentials/> section of the Web.config file is not an option because no mechanism for roles is supported. For the purposes of brevity, the table we create will be very simple. You’re welcome to expand the database to make use of relations (what I would do and actual do use on several sites) for roles. The implementation does start to get a little messy depending on how you do it, and the details are left up to you. This is merely a tutorial about developing role-based security. (more…)

Prereq

Before reading, it would help if you had some knowledge of Windows Forms, Controls, and the usage of the app.config file. If not, you should be able to follow along, but it might get a little rough. Be warned, this is a long article…!

Series Introduction

I found myself writing this article because I couldn’t find a better one on this subject online! (joke)

Seriously, there isn’t a great lot of detail on using Windows Forms Drag and Drop online. What you can find usually doesn’t cut it. Most of the Drag and Drop online is centered around files being dragged to your application, or ListViewItems, TreeNode, etc… but nothing if you want to drag a whole control to another Form/Panel or move it on the same Form/Panel.

I have humbly taken it upon myself to change that and hopefully help others learn more about Windows Forms, Drag and Drop and Custom Controls in general.

I am planning several articles in a series on Windows Forms Custom Controls and how to create them (in my humble opinion). This first one, as mentioned, starts with Drag and Drop. I start here, because I find it’s easier to create a control when the basic control functionality that all GUI users expect, already exists. This allows you to plug (I hesitate to use that buzz word) your control into an existing UI with little work.

The Source

The source code included with this article is a solution, containing a class library, and the Windows Forms Application to test it. The Class Library (the focus of this article) is heavily commented, while the test application (only about 15 lines) is not.

The solution and the Class Library are all under the LAND namespace. In case you ask it stands for Late-At-Night Developer (thought it was fitting!) I plan on using the Library professionally when it is more robust, so I ask if you wish to use it in your code you simply change the namespace please! (more…)

Hello World 1 - The first steps

Introduction

If anyone has every picked up a book on programming, the first things they get you to do is complete a very simple exercise to write “Hello World” on the screen.  This is usually a very exhilarating experience when you complete it because you know you are on the way to bigger and better things.

This tutorial aims to give you a grounding in the basic concepts for writing Joomla components.  It will develop a very simple Hello World administrator component using patTemplate for the presentation layer.

Requirements

You need for this tutorial:

• Joomla 1.0 or greater

Let’s Roll

We will be creating three files in this tutorial in a folder called /administrator/components/com_hello.  Our component is called “hello” so the folder is given this name prefixed by “com_”.  Let’s look at the files we need.
admin.hello.php
This file represents the main task handling file.  The Joomla Administrator looks for this file, “admin.component_name.php”, when it first loads the component.
admin.hello.html.phpThis file represents the preprocessor for final presentation.  As for the previous file, this file needs to the named “admin.component_name.html.php”.
tmpl/helloworld.htmlThis file represents that presentation layer, or the output, that will be displayed.  There is no special naming convention for this file, although it is a good idea to have a name that closely relates to the task used to display it. (more…)

Since Version 1.3.+ Zen Cartâ„¢ has moved away from its old table based layout to a CSS based layout.

CAPITALIZED words refer to a folder or language that you choose. We use CUSTOM for your template and ENGLISH for your language by default. Change these if needed.

Open includes/templates/ and create a new folder. You can call it anything you like, though it is best not to make it too long and to use underscores instead of spaces. We will call it /CUSTOM here, so everywhere we write /CUSTOM from now on, you should replace it with your own folder name.

Create an empty folder inside your new template directory and call it images so you should have includes/templates/CUSTOM/images/. (more…)

Any COE user may setup a .htaccess file in their ‘public_html/’ directory and/or in any subdirectory created within that ’server root’ directory. The main reasons a user would want to set the .htaccess file up are:

1. Block access to certain files, except to certain domains (or competely).
2. Add an experimental or special mime-type (we’ll add any standard ones so let us know too, please!)
3. Password protect a private directory.

The .htaccess file is basically a on-the-fly addition to our server configuration. It allows you to change some aspects of how the server operates on your files and directories. Note that some things have been blocked in order to keep security as high as possible. The .htaccess file is placed in the directory that it operates on. It changes the permissions/settings for the directory it is in and all sub-directories contained therein. You may put an .htaccess file in a subdirectory of a directory controlled by another .htaccess file and it will happily work. The .htaccess file in the parent directory’s settings remain in effect unless overridden in the sub-directory’s .htaccess file. This is confusing just to describe so it probably shouldn’t be done until you are an expert.

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$sql_start = "SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE ";
If($_POST['first_name'] != '') {
	$first_name = $_POST['first_name'];
	$sql_start .= "first_name LIKE '%$first_name%' AND ";
}
If($_POST['last_name'] != '') {
	$last_name = $_POST['last_name'];
	$sql_start .= "last_name LIKE '%$last_name%' AND ";
}
... ## for the rest of the fields

// Trim off the last AND
$sql = rtrim($sql_start," AND ");

And then do the $sql

POST method uploads

This feature lets people upload both text and binary files. With PHP’s authentication and file manipulation functions, you have full control over who is allowed to upload and what is to be done with the file once it has been uploaded.

PHP is capable of receiving file uploads from any RFC-1867 compliant browser (which includes Netscape Navigator 3 or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 with a patch from Microsoft, or later without a patch).

Related Configurations Note: See also the file_uploads, upload_max_filesize, upload_tmp_dir, post_max_size and max_input_time directives in php.ini

PHP also supports PUT-method file uploads as used by Netscape Composer and W3C’s Amaya clients. See the PUT Method Support for more details. (more…)

Myth: From the Oracle® Database 10g SQL Reference “A Cartesian product always generates many rows and is rarely useful.”

Fact: The Cartesian product is a powerful tool that can help in situations where it is known in advance that every combination of every row in two or more tables is needed.
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