Is your website used for relay spam?

Most websites have “contact forms”, which allow customers to get in touch with the website owners, without the owners necessarily having to reveal their contact email address. The customer typically fills in their name, email address and some message text. When the customer submits the contact form for processing, the server software then constructs an email message and sends it to the website administrator or owner.

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Google loves blogs

If you want any proof that Google loves blogs, have a look at some specifics for our own website below:

We’ve taken some random articles, on topics we’ve covered over the months. We then looked at what appear to be actual keywords that humans used in Google to get to our website, rather than our article titles, for instance.

Although our website gets a relatively low volume of traffic (between 200-300 page views per day), it’s interesting that the keywords “who are bitacle” and “blog thieves” both currently enjoy top ranking with Google.

It just proves that content is king, no matter how humble the aesthetics are. And blogs are the perfect platform.

Image spam is back

Image spam seems to be back, bigger and more annoying than ever. What’s even more annoying is that this type of rubbish is also difficult for spam filters to catch due to its nature. For instance, looking at the following sample image clearly shows us that if we have our email client configured to show HTML images, we’ll see something like this:

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Parsing comma-separated data in PHP

It’s only recently that I discovered the PHP function fgetcsv(), which offers a quick and powerful way of handling CSV data, such as that exported by Excel and other spreadsheets.

Using fgetcsv(), the process of reading in a CSV file and printing the results in a HTML table is as simple as this:

$fp = fopen('test.csv', 'r') or die('cannot open file');
echo "<table>\n";
while ($line = fgetcsv($fp, 4096)) {
   $max = count($line);
   echo "<tr>\n";
   for ($i = 0; $i < $max; $i++) {
      echo "<td>{$line[$i]}</td>\n";
   }
   echo "</tr>\n";
}
echo "</table>\n";
fclose($fp) or die('cannot close file');

The real power of fgetcsv() is that it automatically handles the double quotes and any embedded commas which may be present in the source data.

API Guide

Sooner or later, every VB programmer needs to be able to plugin to the native Windows framework to perform some task which isn’t possible with their development platform. The KPD-Team from Belgium, offers a nicely documented and searchable database of over 900 useful functions which make up the API-Guide:

So, if (like us) you’re still occasionally having to support applications which haven’t been migrated to the .NET Framework, you’ll find the API-Guide an indispensable starting point to programmatically accessing the Windows user interface, network communications, numeric algorithms, data access, cryptography and more.