Isles Tech

I recently bought EduPhil.org for the Education in the Philippines Forum which I run. While waiting for the name to propagate throughout the Internet, I used OpenDNS because I've read that it propagates domain names as early as 1-2 minutes after DNS changes. Indeed, when I used their servers as my DNS server, my browser recognized eduphil.org right away.

But while I was working on a page for about 30 minutes, the unthinkable happened: there was an error when I attempted to save it.

Dang me, I told myself. Okay, I'll try hitting refresh, most of time whatever is in the textarea is still available for another POST. But since the default behavior of OpenDNS is to replace nonexistent, unavailable pages with their custom page, I could not locate my text any more.

The default behavior of Firefox (and other browsers, I think), if the target of a POST could not be reached, is to keep that data in some place, so if you do a refresh, it will be reposted. However... OpenDNS does not tell Firefox that the network is unreachable, instead it gives the browser a custom page not found message - a soft 404. The user is of course alerted to that fact, but for Firefox the transaction was okay, and so it discards the form input.

I posted this same concern at the 110MB forum, and it generated a good deal of discussion. Some say privacy concerns are also to be considered.

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Labels: domain name propagation, opendns caveats, opendns.com

Situation: Your MyBB site can be accessed either as example.com or www.example.com. However, when users login from example.com, they are not logged in when they access www.example.com, and vice-versa.

I realized that this has something to do with MyBB's cookie settings.

If your forum URL is http://www.example.com/, the forum can be accessed as http://example.com, and you would like to login to work whether the user logged at the address with the "www" or at the address without the "www", then you have to change your board settings for the following:

• Cookie Domain = .example.com
• Cookie Path = /

If your forum is located at http://www.example.com/forum/, the cookie path should be /forum/

In order to change this, log in to your Admin CP and go to Board Settings > Change > General Configuration where you can see the two settings.

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Labels: cookie settings in mybb, mybb

I'm a teacher by profession (and the salary from the teaching is what brings food to the table) and so I enjoy helping other people learn some things. Technically speaking, I am also earning my living off people's ignorance, but in the process, I am helping them learn something, in a good way.

However, I know of some people who, without batting an eyelash, could hoodwink other people to give up their money in exchange for service which I doubt is worth it. Consider a webmaster kuno who extracts 25,000 pesos from a company in exchange for a website which took four months to create and was just a Joomla hack in the end. Or here's another case: a software engineering company which sells an open-source application to a school for an outrageous sum of more than half a million pesos. Even if the school received very good technical support (which I doubt, considering that even the company's website is down at the moment) it's still tulis atubangay, as my friends would put it.

I don't buy some people's idea that it is the end-users' fault that they don't know the true worth of what they are buying or paying for. In my opinion, we who are in the know has the responsibility to inform those who do not know the actual worth of the service their getting. Unless, of course, we are so selfish ourselves.

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Labels: ethics

One could be wrong, but two are probably right:

Dear Vincent Isles,

This is a notification to let you know that we were unable to approve your blog, Isles Tech, due to the following reason(s):

------------------------------
Thank you for submitting your blog.

Unfortunately we are unable to approve your blog into the Marketplace at this time.

Blogs must be made up primarily of posts that are at least 3-5 sentences of original content.

We do not accept blogs with non-original content.

Blogs that have content primarily reposted from other sources such as recipes, jokes, poems, song lyrics, product reviews, etc, are also not accepted.

Blogs that are kept solely for payment, contain an excess of advertisements, or are primarily for the purpose of posting referral links are also not accepted.

Once your blog meets all of our http://payperpost.com/company/tos.html>Terms of Service please feel free to resubmit it, and we would be happy to review it again.

Thank you.
------------------------------

Please log into PayPerPost.com (https://payperpost.com/login) to correct this issue and resubmit the blog, or to delete the blog.

Thank you,

The PayPerPost Team
http://payperpost.com
http://blog.payperpost.com

If you have any questions or comments regarding this message, please send us a note by clicking on 'Contact Support' at the bottom of any page within your PPP account. Thank you!!

150 N. Orange Ave.
Suite 412
Orlando, FL 32801

Dear readers,

Stay away! There is no original content here ;-)

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By default MyBB won't subscribe posters to threads unless the member has chosen such option in his UserCP. Here's how to make that a default option:

In member.php, change

if(!$fromreg)
{
$allownoticescheck = "checked=\"checked\"";
$hideemailcheck = '';
$emailnotifycheck = '';

to

if(!$fromreg)
{
$allownoticescheck = "checked=\"checked\"";
$hideemailcheck = '';
$emailnotifycheck = 'checked="checked"';

This change will only affect new users. You can instruct current members to enable notifications on their own via UserCP > Edit Options > check 'Automatically subscribe to threads you post in.' Or you can do it via SQL: UPDATE mybb_users SET emailnotify='yes' (replace mybb_ with your table prefix).

(Please take note that only a few members would really like this functionality, and it will annoy more than it would help many.)

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Labels: mybb, subscriptions in mybb

https://www.editdns.net/index.php?site=limits:

Here are the current limits set for Free Members:

- DNS Hosting = 5 Domains
- URL Forwarding = 5 Forwards
- E-Mail Forwarding = 5 Forwards
- Mail Re-Routing = 1 Domains
- Backup DNS = 5 Domains
- Spam/Virus Protection = 0 Domains

I wonder how many subdomains.

EDIT: There seems to be no limit on the number of subdomains, only on forwards.

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Labels: editdns.org

There seems to be a problem with my MediaWiki installation. Even if I put $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false; in LocalSettings.php, one could still create an account via Special:Userlogin&type=signup. This happened after I edited MediaWiki:Loginprompt.

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You can use the heredoc syntax if you need to handle very long strings in PHP.

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After a half-hour of trying to check where I went wrong and why my Google CSE won't resize to my preferred width, I read this:

Note: the minimum width when ads are on the top and bottom is 500. If your ads appear on the right, the minimum is 795. You can't control the iframe height.

Should have read the documentation, but then again, I'm not that type.

More: I'm having problems with the iframe that displays my CSE results; what can I do?

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These functions can be found in Skins.php

• printSource()
  
• pageTitle()
• pageSubtitle()
• subPageSubtitle()
• nameAndLogin()
• topLinks()
• bottomLinks()
• pageStats()
• getCopyright()
• lastModified()
• specialPagesList()
• mainPageLink()
• copyrightLink()
• privacyLink()
• aboutLink()
• disclaimerLink()
• editThisPage()
• editUrlOptions()
• deleteThisPage()
• protectThisPage()
• watchThisPage()
• moveThisPage()
• historyLink()
• whatLinksHere()
• userContribsLink()
• trackbackLink()
• talkLink()
• commentLink()
• makeMainPageUrl(action)
• makeSpecialUrl( $name, $urlaction = '' )
  
• makeUrl( $name, $urlaction = '' )
• pageTitleLinks() - printable version, disclaimer, privacy - explode() can be used to get just the first one
  

There are other functions in Skins.php

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Labels: MediaWiki, skinning mediawiki

To install a MediaWiki skin, upload the skin files into the skin directory of the MediaWiki installation. If you want to make it the default for every body, change $wgDefaultSkin in LocalSettings.php

• How to create a MediaWiki skin
• Gallery of MediaWiki skins
  

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Labels: MediaWiki, MediaWiki skins

I'm doing some renovations of the PhilTowns.net site. You can read the full-length description of the changes.

For now, I will focus on creating content and luring clients to the site. AdSense will have to come later, when I have enough of a userbase.

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Labels: AdSense, philtowns.net

• MK2 as used at http://emlinks.com/ - it strains the eye later though
• 
  

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Labels: wordpress themes

LinkBidScript looks promising.

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From BlogRush:

This message is to inform you that
we have carefully reviewed your blog:

Isles Tech
http://tech.islesv.net

And your blog did not meet the
strict BlogRush quality criteria.

Reason Your Blog Wasn't Approved:
Not Enough Unique Content

Therefore, your blog has not
been approved for use in our
network.

Please do not take this decision
personally. We have decided to
only approve the highest quality
blogs for our network.

You should remove the BlogRush
code from your blog's pages.

Our Quality Guidelines and
criteria are listed within our
Terms Of Service agreement:
http://www.blogrush.com/terms

If you improve the quality of
your blog, and you feel that
it then meets our strict criteria,
you can try and resubmit your
blog for review after 30 days --
anytime on or after this date:

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Thank you for your interest
in BlogRush.

Best Regards,

The BlogRush Team

Yeah, right. So hard to get unique content these days. :)

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Situation: User types http://friendster.islesv.net and http://profiles.islesv.net/islesv opens.

Log in to EditDNS.net

Control Center > URL Forward

Forwarded URL: http://profiles.friendster.com/islesv

Website Cloak: blank

New DNS record: friendster.islesv.net

Wait for at least 10 minutes (and possibly for some hours, but friendster.islesv.net resolved to profiles.islesv.net in a matter of minutes).

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Labels: domain forwarding, editdns.org

• http://uptimedog.com/ - 2 min
• http://basicstate.com/ - 15 min
• http://host-tracker.com/ - 30 min
• http://siteuptime.com/ - 30 min
• http://serviceupontime.com/ - 30 min
  

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Useful utilities to keep your notes for you.

Reasons:

1. You keep forgetting which flash disk you put that to-do file.
2. Viruses are just floating around and you don't want your flash disk to get infected

The list

• http://www.fruitnotes.com/ - the one I'm currently using right now
• http://www.mynoteit.com/ - more geared to the student; I registered but did not push through (too complicated menus)
• http://www.jotthisdown.com/
• http://www.google.com/notebook/
• http://cl1p.net/ - "No signup, no login" (cool idea, but a bit unsafe)
• http://jumk.de/notepad/
• http://www.webasyst.net/notes/ - your own subdomain
• http://www.txtsaver.com/
• http://pbwiki.com/ - yeah, it's a wiki, but can be used for that purpose
• http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/
• http://tiddlywiki.com
• http://www.stikkit.com/
• http://www.diigo.com/
• http://www.notefish.com/
• http://www.gonutshell.com/
• http://www.fleck.com/
• http://www.mystickies.com/
• http://www.posticky.com/index.php
• http://tagfacts.com/
• http://www.goodnotes.org/
• http://www.evernote.com/en/
• http://www.protopage.com/
• http://pad.helicoid.net/home.html
• http://selfnotes.net/
• http://www.notiz.li/ - AJAX-based (but slow)
  
• http://www.spynote.com/
• http://notepad.123india.com/
• http://jottit.com/
• http://notepad.yahoo.com/
• http://www.backpackit.com/ ($5-14/mo)
  
• http://www.zohoplanner.com/jsp/home.jsp
• http://writeboard.com/
• http://www.xaraya.com/
• http://www.netvibes.com/
• http://www.notesphere.com/
• http://notestar.4teachers.org/
• http://www.notes11.com/
• http://shrib.com/
  

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Labels: online notes

I still have only one forum and three threads in my recently created Education in the Philippines Forum. What I wanted to was that if a user types in http://islesv.110mb.com/edforum he would be taken to http://islesv.110mb.com/edforum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2 directly so that he could see the few messages up so far.

One can do this by using the Portal Redirect mod of DenissTT.

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Labels: mybb

This would occur if www is handled as a forward. This can be used to check the correct IP:

$ip = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

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Labels: ip address, www forward

echo fsockopen('tls://smtp.gmail.com', 465, $n, $s) ? 'connected' : $s;
?>

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Labels: fsockopen, GMail

Tip: Check for missing brackets, or an early ?>

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Labels: php errors

The following will redirect to Google:

header("Location: http://www.google.com/");
?>

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Admin > Board Settings > Change

Server and Optimization Options, click on Go

Friendly Redirection Pages - change to "off"

(Redirection pages will be useful for more impressions of ads later on, but I find them annoying myself.)

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Labels: mybb

The default installation of MyBB would require new members to activate their account by going to their email and clicking on a special link before they can start posting. If you want to disable this behavior, you must log in as administrator and Admin > Board Settings > Change. Then click the Go button near User Registration and Profile Options. Find "Registration Method Instant Activation" and choose Instant Activation.

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Labels: customizing mybb, instant activation mybb, mybb

A validated user can resend his or her activation email via the User Control Panel.

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Mozilla Firefox do error-checking of the page while it is still downloading. If it discovers an error on midpage, it will attempt to render the error into the most readable format and then redownload the page.

This behavior will be important to webmasters for two reasons:
1. It messes up the statistics, since an effectively single page load is actually counted as two separate page loads.
2. If the error is present in all pages, the transition from page to page will be affected; this is more obvious for those with darker backgrounds.

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MyBB is one of the best bulletin board software out there, and is the first choice in 110MB.com's 1-Click Installer page. However, the current version requires the PHP mail() function, which most hosting providers disable because of security concerns.

For 30 posts at the 110MB Forum, you can have fsockopen() enabled for your free account. Combined with a GMail account, fsockopen() will allow you to send out emails via MyBB without requiring mail(). Here is the procedure:

1. Download PHPMailer class and extract class.phpmailer.php, class.smtp.php, and language/phpmailer.lang-en.php
2. Upload the three files you extracted to the include directory of your forum (yourforum/inc/)
3. Modify the yourforum/inc/functions.php file: Find the functiona named my_mail and replace the content with the following:

function my_mail($to, $subject, $message, $from="", $charset="", $headers="")
{
require_once("class.phpmailer.php");
require_once("class.smtp.php");

global $db, $mybb;

$mail = new PHPMailer();

$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPSecure = "ssl"; // sets the prefix to the servier
$mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server
$mail->Port = 465; // set the SMTP port

$mail->Username = "you@gmail.com"; // GMail username (including @gmail.com)
$mail->Password = "********"; // GMail password

$mail->From = "you@gmail.com";
$mail->FromName = $mybb->settings['bbname'];
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body = $message;
$mail->AddAddress($to, "");

if(!$mail->Send())
echo "There has been a mail error sending to ".$to." with Error: ".$mail->ErrorInfo;
$mail->ClearAddresses();
}

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Labels: customizing mybb, gmail and mybb, mybb, smtp in mybb

Say you started with a cool CMS and some months later realize that it's not so cool after all. So you would like to change to another CMS.

However, your site has established a good niche already, and you would like users to be able to access pages using the old URLs.

This can be done through .htaccess and through PHP.

If the URL ends with /index.php?page=something, you can just put the redirection instructions in the new index.php file.

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Sending money via PayPal is always free. Receiving money in your PayPal business account has a charge of 2.9% + $.30 from the range of $0.01 to $3,000.

If you have a personal PayPal account (not a business account) you can receive up to $500 a month, without paying anything; if you surpass that limit you'll have to open a business account.

Reference: http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071221193851AAKUfks

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When you "announce" a topic in SMF, emails are sent to all members.

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Make sure that the calendar is enabled (Admin > Calendar).

There must be an event within the "Max days in advance on board index:" in order fo the calendar to show.

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Labels: calendar on front page, smf

You can install the Enhanced Quick Reply mod on a Simple Machines Forum with the Dilber MC theme.

If you can't find the QR box, enable it by default for every body by going to Admin > Themes and Layout > Reset Options > Dilber MC > Reset all members' current options for this theme. In the window which will open, choose "Change" for "Use quick reply on topic display:"; select "show, on by default".

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Labels: dilber mc theme, enhanced quick reply mod, smf

There's a virus out there which I've just met today. I have already seen it in action the other day, when there was a DOS command line window opened by Windows upon logging in to our school's ActiveDirectory. A co-teacher noted that the window title is bungoton.bat

According to here, the side effect of the virus is to stop you from logging in to your settings. I haven't noticed that though.

You can download the USB flash drive cleaner to clean the virus, but I haven't tried that myself. No need to on Ubuntu. ;)

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Labels: bungoton.bat, kulilot virus, usb virus cleaner

I'm working on embedding Feedjit in an SMF theme.

EDIT: You can see the effect on the front page of PhilTowns.net - I'm using the Dilber MC theme, but it should be easy to do it for other themes. The affected file is BoardIndex.template.php (just do a view source so you can figure out how to do insert the necessary codes). You also need to put the same code in a file which is accessed always; I use index.template.php

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Labels: customizing smf, feedjit

Admin Center > Members > Registration > Settings. Disable under "Complexity of visual verification image"

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• http://www.rapidfeeds.com/
• http://meep.110mb.com/ - Teen Forum (looks promising)
• http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx - Blog Readability Test
• 
  

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Labels: useful sites

One successful forum. The first post was on April 21, 2007, less than a year ago.

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here

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the paper that started it all

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Labels: Google, PageRank, searching

Yet another useful concept: Userbar Animator

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Here's an example:

<?php
if($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'lexpedia.110mb.com')
header('Location: http://islesv.110mb.com/lexpedia/');
?>

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I was looking through my email when the blog Balak Bisaya at Blogger.com was mentioned. I visited the site and was impressed with a FEEDJIT widget at the side which indicated the live traffic of the website.

So I went to the FEEDJIT site and will be implementing the widget in my PhilTowns.net site some time tonight. :-)

(On second thought, I don't have the time to find a way to integrate the widget to the site's design, so I think I will just not install it for the moment. But it's a great idea.)

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Labels: feedjit, live traffic stats