Author Archives: Chris Ware

Choosing between PHP and MySQL for quick jobs

I recently imported a database which included a selection of French postcodes. Because of a bug with the original export (received in a spreadhseet) some of the postcodes were missing the leading zeros, and some of them actually had more leading zero’s than were required.

Unfortunately the problem wasn’t raised until the data was imported, and a fresh import was going to take me hours. Fortunately all French postcodes are 5 characters long so it was possible to fix this problem programmatically. Continue reading →

‘Access to restricted URI denied’ and BASE href in MooTools

Whilst performing a standard Request.HTML with MooTools 1.2 I suddenly encountered an unexpected ‘Access to restricted URI denied’ error even though the .PHP page I was referencing was in the same directory as the file which was referencing it.

var sendform = new Request.HTML({
url:'ajax-email.php',
update: $('email-response')
}).post($('contact'));

Continue reading →

The advantages of visualising design scenarios

Author: Rob Swan

Many moons ago, when I was an undergraduate, I worked as a video game functionality tester in Brighton. There was a lot of pizza and late night gaming involved, but amongst all of the fun I saw the repeated mistakes of many, many developers and it taught me a core concept:

“Learn to visualise all possible design scenarios” Continue reading →

Writing secure form to email scripts with the PHP mail() function

Spammers all around the globe are profiting on a daily basis from poorly written form to email scripts. Scripts like this can be abused by spammers, who will inject new email headers into the form fields, effectively allowing them to send whatever message they want, to whomever they want, courtesy of your mail server. Once they find a vulnerable script page, they will mercilessly hit it with their spam robots and send as much spam as they can until your server inevitably keels over and dies, possibly taking your websites with it. Cue phone calls from lots of unhappy customers and a time-consuming mail queue clean-up job.

Continue reading →

3 hour search engine workshop for Connecting Somerset

Following the success of our many previous workshops and as part of our continued involvement with the Connecting Somerset Technology for Business Programme, HigherSites will be presenting a 3 hour online marketing workshop on the 19 November 2008 at The Exchange in Bridgwater. The fully updated programme will include: SEO myth busting; background information on the science of search; an introduction to standards compliance and its impact on search engine ranking; tips and guidance on how to get your website ranked better; an introduction to pay-per-click (PPC) marketing with Google AdWords, and; much more.

Continue reading →

How often does Google change its algorithms?

I have been asked this question many times through my own personal blog and whilst delivering search engine marketing workshops and training. The answer is simple: often.

Many SEO professionals entertain the belief that Google shroud their activities in a cloud of mystery and that nobody knows the actual answer apart from Google employees. This isn’t actually the case. Google are reasonably open about how they manage their algorithms (without giving away any trade secrets, of course) – you just need to know where to look to get the information. Continue reading →