Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Every once in a while I am reminded that I am doing the right thing by sticking to PHP in the year 2015. If you don't know already, the majority of websites run on PHP. That is to say, PHP is a tested technology. It has a vibrant community, it is expanding, and it is very, very boring.
If SQL Injection allows a user to make a full copy of your database, Cross Site Scripting will give an attacker full control over your users. Both are equally dangerous and relatively easy to protect against. Not long ago, I wrote about the dangers of SQL Injection, today I want to focus on Cross Site Scripting.
You've been browsing reddit for a while. You think you have waited long enough, and accumulated enough courage to finally post your opinion again. When you get to the commenting section. You want to format your creative thoughts but it says, it only supports Markdown formatting. "Never heard of it!"
This should be a short post because I am just trying to document a small observation. I don't contribute to stack overflow as much as I used to. Many times I suggested code that I wouldn't normally use on a daily basis. Well documented standards thoroughly explained in hope of making everyone a better programmer. But if I was to solve the same problem, chances are I wouldn't use my own approach.
A very simple concept yet so easy to screw up. When I worked on my first website, it took me a while to understand how to deal with this favicon thing. I noticed how a lot of websites had this cool little icon when I bookmarked them but mine didn't. So I started my quest on finding how to create my own little cool icon. Today, I will save you that trouble and show you all I learned over the many years.
A few months ago I updated my PHP version. PHP 5.4 to 5.5 . I never had any problems updating PHP before. I follow its development closely and try to remove my deprecated functions long before they are officially removed. But this time I was caught off guard. It silently broke part of my website for the silliest reason.
I've recently been entertaining the idea of how much effort people will make to read my blog. I created this page here and used a few methods to make sure a typical user can't read the content.
Freddy the magician walks onto the stage. With a quick glance, he scans the room and stops on one person. This victim subject with big round eyes is convincing enough for us to know he is not part of the act, a complete stranger. The magician asks him to think of a card, almost immediately interrupts and says: King of diamonds. The subject is awed, "How did you know?" Applause and the magician walks out of the room.
Creating a website is easy. Depending on what you are trying to do, there are plenty of tutorials available on the web to help you. I even have one for you. The part that is not talked about a lot is how to maintain them. If there is anything I learned through out the years is that no matter how confident I am with my own code, I cannot say I have it memorized. So I had to developed a system organize it in a fashion I can easily update, revert, and keep my sanity in check.
Web servers are very good at streaming files and currently Nginx holds the throne when it comes to serving static files. My blog used to go down every time I get a spike in traffic but now I serve all my static files with Nginx. However, there are times where you don't want to serve files directly. You want to add a layer of security before serving it. How do you serve the files efficiently with PHP?
