I just wanted to make a good, quick post about two good resources I find myself using quite a bit.  The first is an md5 encrypter.  It’s a very nice, simple tool that simply converts any string into an md5-encrypted string.

At work, I find myself making a lot of very simple scripts that require me to set up administration areas, but don’t really warrant taking the time to set up online registration, etc.  Instead, I simply use the md5 encrypter to encrypt the passwords I want to use, and then I enter those encrypted passwords directly into the database.

You can find that tool, along with quite a few others, at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools.  The link directly to the md5 encryption tool is http://www.iwebtool.com/md5.

The other tool I’ve found myself using quite a bit, for basically the same reasons listed above, is a random password generator.  The one I’ve been using the most is presented by PCTools.com.  It offers a lot of options, and does a very nice job of generating random, secure passwords.  You can find that tool at http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/.

I am basically posting this here as a reference for myself, but I’m sure the information will be helpful to other people out there, as well.

Occasionally, when working on my Web server, I need to create a new user on the server and grant one or more other users permission to view and edit files within the new user’s home directory. This task, in itself, does not seem all that difficult on the surface. However, because most Unix servers are set up (and rightfully so, for security purposes) not to allow most users to navigate outside of their own home directories, it becomes a problem.

Let’s say, for example, that you have two users on your Web server that you want to allow permissions to view and edit each other’s home directories, but you don’t want them to have access to any other files and folders on the Web server.

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I installed a Wordpress blog on my development server the other day and began playing with it. The first real challenge I faced was how to pull my Wordpress installation into my Web site’s template.

My issue is, I’m using a content management system (CMS) to manage the bulk of my Web site’s content. However, I wanted to use Wordpress to manage my various blogs. I obviously wanted my blogs to look like the rest of my Web site, so I needed to come up with a plan to integrate my Wordpress installation into my CMS, somehow.

Basically, what it came down to was that I needed to find a way to store all of my Wordpress output into PHP variables. Once I had done that, I could plug those variables into my template. The main problem I ran across, however, was the fact that 99% of the functions Wordpress uses to build its output utilize echo commands rather than simply returning the output.

That was no good for me, obviously, as it started printing content onto my page before the template had been processed.

PHP came to my rescue, and with very little headache. PHP’s output buffer was the simple answer to my problem.

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I was working on a script the other day at work and came upon the need to determine the dimensions of some images. Because the script was being written in VBScript, I was basically stumped, since, although I’ve figured out a great deal about simple scripting in VBScript, I’m still an absolute novice when it comes to file manipulation and the more advanced features available.

I hit the Web and started googling. Luckily, I came across a great solution on one of my first tries. The Four Guys from Rolla (which, if you’re working with VBScript and haven’t bookmarked this site, yet, I highly recommend it - they seem to be the number one authority on VBScript) offered a great tutorial, with code, explaining how to obtain the dimensions and a lot more information from any image.

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While working on one of my Web sites the other day, I had the need to install some sort of file browsing script that would allow the user to choose a particular file, then insert a link using TinyMCE.

I realize that MCEFileManager is available, but it is commercial software, and I was really looking for something free.

I happened across a script called fileNice. It’s a pretty nice file browser and is extremely simple to use. There are quite a few things I probably would have done differently had I written the script, but it works pretty well, and it took me about five minutes to install and configure rather than five weeks (or months) writing my own full-featured file browser.

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On our sister site CenterNetworks, we use the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. I’ve used nearly every CMS package, both free and the systems costing large sums of money and Drupal is my favorite.

On CN we get hammered with spam every day. So much spam that I had to turn off comments after three months because every post (some 2000+) gets hit.

One thing I’ve noticed is that within moments of posting some new content, spams begin to come in. Not minutes, hours or days, but moments. And after doing some research into our system and into the way Drupal handles content, I’ve realized why this happens.

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The other day, I discovered a minor inconvenience in the way MS Access handles the “Yes/No” (or boolean) data type.

You should be aware, when working with MS Access, that any “Yes/No” field in your table can only accept boolean true and boolean false (or “true” and “false”, “yes” and “no”, 1 and 0, etc.). It will not accept NULL.

Standard programming practice is, when there is not a “default” value for a field, to insert NULL if the user does not explicitly declare a value. Unfortunately, the fact that Access throws an error if you try to insert NULL into a “Yes/No” field really puts a damper on that logic.

As the title says, this is just a quick warning for people that may be using MS Access for their databases. I’m not sure if the same is true for MS SQL or not, but it’s obviously a non-factor with MySQL, since MySQL doesn’t offer a boolean data type.

AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is an innovative way of using existing technologies to create highly interactive web applications. AJAX allows portions of the page to be updated without having to refresh and reload the entire page. It can increase site performance significantly and provide cutting edge user interfaces. Unfortunately it can also be a source of concern for delivering fully accessible web sites.

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I’ve seen a lot of articles on the Internet explaining how to export a page to Excel using VBScript. Unfortunately, they all seem to have problems in their methodology.

Many of the articles are helpful, but they don’t seem to include all of the information you need in order to export HTML content successfully from a VBScript page into an Excel document.

I’ve finally found a method to successfully export my data to Excel, and I hope it will help some of you, too.

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As many of you are aware, it is rather difficult to create an accessible “quick link” menu (sometimes also called “jump menus”) because most of them require javascript.

For those of you that don’t know what a quick link menu is, it’s generally a dropdown menu, made from a typical form “select” element. Then, when a user chooses one of the options within that select element, the page automatically redirects to the location associated with that option.

For instance, in the top corner of all HTMLCenter pages, there is a quick link menu called “Top Links”.

For a lot of users, these types of menus are extremely useful. Designers generally use quick link menus for one of two purposes: a) to provide a quick, easily locatable list of the top content on their Web site or b) to provide a list of the headers on a long page, allowing the users to quickly “jump” to the appropriate section of the page.

The problem, though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is that they all require javascript in order to work properly. That’s great for the users that have javascript enabled, but it really can cause problems for those that don’t have javascript.

I have come up with a solution to that problem, though. With the solution described below, the “quick link” menu is initially written as an unordered list. Then, I use javascript to convert it to a standard “jump menu”. That way, if the user doesn’t have javascript within his/her browser, they get a nicely formatted unordered list of the links instead.

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