I want to try a PHP framework for a job that is coming up. It’s an online booking system and needs to fit into an existing web site and have it’s own admin system. So which PHP Framework to try? A quick google gave me dozens of articles on the subject and it quickly became clear that the leaders, at this point in time, come down to: CakePHP, CodeIgnition, Symfony and ZendFramework. There were others that sounded interesting (WACT provide a pretty full listing here, Wikipedia here) but many seem to be in the dreaming phase or have gone to sleep some months back. Others of possible note include Fusebox (for fans of ColdFusion), Prado or Seagull.
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Sometime back I wrote about comment spam in the blogs and using fake comment pages in order to catch automated spambots and record their IPs. Over the months I clocked up a few thousand spambots and I thought it might be fun to do something with them. Like block them for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

After recently transferring a bunch of mailing lists from Majordomo to Mailman, one of the features that was missed by the users was the ‘–LongSig’ feature of Majordomo. Very useful, but not available in Mailman. Using the ‘–LongSig’ tag in an email meant that anything after that was removed by Mailman and this especially useful if you work in a company that insists on putting 20 lines of boilerplate disclaimers at the end of every email sent. On a mailing list, this can annoy people. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Yup, I’m going to nominate a Man of the Year (if Time magazine can do it, so can I). And he is: Dr Dave, a card carrying Evil Genius, creator of Spam Karma, the software that protects this blog from spammers and scammers.

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There is an updated version of KdeAm available. This is only a bug fix for situations where the audio is not playing correctly. This was due to a recent change in the sox utils, where the ‘play’ command expected a different style of paramater. Find it on the KdeAm page

Once someone has registered on your nice new web site, it would be useful if they could then edit and change their own account details. Well, of course, they can if they can find the link to their account. There should really be a link on the menu underneath the Logout link, which can, like the Logout link, be set via the admin menu. Here I’ll describe how to add that link to the menu.

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Xaraya is a Content Management System (CMS) that is available under the GPL, written in PHP, with a MySQL database at the backend.
I’ve just setup a Xaraya system for the ACCU, an association of programmers, and here I’ll provide some notes on what to watch out for and maybe some ideas for getting started.

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Astute observers (thank you Shawn!) noticed that some of the pages were missing from the blog. In particular, the static pages. The dynamically generated posts were fine. Which is probably why I didn’t notice immediately.

Over XMas I upgraded Wordpress to the latest/greatest release, V2.0. It has a very fancy new admin section and a bunch of other improvements… been extensively tested, in beta for weeks. What can go wrong???

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Back in February I wrote a short piece about stripping down Wordpress to a more basic functionality (see [Wordpress on a Diet](http://codeworks.gnomedia.com/archives/2005/programming/wordpress/wordpress-lite/) ) and now I’ve just undertaken it for another site, so here is a bit more information, also making use of the latest version, [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org) ‘StrayHorn’ 1.5.1.3.
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