For other Radio blogging software users: How to backup and restore your weblog. Funny — deja-vu. I was going though my preferences files in Radio last night and found the back-up feature, and clicked on it – I was thinking it was a great idea and wondering how on earth I'd missed seeing it before. Heh. Because it wasn't there as a feature until Friday! [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

Integrating DreamWeaver and PHP.

Integrating DreamWeaver and PHP

Since this came out a week ago (I feel so behind!), I suspect a lot of you have seen this but for those that haven't, here's a good article on DreamWeaver and PHP:

… but MX finally offered a simple tool for rapidly building database-driven sites using two widely-supported open source technologies: PHP and MySQL.

Unfortunately, if you've used Dreamweaver MX to build ASP, ColdFusion, or JSP sites, you'll notice that the program's PHP offerings fall a bit short. Some standard features, such as password-protecting web pages, or options for formatting dates and numbers, are missing from Dreamweaver's PHP server model. To add insult to injury, if you want to get some of that missing functionality, you'll have to shell out $99 for Macromedia's Developer Resource Kit Volume 2–an add-on that also includes new tools for other Macromedia products such as Flash, Fireworks, and ColdFusion MX.

But there's no need to settle for less, or shell out money for features that should have come with the program. With a little time spent browsing the web, you'll be able to bring Dreamweaver's PHP support up to speed, for free. [_Go_] (emphasis mine)

Note: I'm not a DreamWeaver fan or user as the UI gives me hives so I can't comment in detail on it but it seems right.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Error Handling, Apache and PHP.

Error Handling, Apache and PHP

I'm on record as using this for my sites so here's a good tutorial that I can endorse fully:

Using PHP and Apache, you can turn your “Page Not Found” messages into more than bland error reports. You can serve an alternate page based on the name of the page that was not found, create a page on the fly from a database, or send an email about the missing page to a webmaster. [_Go_]

How else do you think you got this beautiful picture?  True there are a lot more things I could have done with it (which are covered in this tutorial).

[The FuzzyBlog!]

If you have PHP installed and you've loaded up 10. ….

If you have PHP installed and you've loaded up 10.2.4 you've probably noticed that PHP no longer works. By editing httpd.conf in the following way I was able to get PHP back and running. Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm doing here, I'm just a guy armed with BBEdit and some vague notions. Follow my lead at your peril. That said:

1. Open httpd.conf in the text editor of your choice.
2. Find the following lines and uncomment them:
   #LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
   #AddModule mod_php4.c
3. Find this line:
   Include /private/etc/httpd/users
4. And add this line right after it:
   AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
5. Save.
6. Open your System Preferences, go to Sharing and restart your web server.

PHP should be running again. At least, it is for me Discuss

10:03 AM
| Chris Cummer

[Forwarding Address: OS X]

Proliferation.

Attention everyone: please bookmark the following page

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/search.html

This is the Symantec Security Response online database. It contains extremely up-to-date information on computer viruses, worms and hoaxes. Especially hoaxes.

The next time you receive a frantic virus alert email, warning you to delete a file called jdbgmgr.exe, or not to open a certain file because IT WILL DELETE YOUR ENTIRE C: DRIVE, MY FRIEND OPENED IT AND NOW HE CAN'T START HIS COMPUTER!!!!, the first thing you should do is search the Symantec database and confirm that it's a legitimate virus warning, which it often isn't. Just type in the name of the “virus” and click “Search.”

Please do this before you forward the email to everyone in your address book and every mailing list you belong to.

As a simple precaution against real virii, you should never open any suspicious file attached to an email. Especially those that that end with (or contain) the .exe or .vbs extension. And especially if you are using Outlook as your mail program.

[scottandrew.com]

Easy Enable for PHP in OS X

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030124054236237

Heh. Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers.

Heh.  Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers

Try installing SugarPlum, a spam “honey pot” which gives Spammers tons and tons of bad addresses to send to.

Sugarplum — spam poison

 What is Sugarplum?

Does this answer your question?

Sugarplum is an automated spam-poisoner. Its purpose is to feed realistic and enticing, but totally useless or hazardous data to wandering address harvesters such as EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, etc. The idea is to so contaminate spammers' databases as to require that they be discarded, or at least that all data retrieved from your site (including actual email addresses) be removed.

Sugarplum employs a combination of Apache's mod_rewrite URL rewriting rules and perl code. It combines several anti-spambot tactics, includling fictitious (but RFC822-compliant) email address poisoning, injection with the addresses of known spammers (let them all spam each other), deterministic output, and “teergrube” spamtrap addressing.

Sugarplum tries to be very difficult to detect automatically, leaving no signature characteristics in its output, and may be grafted in at any point in a webserver's document tree, even passing itself off as a static HTML file. It can optionally operate deterministically, producing the same output on many requests of the same URL, making it difficult to detect by comparison of multiple HTTP requests.

Sugarplum is free software, distributed under terms of the GPL. [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Need to Send Mail from PHP?.

Need to Send Mail from PHP?

I just found this, phpMailer, which seems quite good.  One of those fortuitious discoveries where you download something else, look at the code and you just see it and it works.  I'm starting to integrate it into a project right now.  [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Moving Movable Type to Drupal.

Moving Movable Type to Drupal

Well anyone who's into blogging and more than a bit geeky would probably like this one.  It's a description of how one user moved from Movable Type to Drupal, step by step.  Nicely done !

Why migrate

I migrated my MT blog to Drupal. It wasn't easy to make this decision, because I became used to the ease of use that came with MT in terms of setting up, administering, and blogging. I simply found that MT was lacking in some of the features and scalability I need, particularly with regard to classification and news feed aggregation. Since I've been using Drupal for the past year and extolling its features, I decided to eat my own dog food and use Drupal for my personal site. This way I can contribute to its development because I'll be looking at it more from the back side.

Migrating was not exactly for the PHP/MySQL novice — which I consider myself — so I wanted to document my experience for others who might consider the same move. I encourage anyone who decides to go with Drupal to please consider becoming part of the development list and get involved with helping evolve the application. Drupal is a very programmer-centric application at the movement, catered to technical people, but if non-technical people or people who demmand ease of use and usbility begin to add their voice to the development list, perhaps the administration experience will improve. I hope to throw some time into making these types of contributions in the future.

So here's how I migrated (this is being updated presently): [_Go_]

It's definitely worth reading.  And I've added his blog to my favorites so I make sure to follow it.  His comments about moving to Drupal for the news aggregator are on point (here's a tutorial on it I wrote).  Beyond the news aggregator, an additional useful tool is that the blogroll is dynamic and shows you how recently the blog was updated.  That's often more than enough to tell you to read it.

His points about Drupal becoming more usable are definitely on point — but they are a very big concern of the project and we're pushing to get them addressed.  This brings up a very good point about open source: we tend to like to make people happy.  Just like anyone else and the “squeaky wheel gets the grease”.  If people start complaining about something (usability) then it tends to get addressed — particularly if the project is user driven as is Drupal.  Our user base to this point has been more technical and that's affected what we work on.  Now its getting more end userish and that will be reflected.  I've talked with the one of the project leaders on this and he definitely gets it.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

PHP & Radio Userland - Can they Co-Exist?

OK, I've been searching for quite a bit on this one, and I can't find the answer, so I'm going to post it here and hope that somebody can shed some light on this topic.

Question: I want to be able to render my Radio weblog in PHP so I can embed PHP code into my Radio templates. A. Can this be done? B. How? “letme”

Thanks in Advance!!