Blog
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PHP Image Header
Despite efforts made by many groups to allow designers to embed fonts into their web pages, such as WEFT and CSS, no method has managed to achieve support across all the popular browsers. Currently, the CSS method looks the best bet, but is still too far in the distant future to be considered a viable option at the moment. Because of this, alternatives such as the Flash sIFR, but this relies on Flash…
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Combo Boxes
Web pages have always been lagging behind when it comes to form controls that exist on most applications you find on a computer. It just about covers the basics and goes no further, leaving web developers without such useful things as spinners, sliders, tabs and combo boxes. There are scripts to emulate combo boxes online, but the ones I tested failed abysmally when script was turned off, so I set…
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Form Validation
Form validation is one of the most under-rated and at the same time most important parts of a web application. It might seem good at first to check for simple things like checking to see if an email address has an @ sign, or that a name field has more than 1 character, the truth is that without sanitising your inputs, you're leaving your whole website vulnerable to attack. Take a contact form as an…
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PHP Calendar
The calendar at the right-hand side of the site is something which I am often asked about. I have seen many examples online, but all seemed needlessly complicated or coded in a particularly odd fashion. Having decided early on that something simple, efficiently scripted and easy to tweak was needed, I created the one which you see on the site. Here is the source code: <?php $ymDate =…
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PHP Captcha
Spam is a huge problem on the Internet today, across the Web, Email, Newsgroups, to name but a few areas. Recently, spammers have been targeting websites, particularly forums, blogs and wikis. The tried and tested method to prevent this is to use a CAPTCHA. The idea goes back to Alan Turings idea of a test to differentiate humans and computers, which is now used to test AI. 1997, Andrei Broder devised…
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Anti-Spam Email Script
Often in forums and blogs, I see people asking how to cut back on spammers getting to their email addresses on a page. The most frequent solution to this problem is to disguise the email, in the hope that the spam bots (scripts purposely built for scouring the webs' pages for email addresses) will be unable to recognise the non-standard format. Below are just some of the ways of email obfuscation: foo…
