One of my clients wanted a simple filter to alert visitors coming from specific websites that they (the other site/company) was in no way associated with my client and his/hers services/products. Without knowing the exact IP I had to rely on PHP’s HTTP_REFERER. This predefined variable can be somewhat unreliable as a hacker may insert a fake value or the browser doesn’t set it. However, for the average visitor and browser (user agent) it seams to work as intended.

In order to make it easy to maintain I created a small function including an array containing the blacklisted domains. To make it work you need to include it before the XHTML header on all the files you want protected.

Not to long ago some of my forms on evaria.com were abused (or at least somebody tried) to submit SPAM. In order to stop this I set up a simple rule in a few of my .htaccess files across the site.

In order for the “filter” to be effective you need to know from what IP(’s) you’re being targeted. This should be available in your server log or, if you are like me, in the admin notification mail received whenever someone is submitting one of your forms.

Below is an example from one of my .htaccess files, edit the IP’s to fit your needs:

order allow,deny
deny from 85.255.113
allow from all

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.example.com/403.html

You can add as many IP’s you want. From the example above I’m blocking all IP’s ranging from 85.255.113.0 to 85.255.113.255. These are all part of the “inhoster.com” network operating from the Ukraine. I might be blocking someone nice, but if so I’ve set up an info page (ErrorDocument 403) informing those (if any) about why and their options.

If you just want to give visitors coming from external websites a warning/info see my post about how to filter incoming links, but have in mind that this method can not be trusted in the same way as an IP block and should not be implemented if you depend on having the external client/site blocked.

When including anything but an image using the Lightbox Media (my Lightbox clone) you might have noticed that IE automatically adds a border around the content. I’ve tried numerous CSS modifications to get this disappear but not until today found a proper solution.

The ridiculously simple solution came about after some Googleing and it all comes down to the frameBorder attribute being case sensitive. As my code read frameborder IE simply ignored it.

Download Lightbox Media version 1.01

This post is just to announce that I’ve decided to release the latest version of my very own Web Content Management System (WCMS). The somewhat strange numbering merely reflects that the WCMS has passed the beta stages and are running several production sites, BUT hasn’t been publicly released until now.

Anything related to the WCMS will be dealt with at its very own project page. I will also post more on the current and forthcoming features along with bug reports and general support. I would like to mention that since this is a Sole proprietorship I might not be able to answer all questions, and it does require some HTML/PHP skills to benefit the max. However, given it’s simple structure, I believe the WCMS could fit in as a very good system to build on for a variety of purposes.

Download(s) are available at the usual place.

Last week Google launched a new service called Google AJAX Feed API, an API which is supposed to make it easier to develop “mashup’s” in JavaScript. A “mashup” is a web page or web application that combines the content from one or several sources into one uniform solution.

With Google’s new solution developers are (should be) able to combine feeds through only a few lines of JavaScript. It supports both Atom and RSS feeds.

Google AJAX Feed API can be used free of charge, but does require signing up for a single Google API key.