HauntedNipple
Everything Internet
HSBC website woes after being handed £10.5million fine.
Dec 5th
HSBC – Hsbc.co.uk is currently having problems with their website.
Internet banking appears to be down with an informative ” There appears to be a problem ” error.
Twitter is alive with angry users who are unable to deal with their finances on-line during the run up to Christmas.
Issues appeared a few hours before writing with no official word as yet to what is going on.
HSBC today were handed a £10.5 million fine for for persuading thousands of vulnerable elderly people to part with their life savings.
19:04 : Website still having issues ” Sorry, there appears to be a system problem. Please try again later. (085) ”
HSBC’s twitter account has acknowledged the issue however NO ETA has been offered.
“We’re sorry for the ongoing problems with http://hsbc.co.uk. If you need to access your accounts urgently please call 08457404404 #HSBC”
http://twitter.com/#!/hsbc_uk_press
PCworld / Dixons websites crash after HP Touchpad price drop.
Aug 22nd
PCworld / Dixons websites crash after HP Touchpad price drop.
After lowering the prices of the HP touchpads from 6pm this evening, the PC world and Dixons websites have been struggling under the load.
With touchpads as cheap as £89.00 down from £350 , Theres no wonder why!
Lets just hope that people dont buy them and find out they cant use them as theres no apps for them!
-Graham
who’s the best live chat provider?
Aug 10th
Answer: WE ARE!
IMsupporting are fast becoming a world leader in live chat support software.
Not only is price just right, you also get unlimited FREE operator accounts, Free support from our technical teams and SSL encryption.
Visit IMsupporting.com for more information
How to add a image to a QR code.
Jul 20th
How to add an image to a QR code.
Hello again people, Its been a while mainly because ive had nothing useful to blog about.
So, Lets get to it yeah?
Nice and quick tutorial on how to add an image to a QR code.
How?
In most cases simply just putting an image over the QR code will break it.
The code gets mashed up and the reader wont be able to understand what is encoded.
To get around this problem when putting an image into a QR code we simply use the fact that these things can use up to 30% error correction.
This essentially means we could loose a fair whack of the image and readers will still understand it.
Ok, Lets do it.
Getting a code with a good error correction rate.
Ive found this site [ http://www.racoindustries.com/barcodegenerator/2d/qr-code.aspx ] very useful.
The above site will enable you to generate your QR code with an error correction of upto 30%
Note: Using more error correction requires more complexity in the image.
In this example we are going to encode a website address ( URL )
- Enter your website address into the code area ( http://www.example.com )
- Error correction level set to either 25% or 30%
- Save the image to your PC.
OK, We have the code. Now we need to add the image.
Adding an image to your QR code.
Open the image in your favourite image editor. if you dont have one, Click Start then Run and type MSpaint.
Find an area in the image that has the least blocks ( So you dont destroy too much ) and then remove the area you need for your image placement.
Now you have some white space on your QR image, Simply import / paste your image / logo of choice into the image like below:
Save, Done.
Simple aye?
Troubleshooting your QR code.
You may find that your scanner isnt picking up the code.
To fix this, Simply try again. Move the blank area, make it smaller etc.
You may also find that having a good amount of white border around the image is helpful with sites that shrink the image.
Good luck and have fun.
-G
Live chat software themes
May 24th
IMsupporting Live chat software.
NEW LIVE CHAT FEATURES!
Two new live chat features launched this month (May 2011) :
1) – Live chat themes.
2) – User is typing “alerts / notifications”
1)
IMsupporting now offer live chat software themes.
Simply login to the live chat console and choose a theme, If you would like one in your companies colours please email us.
2)
Live chat “User is typing a message” alerts.
The user user is typing feature allows you and your visitors to see when each other are typing.
This is especially helpful when you or your visitor is typing a large message and your waiting.
Without the “typing” indicator, You wouldn’t be able to tell if the user is replying or not.
IMsupporting offer Idle detection, So you will know when a user closes the chat window. This features give you that extra value add of
knowing when to expect a message.
The “user is typing a message” feature is enabled by default , However this can be controlled via the Admin console.
Simply clicking “Typing Detection Settings” on the live chat admin panel will enable you to disable and enable this feature for you and your operators.
While we don’t expect you to actually disable the feature, We do want to give you the choice!
More live chat features on their way! So stay tuned!
Why not increase sales and customer satisfaction by trying out the IMsupporting live chat software FREE now.
6 SEO Myths that makes my blood boil!
Feb 23rd
Hello and welcome to my little rant about SEO Myths.
Here’s my little list of SEO myths that just need to die or be killed.
I cannot stand seeing the same posts time and time again on forums only to see so called “SEO Professionals” hand out stupid advice.
So here goes.
- SEO Professionals
Oh how this annoys the hell out of me. How can someone be a pro on any subject that has no firm ground rules?
Its like saying your a “Professionals future predictor” and that you can predict exactly what will happen tomorrow for everyone!I mean, HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU BE A PRO when the thing your trying to be PRO for has very little guideline’s and the big search engines wont tell
anyone how they actually work.Your simply someone who has tried and tested a few times, Failed more than not and attempted to get some cash from poor souls.
Granted you may be able to help for a few things ( That your punter could of done themselves with a few Google searches ) but you simply
cannot do the things 99.9% of these people say they can.The playing feild is changing far too much too often, So stop being a douche about it.
- Your pagerank is important, You rank higher with a higher pagerank!
While this is somewhat correct, It still isnt correct.
Pagerank “Googles internal ranking system” helps rank your website.
This system is used only by google internal search and has a lot of metrics.The pagerank everyone talks about is the rank from 0 to 10. This is toolbar pagerank and means next to nothing to anyone.
The toolbar PR is updated roughly every 3 months and is only a guide to how your “Internal” PR is performing.This is exactly why some sites with a PR of 1 may rank higher than your site for the same keywords while yours has a pagerank of 5
It simply ISNT worth your effort even looking.
- Having a sitemap will help rank your website and help get indexed quicker.
No, Just no.
If you spend even 10 minutes on googles webmaster tools website. You will find that your sitemap is ONLY used to tell google about pages that it
may not be able to find by itself ( Not linked to by anyone, “Orphaned pages” )Google/Anyone may or may not include said pages in its index.
It wont help for anything else.
If your site isnt ranking at all, Simply adding a sitemap will not change this. - Meta tags will boost your rankings.
Maybe back in the day
, But not today.
They may help other sites categorize your website or may even help Google do so, However they wont increase your ranking in anyway.
Meta tags were abused years ago and Google have far more intelligent ways of tracking what a site is “about”.While these mean nothing now-a-days , I will still say to people add them! But dont spend more than a minute doing so.
- Add a meta robots tag saying follow,index.
No, You DONT need to do anything with robots if you want EVERYTHING indexed or urls followed.Google/Others WILL FOLLOW and INDEX anything it comes across and finds useful.
You ONLY need to use robots.txt or robots meta files to restrict search engine robot access. Even then, Other engines may ignore these “requests” to not index anything. - DOFOLLOW! Get dofollow links!
I hear this all the damn time, “How do i get DOFOLLOW links?” , “How do i make my links DOFOLLOW?” etc etc.There is NO SUCH THING!
You can use NOFOLLOW if you dont want SE’s to follow the links and pass on PR ( Remember, This is a “Request” not a command! ) however ANY LINK
without the nofollow attribute will be followed by default. They are not DOFOLLOW links, They are simple just LINKS!
Well, Thats all folks.
Ill add more as time goes on and things peev me off some more.
If you have any “SEO MYTHS” that grind your gears, Let me know. Ill add them if they annoy me also
Why not increase sales through your website?
Give IMsupporting a shot. Chat to your website visitors in real-time.
Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings.
SSL encrypted live chat software
Jan 18th
PRIVACY!.
As promised, IMsupporting are rolling out our new-year features.
The first of these are the ability to switch on and off SSL encryption for your users.
Typically, Live chat doesn’t contain much “private” information. However there are times when a user will want to tell you things that they don’t want others to see.
A lot of people will be connecting into the live chat from Public networks, Work networks or home networks.
While these are mostly secure in their own right, people can still snoop and listen into your chat session.
Places like coffee shops may have people scanning the network for private information you send out.
IMsupporting now offers users of the medium or large business packages the ability to enable SSL encryption on the live chat software.
This means that anything your users send from their machine or from your machine to theirs is encrypted.
You can turn this on and off in real time as needed.
You don’t need to change anything on your systems to get this encrypted live chat working.
Simply click SSL settings in your admin panel and click enable.
Done!
IMsupporting are dedicated to offering the best live chat software at prices everyone can afford
Creating a login system in php. Salting and MD5 encrypting your users passwords.
Oct 26th
Creating a login system using PhP.
Today im going to talk about how to create a login system using PhP & A mySQL backend to authenticate to.
While this may seem a little long, Please stay with me.
Once you have read it all, You will be able to create a fully fledged login system with encrypted passwords and password salt protection.
Requirements
- A server with PHP
- A server with mySQL
- Some basic HTML knowledge
- Some basic PhP knowledge
How it works
We will be creating two main files.
- login.php
This is the html login form you use to enter the username and password.
- auth.php
This is the workhorse, This file will check if the user can login or not.
PHP Sessions
We will be using PhP sessions to store our users data in.
These sessions will tell all our other pages if a user has logged in or not.
They will also hold other data like their username.
Lets go
Ready?
here we go,
The mysql Database.
The first thing we need to do is create our database and table.
Create a database called mylogin
mysql# create database mylogin;
Create a table called users
CREATE TABLE `mylogin`.`users` ( `id` INT( 10 ) NOT NULL , `username` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL , `password` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL , `email` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL , PRIMARY KEY ( `id` ) ) ENGINE = MYISAM
What did we do?
We created a database called mylogin,
We will use this database on our auth.php to check if a user is valid.
The table has 4(four) columns
id : for a unique user id
username : their username
password : their password
email : their email address.
Ok Done?
Great!
Lets create login.php
This page will be our login form.
Lets create a very simple html form that will POST its data to auth.php
Login.php
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Please Login</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="auth.php"> <p> </p> <p> </p> <table align="center" width="375" border="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr style="background:#09C;"> <td colspan="2"><strong>Please login.</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="180">Username:</td> <td width="614"><label> <input type="text" name="username" id="username" /> </label></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Password:</td> <td><label> <input type="password" name="password" id="password" /> </label></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><label> <input type="submit" name="button" id="button" value="Login" /> </label></td> </tr> </table> </form> </body> </html>
Done?
Lovely….
auth.php ( the magic happens here )
ok,
So we have our database,
We have our login form..
Now we need a page that will process the request and log them in.
<?php
session_start(); // Create the session, Ready for our login data.
$username = $_POST['username']; // Gets the username from the login.php page
$password = $_POST['password']; // Gets the plain text password.
$salt = "oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjp"; // our random string of text for our password salt ( I will talk about this at the end. )
// Add some salt to the users password.
$salt .= $password; // The password is now: oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjp_PLUS_THE_USERS_PASSWORD
$password = $salt; // Change the password var to contain our new salted pass.
// Encrypt the password. ( md5 it )
$password = md5($password); // our password is now encrypted. ( cannot be reversed on a rainbow table as we have a secret salt also.. )
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
// Connect to your database
mysql_connect("localhost", "dbusername", "dbpassword") or die(mysql_error());
$query = "SELECT * users WHERE password = '$password' LIMIT 1";
$username = mysql_real_escape_string($username); // just to be sure.
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$resusername = $row['username']; // username from DB
$respassword = $row['password']; // password from DB
$resemail = $row['email']; // email from db
}
// Are they a valid user?
if ($respassword == $password) {
// Yes they are.
// Lets put some data in our session vars and mark them as logged in.
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = "1";
$_SESSION['email'] = $resemail;
$_SESSION['username'] = $resusername;
echo "Congrats, Your logged in"; // YAY
}else{
// No, Lets mark them as invalid.
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = "0";
echo "Sorry, Invalid details"; // Nay
}
?>
</body>
</html>
Ok ,
So we have out auth.php
This file does a few things:
- gets the data from login.php
- adds a special salt to the users password
- encrypts the whole lot
- checks it against a database
- sets up a session if they are logged in.
Creating a test user in your database
We need to create a user and a password for someone to test with in our database.
To do this you need to do 3 things.
- create a password
- add it to the salt
- encrypt it
1,
Lets create a password of say : mypassword
2,
We are using the salt of
oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjp
from auth.php
This together = oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjpmypassword
3,
Encrypt it, You can either use the md5($str); function or use a md5 generator like http://www.adamek.biz/md5-generator.php
Output.
Our MD5′d password is now: faa04f5ecae9c8b7cae967e08ab5a134
Add the user of your choice and add faa04f5ecae9c8b7cae967e08ab5a134 as their password.
Now, when you login using login.php their password is “mypassword”
Protecting any page ( check if they are logged in )
To protect a page, Simply add the below to the VERY top of any other php page that needs protecting.
<?php
session_start(); // Start the session
$loggedin = $_SESSION['loggedin']; // Are they loggedin?
// They are not logged in, Kill the page and ask them to login.
if ($loggedin != "1") {
die('Sorry your not loggedin, Click <a href="login.php"> Here </a> to login');
}
?>
I really hope this helps!
If it does,
Please let us know, And if you have a blog or website, Please link back to our sister site Http://www.imsupporting.com
Thanks
Graham
<?php
session_start(); // Create the session, Ready for our login data.
session_start(); // Create the session, Ready for our login data.
$username = $_POST['username']; // Gets the username from the login.php page
$password = $_POST['password']; // Gets the plain text password.
$salt = “oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjp”; // our random string of text for our password salt ( I will talk about this at the end. )
// Add some salt to the users password.
$salt .= $password; // The password is now: oijahsfdapsf80efdjnsdjp_PLUS_THE_USERS_PASSWORD
$password = $salt; // Change the password var to contain our new salted pass.
// Encrypt the password. ( md5 it )
$password = md5($password); // our password is now encrypted. ( cannot be reversed on a rainbow table as we have a secret salt also.. )
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
// Connect to your database
mysql_connect(“localhost”, “dbusername”, “dbpassword”) or die(mysql_error());
$query = “SELECT * users WHERE password = ‘$password’ LIMIT 1″;
$username = mysql_real_escape_string($username); // just to be sure.
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$resusername = $row['username']; // username from DB
$respassword = $row['password']; // password from DB
$resemail = $row['email']; // email from db
}
// Are they a valid user?
if ($respassword == $password) {
// Yes they are.
// Lets put some data in our session vars and mark them as logged in.
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = “1″;
$_SESSION['email'] = $resemail;
$_SESSION['username'] = $resusername;
echo “Congrats, Your logged in”; // YAY
}else{
// No, Lets mark them as invalid.
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = “0″;
echo “Sorry, Invalid details”; // Nay
}
?>
</body>
</html>
Q.) How do i add live chat support to my website?
Oct 7th
Hi Guys,
Working in the live chat sector myself, I will now guide you through quickly installing a live chat app into your own website / blog / online store.
If you have basic HTML knowledge and 10 minutes of free time, You will be chatting before you know it.
OK,
Im going to use IMsupportings live chat support software
This company provide a free trial with ZERO downloads and no cash up front, so you can see the effects live chat has on your sales without parting with a penny.
The process is as follows:
1) Have a website you need live chat for.
2) Sign up to IMsupporting
3) Find a button ( or upload a button ) that suits your website . This is what visitors click to talk to you.
4) Install the small HTML snippet of code.
5) Login to the admin console and click “Go Online”
- Wait for people to chat to you.
IMsupporting offer plenty of live chat features and after the free trial you will find they are much cheaper and scalable than other providers.
Ok,
So here we go.
- Lets sign up to IMsupporting.
Follow this link [here] and enter your site info.
Once registered, wait for your confirmation email and follow the link to activate your account.
- Now you have a registered account you simply need to login.
Visit http://admin.imsupporting.com and login.
- Now get your website code:
Click [ Get website code ] on the left hand side of the control panel.
Choose an icon you like and that fits with your website and click [ get code ] to the right of the icon you choose.
Copy and Paste the code on the screen into your html in your website ( Where you want the button to appear )
Save and upload your edited html file.
Now the button is on your website and saying your Offline ( leave a message )
- Wait for chat requests
To Go online and receive live chat requests, Click “Go Online” in the upper left corner of the chat admin panel.
Now just wait for a request, You will be notified in the main area, Click “Open” when one comes through and start chatting.
Done.
Now,
There are plenty of other features the software offers, Like a helpdesk system and geo-location.
Simply take a look around.
You can customise the chat screens and more.
If you find it useful, Simply top-up your chat credits when needed.
Howto: Make a contact form and mail the details with PhP
Sep 26th
I keep seeing the same request on forum’s day in day out.
This has to be one of the most documented features of PhP however people still have problems with it…
Here is my attempt at helping to make a “contact us form” on your website.
Requirements:
- A php enabled webserver.
- PHP configured with a mailserver ( to send mail through ) , Most servers will already be setup.. So give it a try if you don’t know the answer to this.
- A text editor / html editor ( to create your .php files. )
- An basic understanding on html and php and how they work together.
- ~10minutes of your time.
Intro:
We are about to make a contact us form using html and php.
We will create one file, Called contact_us.php
This file will handle the form and the actual sending of emails.
See code comments on how it works..
Paste the below into a text editor and save it as contact_us.php.
Once uploaded to your web-server, Just load the page and viola, It ? *should*? work.
<?php if ($_POST["email"]<>'') { $ToEmail = 'youremail@site.com'; $EmailSubject = 'Site contact form '; $mailheader = "From: ".$_POST["email"]."\r\n"; $mailheader .= "Reply-To: ".$_POST["email"]."\r\n"; $mailheader .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n"; $MESSAGE_BODY = "Name: ".$_POST["name"]."<br>"; $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Email: ".$_POST["email"]."<br>"; $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Comment: ".nl2br($_POST["comment"])."<br>"; mail($ToEmail, $EmailSubject, $MESSAGE_BODY, $mailheader) or die ("Failure to send email"); ?> Your message was sent <?php } else { ?> <form action="contact_us.php" method="post"> <table width="400" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="29%" class="bodytext">Your name:</td> <td width="71%"><input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="32"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="bodytext">Email address:</td> <td><input name="email" type="text" id="email" size="32"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="bodytext">Comment:</td> <td><textarea name="comment" cols="45" rows="6" id="comment" class="bodytext"></textarea></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="bodytext"> </td> <td align="left" valign="top"><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Send"></td> </tr> </table> </form> <?php }; ?>
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