Peter’s Blog

Title High Performance Web Sites
Author Steve Sounders
ISBN-10 0-596-52930-9 (ISBN-13 978-0-596-52930-7)
Pages 146 (including index)

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Saunders is an attempt at teaching people how to best go about optimizing their web sites. No I do not mean optimizing for search engines, I mean optimizing for the best user experience (and believe me it is a relief to have a book aimed at giving the user a better experience rather than the search engines). (more…)

On my travels I come across many people who are blissfully unaware of register globals and if they are aware of it, they misunderstand what it does.

Some people seem to believe that using the $_POST, $_GET… global arrays that they have protected themselves from the effects of register globals.

They couldn’t be further from the truth. (more…)

I have just started making some wordpress plugins. My first attempt was a quiz script which seems to work fairly well however is not released as of yet.

My second plugin which I have just released in a beta state (and have applied for inclusion on the Wordpress site) is a cool plugin that will show you how many people are on your blog. It displays a handy link on the top right of your admin pages as well as having an added page within the Users section of the admin panel which shows who is online as well as what they are looking at. If you think this is an interesting plugin take a look at the Who’s Online Plugin page for more information. (more…)

For those of you that have tried to visit us in the last few days we unfortunately experienced a problem with the server.

At 00:30 or so Friday morning we found the server behaving erratically and finally becoming unreachable. Even a reboot would not fix it.

It turned out we had a rootkit on the server. We have now subsequently reformatted the server and are securing it to try to ensure it never happens again.

Here’s hoping for a smooth ride for a while.

I received the usual Zend newsletter today. Zend have announced a very interesting looking webinar in January.

The webinar is entitled “Seven Steps To Better PHP Code” and is split up into 2 separate webinars.

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I subscribe to many blogs. Most are full of mediocre information. However there is 1 blog that tends to stand out and is by someone who I admire as a PHP coder.

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On my daily rounds of forums views I regularly come across threads that show how much of a problem getting a good coder can be. For that reason I have compiled the following guidelines. (more…)

Yesterday I was doing my usual run on forums. Looking about to see what I could find that was interesting.

I have a particular interest in PHP coding and came across a user who had made a 3,4 and 5 digit domain name generator. I had a quick look to see how well he had done but found there was a problem. (more…)

For those of you not aware episode 26 of the Zend sponsored PHP Abstract podcast is now available.

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Matt Cutts has recently posted an article about Fuzz Testing.

For those of you that are unaware fuzz testing is the art of testing a piece of software by giving it random input. The reason this can be effective is that it can trigger unforeseen bugs within an application. In fact Matt gives an example of tests carried out on UNIX software which found that a substantial percentage of softwares were vulnerable and the fuzz testing caused the application to crash. (more…)