Do you backup your computer? You should. Here are a number of reasons why you need to backup as well as information on what to backup.

Backups

To ensure your computer remains secure you should have one login per user with just the access that is required for day to day use and one login with admin access to use for those one off tasks that actually require full access. Most of the time you will not even need to log in to the admin account except for running system utilities as the ‘run as’ command will handle most admin tasks.

The Admin Login

Between now and 5th September (Father’s Day in Australia) I am offering my advanced form2mail script at half price. All you need to do in order to get the price reduction is enter the word father in the discount field when making your purchase.

Hidden files are much easier to reference in Linux than in other operating systems. It all comes down to a single character on the front of the name.

Hidden Files

This example of my cookie toolbox in action allows you to set up a web page on my site that links to your fifty favourite web pages.

Your Favourites

Cookies are the main way of retaining information between one web page and the next and the only way to retain information between different browser sessions. Cookies are supported by both JavaScript and server side processing. Cookies are however limited in the amount of data they can store. Each domain can store up to 20 cookies with up to 4k of data in each with a maximum of about 300 cookies being able to be stored in total.

By using my cookie toolbox you make processing of cookies in JavaScript easier as well as being able to store an array of values into a single cookie.

A Cookie ToolBox

Windows XP was shipped with two web browsers from Microsoft. Internet Explorer 6 is the one everyone knows about while almost no one even realises that MSN Explorer is there. This “hidden” web browser can be removed from your computer to free up resources and increase the security of your computer.

Removing MSN Explorer from Windows XP

Unlike normal input text fields where you can specify a maxlength attribute, there is no HTML equivalent for textareas. Instead if we want to limit the amount of text that can be entered in the browser rather than just truncating the textarea after it is submitted we need to use JavaScript.

Limiting Textarea Text

These two PHP functions are very similar in what they do. They are also ones that many PHP newbies misuse by running them earlier in their processing than is appropriate. These functions are ones you want to run last when creating HTML.

htmlentities and htmlspecialchars

PHP now has a filtering option as a part of the language. Two of the things that the filter can do is to validate common data types or alternatively to sanitise the data. Sanitising data allows you to strip out totally invalid characters from a field without validating it.

Sanitising Data

Most programming languages have a really obvious way of assigning default values to function arguments for when that parameter is omitted. JavaScript has a not so obvious but far more flexible way of doing it.

Default Values for Arguments

When coding your web pages there are two ways to specify the address of other files that you want the page to reference. You can use absolute addresses that include the domain name or relative addresses that don’t. Obviously external references need to use absolute addresses but internal ones are better done using relative references. You just need to work out where each reference is relative to.

Absolute and Relative