Muller Digital | Web Programming » Programming

Coda – Error code 37 – “Host Key Changed for…”

nick — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:35:52 +0000

Coda error code 37, caused when a site’s ip address changes, and the SSH keys are no longer valid. It can be fixed by connecting with Coda’s Terminal and reading the response. Which will tell you what line on the known_hosts file the old key, that then needs to be deleted, can be found.

Allow PHP to access files but not website visitors

nick — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:56:09 +0000

Add the following to an .htaccess file, and all .php files under the .htaccess file will not be available via the web:
Order deny,allow Deny from all

The files will be available through PHP though. As PHP is not requesting the files through Apache webserver, rather is it requesting include files via the file system.

webcal link in IE

nick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:21:06 +0000

webcal links (eg. webcal://www.domain.com/calendar.ics)will only work in Internet Explorer if Outlook 2007 is installed on the users machine. Office 2003 or earlier do not install the support required to make webcal links active.

“This page contains both secure and nonsecure items” IE fix

nick — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:09:10 +0000

Use a CGI proxy service on your secure site. Download CGIProxy. Upload to your sites cgi-bin folder (most hosting packages will have that set already). Once uploaded, change the permissions of the ‘nph-proxy.cgi’ file to 755 (rwxr-xr-x) Owner=Read,Write,Excute Group=Read, No Write, Excute Everyone=Read, No Write, Execute.
Visit the CGI script on your secure address: https://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi
Type in the address of the non-secure item you’re trying to show on your secure site. Uncheck “Show URL entry form”. Click “Begin Browsing”.
After the page loads, you can copy the address from the address bar, and it will be using your secure address.
Should look something like: https://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000000A/http/www.nonsecure-site.com/awesome-page.html
Now paste that address in your site and no more IE warning.

.htaccess tutorial reference and cheat sheet

nick — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:31:19 +0000

Best reference of all things .htaccess perishablepress

Supporting iPhone custom protocols

nick — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:40:53 +0000

The iPhone Safari browser supports several extra protocols to launch their corresponding apps:
Apple documentation on iPhone integration

sms ex. Text this ( Text this ) For SMS texting
tel ex. Phone this ( Phone this ) For regular phone calls
youtube ex. Singing Shiba ( Singing Shiba ) Starting youtube videos
itms ex. ZipCar App ( Items ) ZipCar App
maps ex. CN Tower ( CN Tower ) Launching maps with address marker

HTML 5 and Push technology

nick — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:12:09 +0000

The ability for a user to be on a site and have the web server cause an action to occur on the site, via ‘push technology‘, is soon to be realized at the HTML 5 leve. Although this type of interaction has always been available; through Flash, Java and Javascript. It’s finally being brought-up to the HTML level as noted in W3C documentation. The Stray Orange blog has a good post relating to HTML 5 push technology.

PHP XML ignore whitespace

nick — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:51:44 +0000

$xml_data = preg_replace("/>\s+<", $xml_data);

Removes all the whitespace, tabs and newlines between the nodes from an XML file. A lot of PHP XML parsers tend to parse the white space, which can cause errors. Adding the function before the PHP XML data handler executes will prevent those issues from arising.

Force YouTube to play HQ (high quality) or HD (high definition) link

nick — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:14:49 +0000

Add:&fmt=18 to the end of the YouTube video URL will play the video in HQ (high quality).
Add:&fmt=22 to the end of the YouTube video URL will play the video in HD (high definition).

Regular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA
High Quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA&fmt=18
High Definition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA&fmt=22

If a video is not available in HQ or HD, then they will not be able to be shown in those formats.

HTML5 – A great progression in markup

nick — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:11:47 +0000

Hardly a buzz-word, more the “hail-mary” of markup language progression, HTML5 brings very important tags and standards to the web.
First and foremost, HTML5 solves the question from that last couple of years of what DOCTYPE to use with XHTML.

John Resig (creator of jQuery) has the best write-up on HTML5 link to John Resig site.

HTML5 also brings three new “Flash killer” tags (when I write “Flash killer” I intend that a lot of frivolous reasons people use flash for, will be replaced by these tags, not flash will be gone).

The tag (YouTube demo) will eventually replace Flash Video, and hopefully SilverLight too, because it offers no reliance on Flash and better compatibility with mobile devices of the future. As in it is easier to detect a video format to play based on browser than to have a flash video player mobile device. Also, flash video does have some basic limitation and does sometimes hog more CPU than required to show a video. Especially if you can have a more core level video decompression happening on a machine. One issue that has been popping-up is the age old, what video codec to support. My two cents say, doesn’t really matter, browsers should try to support as many as they can and a clear winner will prevail, hopefully one that doesn’t exist yet. Van Kesteren has a good write-up on the issue, he is a bit biased though.

has less of a struggle, because MP3 is supreme and it would be great to see Soundmanager get an upgrade in using this new tag. This would replace the enormous amount of small flash mp3 players that are scattered about the web.

And