The day CafePress ceased to be appealing

Yesterday was a very sad day. For some, a tragedy. Millions of CafePress shopkeepers were shocked when they read an e-mail from CafePress announcing imminent changes in their policies, mainly concerning the markup scheme of items on sale. I am one of them as well.

Basically, the deal is that shopkeepers – starting June 1st – will no longer have the right to set their own markups on their designs: they must resign themselves to obtain a mere 10% of the sale price in the Marketplace (fixed by CafePress, of course).

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Two methods for generating random strings and passwords

Many websites and boards, upon registration, send the new users an e-mail with their user name and a random password. This is just one of the many purposes for which generating a random string or password is useful.

Ever wondered how this is done? Actually, with PHP, it’s very easy. I will explain you two ways of doing so, and provide the necessary code for you to have the script up and running immediately; you may use the one which suits your needs most. Of course, those are not the only ways to achieve the same goal, but are very effective and in the same time, easy to understand. Note that in this post, the random string will be used as password.

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The dark side of AJAX

Today I’d like to share an interesting article written by Earle Castledine back in 2005, where he considers the potential risks that certain implementations of AJAX pose to the security and privacy of web users. It is titled “Using the XMLHttpRequest Object and AJAX to Spy On You”.

“Currently, user profiling helps Web site owners detect trends, track page viewing habits and iron out usability problems. Until now though, developers could only analyze posted data—data that users decided they wanted the server to get, and were happy to send off for processing. But in a subtle shift, this balance of power has changed hands. With AJAX, a user’s actions can be constantly and meticulously monitored. Because it can be done, it will be done, and that will lead to a headache bigger than just wasted bandwidth, terabytes of useless information, and slower page load times…”.

Read the full article here.

Performing MySQL queries with the help of AJAX

Back to AJAX! This tutorial is a reply to a question posted in Experts Exchange, and therefore it has a very specific scope. However, taking into consideration it may prove to be useful to many, I decide to share it with you all.

What this tutorial explains is how to perform asynchronously MySQL actions with AJAX, using GET variables and an external PHP page. It may sound super-complex, but it is not. As usual, I provide the full code of the script and a working demo which you can see here.

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Getting syntax highlighting plugins to work correctly with certain WordPress themes

Happy April 1st! Note however that this is serious content; in my country we celebrate fools day the 28th December instead

If you’re running a WordPress blog, some themes – including the one used in this blog, which is Gear theme – might give you headaches when using syntax highlighting plugins (namely, plugins for showing source code in a well-organized and nicely formatted way). The problem? The code displayed is completely messed up. As far as I know, this happens with different plugins, and all of them are based on Alex Gorbatchev’s syntax highlighter. Read the rest of this entry »