Posts by Dani

Keep in mind, my primary objective right now is to find a way to reinvent DaniWeb for 2017.

It's not going to get you indexed any quicker, but it will help Googlebot to have a deeper understanding of your content. It may result in breadcrumbs and other semantic data being displayed in the search results, which can increase the CTR of your links.

I'm excited I just discovered a way to remove unused MySQL indexes and I wanted to share it with you guys.

I'm following the tutorial here: https://www.percona.com/blog/2012/06/30/find-unused-indexes/

We happened to have already been using a Percona-fork of MySQL. It just so happens that Percona has been our database consultants for over a decade.

Either way, I've been trying to figure out how to do this for awhile now, and so I'm a bit excited and wanted to share. That, and the fact that I'm working on some backend stuff that required me to start a new article in order to test it out.

Well, that's coincidental :)

I was planning on using Dazah to do it ... basically using Dazah's group chat functionality and then attaching metadata to individual messages that consist of the individual key strokes. That should allow me to create a log of the realtime stream and replay it.

Fewer posts about code, more posts about SEO and marketing.

Sorry, I'm misunderstanding. You mean focus on driving traffic to DaniWeb's Digital Marketing category? I'm confused.

It looks like anonymouse is using an older version of Google or something (If you compare the anonymouse'd version of the Google homepage to the current version, you'll see that it's an older snapshot).

Oh, and this works for me: http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.google.com/search?q=php%20programming

I just use /search instead of /webhp

This seems very complicated. Why not just use DuckDuckGo?

From what I understand, they function as a "proxy" in that they simply use Google's search API.

Glad you got it working!

Are you sure you're getting the same error message?? What version of PHP are you using??

Umm ... I don't think CURLOPT_HTTPSHEADER is a known cURL variable. Try doing something like this instead:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Content-Length: ' . strlen($req),
));

I've added links to the most popular tags in each forum on the forum listing pages. I also added a tag cloud to the homepage sidebar. Hopefully this should make it a bit easier to drill down quickly to our most popular tags.

Oh, I just want to point out that my post last night was in bed from my iPhone, and I hadn't scrolled up enough in the conversation to realize he was talking about API documentation and not markdown documentation. Oopsies.

Hi Scott,

I received your email. For everyone else, Scott is actually Sknake, who was active on DaniWeb back in 2009/2010.

I'm on my iPhone and I have an image showing to tell me to hit alt+s to start a new discussion?

Valid point. I didn't think of this, so I'll go ahead and fix it shortly.

I also love how software development has been lumped together. Last time I looked, years ago, you had it as tags.

Yes, it's still broken up into tags. You can currently retrieve the most popular tags for the forum by clicking in the search box and waiting for the dropdown, which isn't very intuitive at all. Moderators have access to a listing of all tags, but it was too resource intensive to make public. I'll have to figure out a way to do that, so thank you for that feedback as well. Because, you're right, there's not an easy way to get to just PHP anymore, short of typing it into the search box.

If you listen to users... or better yet.. use your own product... you will find the shortcomings.

I do listen to users ... I just listened to you, and I'm going to implement your suggestions right away! And I do use DaniWeb myself, but as I'm the one who designed it in the first place, it's often hard to see my own shortcomings, so I rely on feedback as well as …

Maybe the Github javascript injected <link rel="shortcut icon" href="blah blah blah"> into your webpage, and your browser cached that (as it does with favicons).

I took a closer look and it appears the CSS is broken. Can you do a hard refresh or clear the browser cache? That should correct the problem.

Hey guys ...

Over the last year or so that I've been hard at work with Dazah, I've received multiple requests from people offering to help. I am now in way over my head, and I would be eternally grateful for anyone who might be able to offer up their time and skills.

While I continue to work on DaniWeb and the actual Dazah API itself, I have a list of people who all would like to use Dazah, but the only thing in their way is the barrier to entry. Please, please ... if anyone can help me write a Javascript plugin to get these people onboarded onto Dazah just by copying/pasting a few lines of JS code, I would be so eternally grateful.

Here's what I need:

• A JS-based chat plugin based on the Dazah API that people can copy/paste into their websites to give them functionality similar to DaniWeb's private messenger in the form of a little bottom toolbar (think Facebook); To start, it would just have group chat for all of the users of the website, I'm thinking
• You can release it as open source, or you can choose to charge for it (Depending on its complexity) ... But either way, it would be your project all the way

What I can offer:

• A ton of publicity for your plugin, access to the people waiting to use it, which can open doors for potential future clients, etc.

Any takers????? ;)

There was a reason back when we first switched to Markdown from BBCode and I forget specifically what it is. I think it either had something to do with backwards compatibility or it fubar'ing up too many posts. I think it might also be related to the Markdown parser we were using at the time. It was so many years ago, I unfortunately don't recall. And this is the first time in all those years that anyone's ever missed it.

For those of you who remember, the old DaniWeb API went away over the summer when we switched to the Dazah platform. We have a new little API launched now to access articles/posts. However, you can now use Dazah to connect with the entire DaniWeb community.

https://www.daniweb.com/welcome/api

It is with deep regret that I inform everyone that it just very recently came to my attention that the DaniWeb database was breached in December 2015. Over a million user profiles, including email addresses and IP addresses, were stolen. Logins and passwords were protected through an additional security layer and were NOT able to be stolen.

While encrypted versions of passwords were stolen, without access to the old version of DaniWeb's code base, there is no way for a hacker to figure out the very unique encryption method, which included multiple unique salts, which we used.

Please note this attack happened over a year ago. Over the past year, DaniWeb migrated to entirely new infrastructure, a new code base, off of Apache and onto Nginx, and its login mechanism is now powered by Dazah, which is infinitely more secure.

Are you meaning to ask a question or just share the definition from Tutorials Point?

Any entrepreneurs in India out there in Internet land?

I just stumbled upon this article https://developers.google.com/startups/ called the Google Launchpad Accelerator where Google is bringing startups from India all expenses paid for a 2 week accelerator program in Silicon Valley.

Obviously the goal is so that startups will have more of an equal opportunity to compete and promote successful entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Hopefully this helps someone.

I don't mean to troll or spam, but why not just use Dazah to create a chat? It handles all the database stuff.

Hi Dave!!!!! Super welcome back. Of course I remember you ... you were originally from JustLinux, right? Looks like you were last active back in 2006. Wow, was it really that long ago?! We were going super duper strong between 2007 - 2013 or so, and then things started on a terrible downhill spiral.

If you're using bootstrap, you should be able to just add the clearfix class to the page-header, as so:

<div class="page-header clearfix" style="background-color:#A0C9E0;">

If you're not using bootstrap, or as an alternative, you will want to manually add the clearfix right before closing the header, as so:

 <!--   <div id="header"> -->
<div class="page-header" style="background-color:#A0C9E0;">
        This is header
        <div class="userpic">
            <img src="photo96.png" height="55" width="55" />
        </div>
        <div class="userbox">
            <B>Welcome User</B>
            <br />Last Login:
        </div>
        <div style="clear:right"></div>
    </div>
    <!--Header closed-->

You may have noticed that messaging about earning rewards points that can be cashed out for real dollars has just now been removed from various pages.

It's not that I've completely called quits on the idea. When we switched over to the new platform, it was always in the pipeline to reintroduce the functionality. It's just that DaniWeb is really struggling nowadays, and it's really hard to be able to split what little revenue we do generate with you guys, no matter how special and appreciative I am. I've removed the messaging for now because I wasn't expecting to not have the functionality as long as we did, and it got to the point where it was just outright deceitful by keeping it up there. Hopefully one day soon this functionality will return!!

A lot of it has to do, not just with targeting the right demographics, but exactly how you are targeting.

For example, Google AdWords offers two primary ways of targeting (let's take TV ads out of the equation for now): You can advertise on Google search results, or you can advertise on Google AdSense partners / publishers. Depending on the call-to-action of your ad, you would want to target each one for a different use case. People who click on ads from the Google search results are in the middle of trying to get the answer to something ... they're not going to detour so quickly. On the other hand, an ad at the bottom of an article on a website is properly suited for a website visitor who is looking for the next interesting thing to check out. Now let's talk about Facebook ... put yourself into the mindset of someone casually browsing their Facebook wall. Perhaps they're bored at work. Perhaps they're looking for the next interesting thing. By this logic, a very niche, focused article on DaniWeb that might solve a specific algorithm issue would be something of great use to people who are specifically searching for it in Google, but wouldn't be something people would be interested in reading should they casually come across it when they're looking for interesting / light reading.

Our secret sauce is that we have a formula that can be trained to work across any industry or niche.

In our case, there is much more as to why you haven't been picked than your expertise in a certain programming language. In fact, we don't typically pick the top people. Much more important are the aspects of instant gratification that we are able to offer question askers. Upon asking a question, we want to hook them up with people who happen to be online, were online just recently, are "scheduled" to return soon based on behavior patterns, or have a proven track record of tending to return quickly upon receiving email notifications from us. Other things we look for are whether they responded to questions about similar topics in the past, how responsive they tend to be, whether they have had previous encounters with the question askerer, etc. For example, if you tend to ignore newbie questions, or questions asked by certain people in particular, we won't alert you when they are looking for help.

While every community and niche that uses Dazah obviously will have different needs, there is one thing that always will hold true: and that is that, regardless of the reasons you're looking to interact with someone, people always want as close as possible to instant gratification. By analyzing past behavior patterns, we are able to use machine learning to discover patterns between whom chooses to interact with whom, and what may trigger …

Google offers a lot of free functionality ... such as a CDN to serve jQuery, Google fonts, reCaptcha, Analytics, DFP, etc.

A lot of these features are designed to create google's vision of what the web should be like, accessibility, UX, etc.

Does google data mine? Absolutely. Does that mean you shouldn't use it? Not in my book. Other opinions may vary.

No problem. I figured it was a typo or something like that. Cheers.

Done deal.

There's a history of the edit that moderators can see. There's currently not a public flag saying the post was edited. We should have one, you think? I believe we used to.

While I'm certainly not disagreeing about this particular instance, personally I don't think that it's always best practice to never duplicate data in a database. There are many instances in which it's beneficial to denormalize your data, being that CPU resources are much more expensive than hdd space. Sometimes it's the more efficient solution to save yourself from large and resource intensive table joins in favor of duplicating columns across tables. I speak from MySQL experience. Not sure if MS SQL is entirely a different beast entirely.

Sounds about right. Ok, I know what I need to do to fix it.

I use jQuery UI tooltip for the autocomplete for tagging and member usernames.

Is it possible you logged into Dazah from Camden once upon a time?

Ooooh, we used to do this, but then we switched from Apache to Nginx, and Nginx doesn't use .htaccess files. I think we did something along these lines:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^daniweb.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.daniweb.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

I wish I could just pull up the exact rules I had. :( Hope this helps.

For a long time, it's been a web design no-no to use black fonts on a white background. I don't know the specific reason, but it just looks "off" ... DaniWeb has been using grey fonts for well over a decade. I do agree, though, that the Google example linked to really takes it to the extreme.

Something like this should do the trick ...

div {
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
    overflow-x: hidden;
    white-space: nowrap;
}

I met up with him in person here in Silicon Valley (where I currently reside part time) earlier this year.

HI Connie. Welcome to DaniWeb! Firstly, one of the biggest differences between DaniWeb and SO is that we're an interactive community that encourages discussion. ;)

That being said, there are a lot of OAuth libraries that exist already across a wide variety of languages. I don't use .NET, but I'm sure that you should be able to get SSO working with only a few hours of work? Other than that, a second alternative, as you suggest, would be token-based. I guess the absolute simplest thing to implement would be to randomly generate a key and hard-code an encrypted version of it in a file somewhere on the server. Require a key to be passed in as a parameter or as part of the HTTP header with every request. Ensure that an encrypted version of the plaintext version passed in matches the encrypted version stored on the server. Do this check first thing on every request that comes in.

That being said, I think an existing OAuth library would be simpler and out-of-the-box. Besides, I'm a big fan of doing things right the first time so you won't have to go back and do them again later on. In other words, go the SSO route. ;)

Has to copy cookie to from working login,to other computer just to get login to work.
So not been happy with this Dazah change,have not been active here for a while to.

I'm not able to fix problems unless people tell me about them :(

Do you by any chance have lots of instances of DaniWeb open? Many browser tabs? Open on multiple computers? etc.

It depends who your visitors are. If your site, for example, targets housewives, what percentage of them are likely to have a website to link to?

The best way to build a link strategy is by doing something extraordinary ... something that will get bloggers to write about you; that will get people on social media talking about you; etc. If you have a lot of articles on your site, including social sharing widgets like 'share on facebook' or 'share on twitter' are also a great way to get links.

What I absolutely love about the web is the relatively low barrier to entry. Anyone with a good idea and some hard work can start their own website. With all these good ideas coming to fruitition, it keeps the established sites constantly on their toes. They can be dethroned anytime something better comes along.

Bug fixed. Sorry for taking so long.

DaniWeb and Dazah are both written with CodeIgniter. I'm pretty experienced with 2.x as well as 3.x. What's up?

I'm trying to design a landing page for my API product, and it seriously is lacking any images. Where are the best places to get those Photoshop-ready backdrops that all of the paid themes seem to have? Deviant Art? Looking for ones that are optimized for this sorta thing, and will easily accept some large font writing on them while still being readable.

Bug fixed.

OK, I am able to reproduce it. I will investigate :)

Bug fixed.