With today's sponsored post, I'd like to talk about an interesting tool or application called the Free Plagiarism Checker. It is designed to quickly search for duplicate content on the web using the 'big three' of search engines (Google or Yahoo or MSN or a collection of all three).
You can paste a section of content, upload a file or point the application to a URL. I tried FAST search, and that seemed to not be working properly. I'm sure the site is still working out a few bugs. When I was referred to this site, it mentioned that this was the article checker blog where it would spotlight interesting article checker captures. At the time of this writing, I've not seen this, but is something to look out for in the future. When you've specified your content, simply click 'Compare' to let the application begin its search. Results are returned as a percentage for duplicate content probability.
If you are concerned about sites scraping content from your site, this would be a good place to start to determine the probability of certain articles. If you are returned a high probability, you would then begin to specifically search for content and track down sites that are scraping.
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Tracking email and newsletters with iContact
This last year, I completed a few web application projects for non-profit organizations and a few ad agencies. They all expressed the need for newsletters and mailing list solutions, but with the ability to track the effectiveness of their newsletters. Looking at a few solutions, I was able to provide a turn-key application that handles this functionality. Again, I always look to for opportunities to sell previously developed services, especially when it's outside our application to save on cost and development time.
Just recently, I just discovered another solution, and with this sponsored post, I would like to talk about iContact Email Marketing Software . iContact gives you a way to easily create, send and track email newsletters, surveys and RSS feeds.
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Host Arcadia
I've discussed web hosting in the past on this blog. I can't stress how important it is to find a quality web host. Depending on your needs, if it's for personal use or business, the proper web host can make or break your site or business. My main focus is for business success with web hosting companies. If you're a developer with clients or a small web development firm, you might not be at the point for dedicated or colocated hosting, and need to rely on reseller services to take advantage of hosting income. With this said, downtime can drastically cut into the hosting income and potential breach the trust between you and your client.
I'm always on the look out for new hosting providers. As I've stated in the past, it's really important to test your hosting providers before moving everything over. I also think that spreading your clients out to various hosting providers is a good way to include some redundancy in your system, and avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket.
With this sponsored post, I'd like to talk about Host Arcadia. They have a very slick web site, and appear to be a new player in the hosting game. I've found that I have better luck with hosting companies that are starting out, versus large over subscribed hosting facilities (I don't want to mention any names... but you should know who I'm talking about).
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MerchantOS
Dealing one to one with multiple small businesses while doing web development or network consulting work, I'm often asked about POS or Point Of Sales systems. There seems to be a large gap between super high end POS (QuickBooks, POS-X, etc) and small open source solutions (OpenPOS, etc). I've often entertained the idea of rolling out my own, but a project like this can quickly develop into a costly beast. I'm always looking for affordable solutions, since they often meet the needs of the client, cost much less than developing one on our own, etc. They do need to meet security requirements and be easy to use.
With this sponsored post, I would like to write about a service I just recently discovered called MerchantOS POS. Now, the item that caught my eye right off was their pricing. They offer subscription based pricing, at extremely affordable rates. If you have a small business, you can be up and rolling at $29.95/month! You will need to buy hardware (printers, card readers, etc), but that should be expected.
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Picturesque - Make Images Gorgeous
As a somewhat new Mac owner, I recently purchased a x86 arch Mac Mini, I've been looking for tools and applications to give me reasons to work on it. The reason I originally purchased the Mac Mini was for application testing, since my customer base using Macs have increased over the years. I feel like I need to see and reproduce a bug before I'm able to fix it, and before owning a Mac, that was impossible.
Macs come with an excellent base of useful software when purchased, but some of the software can only do so much. With this sponsored post, I wanted to talk about a great image application for the Mac called Picturesque - Make Images Gorgeous, by Acqualia.
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Optimizing MySQL with PHP
This code snippet deals with PHP and MySQL. MySQL is a very powerful database and is commonly used in PHP applications. One item that is rarely discussed is optimizing and repairing tables using a query. As you add and delete records, you add overhead to the tables. Basically, this is unused space that MySQL has allocated and cannot get rid of.
If you have a data table that has many adds and deletes, this overhead can become quite large over time. An example of this would be something that monitors stats or logs, etc. Recording Snort alert data is great example! Eventually, your overhead can go into several megabytes or even larger. As this overhead grows, it can impact the performance of the MySQL server.
You can repairs these tables quite easily. I like to handle my database maintenance in the administrative backends of my applications. On the script that handles my CRUD (CReate Update Delete), I like to add a optimizeTables function. This user-defined functions takes one argument, an array of table names.
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Frame capture with PHP and mplayer
So you wanna show screen snaps of your uploaded movies like YouTube, etc?? I was presented with this request from a client, and I thought it would be great to implement it and share what I learned. It's quite easy really.
My environment for this is a Linux server with Apache and PHP installed. Also, there are some caveats here. First off, we need to have mplayer installed on the server. Mplayer is the tool to view the movie and export a frameshot. The next caveat is the ability to run system commands or exec() with PHP. Depending on your hosting platform, that may be removed for security, and you might have trouble accessing the mplayer binary if PHP is running in safe_mode.
If anyone knows of a PECL wrapper or PHP configure option to enable mplayer hooks via PHP, please let me know. At the time of this writing, I was having trouble finding anything like that. I personally, would like to not use exec() or system() in my programming, since that can provide a potential security issue down the road. If you do use those system function please use this function [ escapeshellcmd() ] to sanitize the command passed to it.
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Minalyzer Lite Site Search
I often get asked for search functionality for web applications. Normally, this is a nice easy issue to confront, if all your data is stored in a 'content' table, but let's say we have custom modules outside of our CMS and those areas will need to be search as well. What about documents?
Depending on your search needs the solution can be quite complicated and extensive.
There are some great solutions on the web, and one of the best (free) is Java Lucene. Google makes a search appliance, but comes with a cost. With this sponsored post, I wanted to discus Minalyzer Lite Site Search , which is a command line wrapper on top of Java's Lucene.
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Logo Design Works
When creating web applications, it's important to bring functionality and graphical user experience to centralized shared point. This is a balance that needs to be achieved or your application could suffer in the end. A key piece to creating a visually compelling application to create a identity. Logo creation is a critical piece to web application identity.
With this sponsored post, I'd like to write about a graphic design service that focus on logo design. This business is Logo Design Works (Business Logo Design). I particularily like companies that focus on core strengths rather than say "We can do it all". When a business focus on their strengths, you can usually count on quality and fast work.
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DataStream - CVSReader
People that frequent this site know that I primarily deal with PHP/MySQL development, but I've done serious development in the other core languages. When I initially started, ColdFusion was the first server side 'dynamic' language that I was exposed to. Switching programming firms, I was then required to code in ASP and PHP. Towards then end of my days at that programming firm, we started to do heavy development in ASP.NET, primarily with C#.
I was lucky enough to be able to go out on my own and start my web development venture. Due to hosting costs and programming resources, I decided to stick with PHP/MySQL, but still often dabble in .NET/C# jobs here and there.
With this sponsored post, I would like to discuss DataStreams. They produce and develop a very specific and incredibly useful component library for ASP.NET. The library that they develop is CVSReader. It is currently compatible with all 'active' .NET framework versions (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0). What is interesting to me about this product, is that they focus on speed. The ability to parse CSV and Excel documents have been around for years, but have always been resource intensive and slow. Normally, you need this ability to populate a 'fresh' database, etc, so is only performed a few times. However, if you need to do this on a routine basis, say daily, a bulky CVS reader could really hurt the performance of the site or application.
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