This week, I’m testing out the new PhpBMS software. It’s an online system into which you enter all kinds of client details, including meeting schedules, deadlines and invoicing. It’s not bad for something which you want to use for viewing important client details at a glance. And it uses AJAX too.
http://kreotek.com/products/phpbms/
I’ve been playing around with Zohoplanner and I think I’m going to be using it more often to get things organised. It is an online interface that lets you create todo lists and make notes. There are a few things that I hope they will add later like a wiki like Schtuff.com has. (I love wikis. They’re just so easy to use and my MoinX desktop wiki has taken over as my favourite desktop publishing interface.) Zohoplanner also allows people to view your lists and notes, but it doesn’t have RSS feeds for updates.
Chris Josephes writes in Oreillynet about an interesting method for finding out if an image that one of your visitors is hotlinking is instead sending a substituted image. Hotlinking is often a danger in forums and blog comments where there is no preset control over what is posted.
Chris says:
If any site user makes a posting that inlines images from a third party server, the editing software should retrieve the image twice using the HTTP HEAD method. For the first retrieval, don’t pass a Referer header. For the second retrieval, set a Referer header that would reference the full URL of the page that would eventually load the image. For both requests, the HTTP server headers Content-Length and ETag should return identical values. If they don’t, that means the web server is sending out different files. Make sure the comment poster is aware of this, and give them the opportunity to correct the problem.
This would be really nice if someone used this method in a plugin for blog CMSes.
Written using Ruby on Rails, Tagifieds.com could quite possibly be a work of genius. I haven’t decided yet. It’s still too new and I haven’t seen the full potential of it yet. In the “About” section, the creator insists that “It’s great for online classifieds, recipes, reviews, rants, scrapbooks, and useful information of all kinds.” Yes, it can be used for all those things, but I’m not sure whether this is the perfect format for any of them. It is a bulletin board, but more in the sense of the corkboard kind with all its chaos, not like the online kind which is often known as a forum. All the posts appear on the front page. And without categories, it may be hard to browse for things — you have to use the search function instead.
Bharat Mediratta and his team of developers have released a stable version 2 of their popular Gallery software. It looks like their new features include some moblogging support, theme support, watermark support, but otherwise it seems to be mostly backend improvements and bug fixes. Get your copy today.
A few months ago, Kafkaesquí found that like myself the Wordpress Codex was missing a major section — a reference guide to template tags, like the ones in the addendum of most programming manuals. Luckily Kafkaesquí made the effort to rectify that mistake and published his list for everyone. Thanks, Kafkaesquí!