A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
Development
What I learned from my first OWASP meeting (or why I will never use PHP Nuke)
Jul 6th
I just got home from attending my first meeting of the Phoenix chapter of OWASP. WOW!!! That’s all I have to say. The guest speaker was Mike Brooks, currently the top answerer and asker of security questions on Stack Overflow, who will be giving the same talk at the upcoming DEF CON 18. Mike gave an amazing presentation on chaining vulnerabilities in order to bypass layered security systems and ways of obtaining wormable remote code execution on a modern LAMP platform.
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Improve the performance of the WordPress plugin Statpress (and your blog)
Jul 3rd
I haven’t hid my feelings about the poor performing StatPress plugin for WordPress. However, performance issues aside, I will say that the information this plugin provides is useful, and detailed. I’ve been running this plugin for 8 months now and have a good sized data set (125,000+ rows of data). While I myself have not experienced as many issues with this plugin as I have seen on other blogs, it is mainly because I am running my blog on a virtual dedicated server as opposed to shared hosting. I have seen smaller data sets than mine cause problems on shared hosting servers.
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jQuery tabbed content switcher
Jun 27th
Eat your heart out Sir Alexander Fleming! While my accidental invention of a jQuery tabbed content switcher may not be up there with penicillin, the pacemaker, and post-it notes, it sure did wonders for my latest web design project.
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Our first WordPress Plugin: WordPress Woot Watcher
Feb 17th
In conjunction with Lee Thompson of MySQLHow2.com, we have released our first WordPress Plugin:
WordPress Woot Watcher
WordPress Woot Watcher, will monitor and check woot, shirt.woot, kids.woot, wine.woot and sellout.woot for new products every 10 hours. When a woot-off is launched, the widget will update the woot product every 30 seconds. WordPress Woot Watcher is a sidebar widget that enables select the woot sites you want to monitor in the administration section. The default installation selects woot.com only.
For all the details, installation, and more, visit the WordPress Woot Watcher page.
How to append values to an array in bash
Feb 4th
Last week I was working on a bash script for a project at work. The script parsed through a log file with server load and disk usage statistics at regular intervals. The script was calculating the average CPU idle time, disk utilization, and disk usage for servers. After calculating the averages for each of these three metrics, I then proceeded to loop through all the lines in the file and create an array of all the times when the CPU idle time was below average, or the disk utilization or usage was above average.
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Avoid WordPress StatPress plugin like the plague!
Dec 2nd
** Update: I have released my first set of updates to the StatPress plugin. Check out the post for code to improve your blogs performance of StatPress
The WordPress plugin StatPress is an absolutely horrid plugin to use. Yes, I said it…horrid! After seeing many people praising this plugin on their sites, this is a bold statement.
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New website launch: OneWordSurveys.com
Oct 19th
Desert Web Designs is pleased to announce the launch of our latest site:
OneWordSurveys.com
The Site
OneWordSurveys.com is a site as simple as it’s concept: Simple (one word) answers to simple questions. The site poses simple questions to users, all with one word answers. Questions like “Soda or Pop?”, “Coke or Pepsi?”, “Biscuits or Muffins?”, and much, much more. The site also provides a means for users to submit their own surveys as well.
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Lots of Upcoming Projects
Jul 13th
So all of my dedicated readers out there (both of you) who may be wondering where the posts have been, you can rest easy easier. I have been working on a number of pretty big projects lately that have been taking up most of my time and just started another one. I’ll try to continue posting as often as I can during this development time, but as you can see, they have slipped a bit. I’m excited about all the projects I have and will post them here, of course, once completed, and maybe even some progress updates.
How to Post to Twitter from a Linux Shell
Jun 18th
I had a little downtime today at work and decided to write a shell script that I could use to tweet from the shell of my Linux server. The reason is that Twitter is one of many social networking sites that is blocked at my workplace. However, I do have access to my server and found a great one-liner on commandlinefu.com to update twitter via curl. I decided to expand on this a bit and wrote a shell script that offers a bit more than merely posting a tweet. Check out my shell script to post to Twitter here.
New GreaseMonkey Script: Highlight your Domain in Search Results
Jun 17th
I completed my first GreaseMonkey script for public release tonight. For those who don’t use it, or have not heard of it, GreaseMonkey is a Firefox Add-on that allows users to write or install custom javascripts to alter the way a website functions. It is one of Firefox’s most popular add-ons with over 20 million downloads. Literally thousands of GreaseMonkey scripts are available at userscripts.org and new scripts are added constantly.
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