Tim Matheson Blog - Productive Tips and More

I spoke with Gina Trapani on Wednesday about my concerns on this issue. The problem is that many online shops are using hidden fields in forms to pass information such as pricing, shipping, and quantity to their online checkout systems. Now I love Google Checkout for its sheer simple integration methods, but there is also an option to auto approve the payment and this concerns me. So I am writing to you today to illustrate some of the methods I have came up with which will hopefully prevent this sort of attack. Here are three ways you can circumvent this little flaw in many online stores.
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SpeedTest.net is a cool way to test your internet connection speed online. Simply select a server to test and speed test does all the work in an awesome Flash based web application. Speed Test features a speedometer to show you the speed and is a very cool way to do an internet speed test. I highly recommend it, Speed Test is simple to use and just plain cool.

Link: http://www.speedtest.net

Need an XML sitemap for your site but don’t want the hassel of doing it by hand? If so the XML Sitemap generator has got your back. The XML sitemap generator allows you to spider and create a sitemap for upto 500 pages and with their premium service you can create a sitemap for an unlimited number of pages. This is a really cool tool if you need to make a Google Sitemap for your site.

Link: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Need a quick way to drown out distracting noise and get more work done? Then head on over to listen to a movie and select a movie from one of the various titles they have to offer. The service allows you to listen to the audio of any movie they provide for free. As an additional tip you could use some headphones to listen to movies and potentially drown out distracting co-workers, instant messages, and annoying telemarketers that can disrupt your productive day. I personally love this service and it some what takes me back to the days where books on tape were cool.

Listentoamovie.com

If you’re a web designer or frequently use CSS in your projects then you will love typetester.com. Typetester allows you to try out different CSS typography settings on one page with a simple interface. You can adjust size, leading, word-space, color, background, font etc. all on one page. Typetester also allows you to use your own text or the predefined place holder text. This is a must for anyone who wants to compare a CSS design before deploying it on a client or personal web site. This is definitely one of my personal favorite Web 2.0 applications.

Link Typetester.com

Tracks is a new Web 2.0 GTD application (Ruby on Rails required) that will get you on the right track. I personally use tracks as my GTD application and am quite fond of it. I find Tracks to be easy enough to use not to slow or even halt productivity like some GTD applications.

Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology.

Link Via Rousette.org.uk

Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that allows you to synchronize your Firefox bookmarks to another computer. If you are able to run Firefox at work and want an easy way to keep your bookmarks in order then this is for you. Foxmarks requires you have an account to use it. The account is free and allows you to use it virtually anywhere you have Firefox and Foxmarks running.

The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. It also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com.

Foxmarks

First off I would just like to appologize to my readers for my lack of fresh posts. I have been working on multiple projects. With that said here is a new tip for all you MSN messenger fans.

I have yet to try this method. It just sort of came to me the other day so i decided to write it down.

My cellphone has an email address and no I will not post it. But it looks something like this XXXXXXXXXX@email.uscc.net where the X represents the number. Now there are several different email domains for different providers and I have drummed up a list of them and provide it at the bottom of this post.

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PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham.

I use putty alot and really find it usefull. Download PuTTY here

–Tim Matheson

When we use the internet to look for resources, shop for gifts, and other online activities every aspect of your surfing habits are usually stored in a sites web server logs including IP address, browser type, operating system, and even what site you came from. For some this may be no problem, for others it is a direct invasion of privacy. Well now you can surf anonymously using www.anonymouse.org. There are a lot of these types of proxy sites which allow your IP and computer information to be masked. If you are concerned about your privacy online you might want to use one. If you are really concerned about privacy there is software such as hideip that run on your computer continuously masking your info using different proxy servers.

Forecastfox Enhanced is an excellent addition to the Firefox browser. This little extension will display your local weather forecast continuously in your browser’s status bar.

Adding bulk watermark’s in Photoshop

You have just finished taking some digital photo’s with your new digital camera and want to share them on say Flickr.com. Adding watermarks to photo’s is always a good idea, especially when they are of high quality and or high resolution. Creating the watermark’s by hand would take forever right? Wrong, thanks to Photoshop’s Actions palette you can write a simple action to automate the task.

Getting Started

Open up a file to work with while we complete the initial steps for creating the action. The action palette has five functions stop, play, record, new, and delete. Start by clicking on the new button in the actions palette and name it watermark as shown below.

You will also notice I selected Shit and F9 as my function key. A function key is a key combination defined in an action. When the key combo or hot key’s are pressed the action is executed.

When finished, click the record button to the right of the dialog box. Your actions are now being recorded so begin the process of creating your watermark. Select the type tool and choose a font, size, and color from the type toolbar. Also be sure to select Right Align Text tab shown below. Set the opacity to a lower value as shown below.

When you get your watermark looking the way you want it you can press the stop button on the actions palette. Your action is now ready to use on any photo you like. Since we selected Right Align Text our watermark text will always be in the same position regardless of the photo dimensions.

[TAGS]Photoshop Tutorials, Watermarks, Copyright Image Tutorial, Graphic Design, Photography[/TAGS]

Anyone who has used a web statistics program should understand that to a competitor the statistical data found in a web stats page is very valuable. Something this valuable should be kept safe from prying eyes right. Well in some cases web stats can be extremely insecure and need further configuration beyond the default settings. This article deals mainly with the Awstats program. I am most familiar with Awstats and I am sure the majority of readers are too. With that said lets get started.

Overview

• How to search for web statistics via Google Hacking
• Ways to prevent your stats from becoming public.

How it works

Ok go to Google and do a search for inurl:”awstats.pl” I came up with 296,000 pages with public stats using just that search string. As you can see everything about these sites is made public thanks to Google and poor web administration practices. So now you see the problem, now I am going to show you some methods to prevent this sort of snooping on your own site.

How to prevent it

First and foremost many websites are hosted on shared hosting accounts. The web stats are installed either automatically or using some sort of installer such as Fantastico etc. For these users you will need to start by contacting your web host. Some other methods of preventing you web stats being made public are to restrict search indexing of the cgi-bin and other sensitive directories within your web space using a Robots.txt file. This will prevent search spiders such as Google and the like from spidering your stats pages. Another way would be to use .htaccess to prevent access to that directory all together. For the purpose of example and simplicity I will explain only the latter. The Robots.txt file mentioned before is a simple text file that search engines look for as a set of guidelines for proper indexing of the site. The Robots.txt file tells the spider where it is welcome and where it is not welcome. Now I am not going to go into major details on how to setup a Robots.txt file. I will give a quick overview on how to protect your cgi-bin with a Robots.txt file. First things first start by creating a plain text document in the root folder of your site and name it robots.txt. Open the file and on the first line type User-agent: * then on the second line type Disallow: /cgi-bin . Explanation : Ok so the first line tells me the user agent (i.e. the search engine reading the file). Using a star or “wildcard” makes the rule apply to all spiders. There are literally thousands of spiders out there so here is a list of spiders I found

Most Well Known Spiders

• GOOGLEBOT - http://www.google.com
• SLURP - http://www.yahoo.com
• MSNBOT - http://www.msn.com

Ok so far we have learned how to make a robots.txt file that will disallow all spiders from spidering out cgi-bin directory(I chose this directory because it is the primary location where most stats scripts are installed). Now let’s learn how to disallow just one spider.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin

ok the above instructions tell Googlebot the spider to exclude the /cgi-bin directory of the site from its crawl. You can change the user agent to whatever spider you want and set specific instructions for the spider.

This is by no means the most secure way of preventing access to your cgi-bin folder. It is however a simple precaution to make the public viewing of your stats pages less probable. To prevent access using a more secure method use the .htaccess file to restrict access to the directory.

I hope that this tutorial has brought to the attention of web master’s that their competition could very well know their next move or even their latest clients and should take precautionary steps to prevent it.

Ok folks this has gotta be one of the best tools out there right now. Anyone who has ever tried to configure PHP, Apache and or MySQL on there local machine and has failed can appreciate this installation. Basically what this application will do in a nutshell is install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on any Windows or OSX based machine with just a few clicks and a question or two your done. Now you can finally get back to what you love doin and forget about the rest. This tool has made my life 110% easier and best of all it’s free. This is great for anyone just wanting a quick database system for testing sites locally. My development tool of choice is Dreamweaver 8 if any of you are out there wondering. Enjoy the application and stay tuned for more great development app’s. Download WAMP SERVER!

I recently found this great tool from Medialabs called psd2fla. Psd2fla is an Adobe Photoshop plugin that allows yo to export your Photoshop document directly to Flash and still maintain the integrity of the layers in the original photoshop document. This has got to be one of my favorite Adobe Photoshop Plugins yet. I love it and there is a demo version of the plugin available here PSD2FLA

I would just like to remind everyone that I am still doing web development on a corporate and non corporate level. If your company is looking for a web designer or web developer please contact Tim Matheson by email.

• Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite
• Adobe Illustrator Creative Suite
• Adobe After Effects 6.5 Pro
• Macromedia Dreamweaver 8
• Macromedia Flash 8 Professional
• Macromedia FreeHand
• Macromedia Cold Fusion
• 3DS Max 6 & 7
• Particle Illusion
• SEO organic and non-organic methods

I am looking to take on some new projects so if your interested in developing a new or existing website please let me know. I have been designing for the web for the past 8 years.