A single kill switch for 90% of the top ten websites

There are hundreds of domain name registrars you can choose to register your website domain name with. EG: Gandi, Namecheap, Godaddy to name a few popular ones. However, we recently had a couple of clients who use markmonitor as their domain name registrar. Looking around on markmonitor website and searching through the whois records revealed […]

Using a mobile device to control a game on your browser

Accelerometer support is available in Mobile Safari and all new android devices. This enables the browser to sense movement, speed and direction with Javascript on mobile & tablet devices. If we push the movement data from the mobile device instantly through a nodejs server to a browser, then we can control a game on the browser. This is […]

Cool new stuff in PHP 5.4

PHP 5.4 was released yesterday. It took nearly 2 years since the release of version 5.3 and has been a huge undertaking. Congratulations to the guys that made it happen. Let’s take a look at the features: 1) Speed PHP 5.4 is the fastest of all PHP versions. Benchmarks both Synthetic and real-life show a […]

Build better facebook pages with iframe tabs

There are two major changes announced for Facebook pages. The most prominent is the change to the the layout and fan page design (forced update due on March 10th 2011). The second is that Facebook pages now support iframes. This means that developers are free to use popular, simple and standards-based web programming model (HTML, […]

Retain leading zero in CSV

Most web applications at some point will have some sort of an export data feature to get data out of the database in some csv or excel format. CSV is probably the simplest to generate on the fly from PHP and other server side scripting languages. However, I had a particular issue where leading zeros […]

Creating a custom facebook fan page

A Facebook Page is a public Profile that enables information about business and products to be shared with Facebook users and the public. An user should be able to create one in a few minutes. This article explains how to add custom tabs to your Facebook page to make it do more. Here we explain […]

Get your own cloud server running in 15 minutes

This article uses Amazon EC2 and does not require any additional software installed on your machine to get your own cloud instance running other than your browser. To further configure your instance once it is running you will need Putty or an RDP client depending on your server instance. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is […]

Javascript Gotchas listed to help avoid mistakes

A gotcha in programming is something unexpected although a documented feature of a computer system and not a bug. These gotchas throw beginners off Javascript programming and send some people running and screaming. In my opinion, Javascript is one of the most widespread languages as it is available on all browsers but one of the least learned languages.  Let’s […]

Understanding FTP using raw FTP commands and telnet

Both FTP and SMTP are simple text based protocols. A previous article showed how to check if an email address exists using SMTP commands from the terminal. Here I would like to show you how you can use raw FTP commands to connect to an FTP server, login, traverse directories and even download files. But […]

Avoid Javascript blocking content download on your website during page load

Around 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. A fair share of this time is spent on downloading components of the page like scripts, Flash, stylesheets, images etc.  Javascript takes majority of the loading time of a webpage because scripts block parallel downloading and rendering in the page. Even if you do not have […]