Excerpt: Everyone knows what Spam is. We all get unsolicited emails every day, and dealing with spam has never been a bigger battle. Having a website that has any type of form means you are after opening a gate for spam. Trying to close that gate and keep it close, for some people is a full-time job. Below are some solutions that I found helpful: 1. Set a variable that will hold a number let's say 6. Set-up a session on form submission and increase the count by one anytime the form gets submitted by the same user, then check to see if it's not equal or bigger then the variable you have set. If it is, display a message or redirect. This is useful on contact forms. 2. On any other type of forms, like search, make sure you check the value of the submitted fields not to contain an email address this can be easily done.  e.g using php: if(eregi( "^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $_GET["field_name"])){   echo "You are not going to find an email address in the products table. Get real.";   die(); } 3. Limit the amount of data a user can type into the form field by using the input attribute maxlength="50".  You'll be surprised how much you can type into an input field that has no "maxlenght" applied. e.g.If you have a qty. field for a product to be added to the shopping cart you can limit the amount of data to 3 - maxlenght="3".  Who would buy more then 999 products at a time? 4. Few months ago I was getting a lot of r
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Excerpt: No matter how much you try there will always be the day when you make a mistake in your sql accessing the database. Sometimes queries are based on some sort of session which, if it times-out the next query to the database will show an error instead of getting the result expected. Sometimes the query comes from an old page in the Search Engines, the possibilities are unlimited. Showing a Sql error to the visitor, could mean a lost customer, giving out too much details that are not meant to be seen, etc... The biggest problem is "How do you know you have made a mistake?" The solution is to send yourself an email when that happens and instead of the error message displayed on the page, you can write a nice message to the visitor that he will accept quicker then "The page can not be displayed".  Not many visitors knows how to go back to your Home Page if there are no links that will redirect them there. There is a simple example bellow that will do just that. function ewd_db_connect($HOST,$USER,$PASS,$DB) { $conn = @mysql_connect($HOST, $USER, $PASS) or die(ewd_error($sSql="No Connection to the database")); @mysql_select_db($DB) or die(ewd_error($sSql="No Connection to the database")); return $conn; } function ewd_db_close($conn){ mysql_close($conn); } function ewd_query($strsql,$conn) { $rs = mysql_query($strsql,$conn); return $rs; } function ewd_num_rows($rs) { return @mysql_num_rows($rs); } function ewd_fetch_array($rs) {
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Excerpt: Recently I came across a website that  was displaying one of my pages in their own frame set which made it difficult to store the shopping cart session and was breaking the website functionality as well. The solution was a small piece of Javascript added between the HEAD tags to remove all frames: This script checks to see if the current page is the "top" page. If it is not, it tells the web browser to load the current web page as the top, thus wiping out any frames. Of course, this script won't work with browsers that don't understand scripting, or where scripting is turned off, but the script will work on most browsers, and that makes it a pretty effective deterrent
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Excerpt: Recently I started a new AdWords campaign, and because the bids where hight on certain keywords / phrase, I have made an adwords tracking system for the campaign.  Just wanted to know what the hack is going on, especially when 1 click could cost you as much as 5.00euro  or more for a decent position (6-9). Not even 12 hours later, had a look at the log file and here is what I found: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)  | ip-78.16.2.*** | 2007-05-30 22:30:35 ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0) | ip-78.16.2.*** | 2007-05-30 22:32:48 ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0) | ip-78.16.2.*** | 2007-05-30 22:33:30 ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0) | ip-78.16.2.*** | 2007-05-30 22:35:19 ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0) | ip-78.16.2.*** | 2007-05-30 22:50:28 ad id | ad name | no_kw_name | referer Mozilla/4.0 (compa
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Excerpt: Google AdWords is a PPC (Pay Per Click)  advertising program started by Google Search Engine a few years back. Is a quick way of getting visitors to your website, especially new websites that want to draw visitors or for launching new product/s, etc. The ads appear at the top and right hand side of the Google Search page, as Sponsored Links on keywords / key phrases that you choose as per image below. You can get visitors to your website for as low as 0.03 Euro per click.  It is Free to advertise and you only pay when your ad has been clicked, so if the impressions of your AdWords ad is 500 and you only got 5 clicks at 0.03 Euro the total own to Google is 0.15 Euro.   Hey, that's a small price to pay for on-line advertising if that click could turn into a new customer, but it also has its drawbacks. The secret of running a proper AdWords campaign lies in your chosen keywords and phrases, the copy of your ad, landing page, and much more. Choosing the wrong keywords or phrases could get you clicks but not customers and then you wonder why? One reason is that the landing page is not properly  formated or it has no relation between the keyword that your visitors used in his/her search.Also not having the right ad copy or keywords / phrases could get a lot of impressions but no clicks, and if the CTR (clickthrough rate) goes below 0.05% Google could disable your AdWords campaign. The biggest mistakes that people make in their Google AdWords campai
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