“Many JavaScript libraries use $ as a function or variable name, just as jQuery does. In jQuery’s case, $ is just an alias for jQuery, so all functionality is available without using $. If we need to use another JavaScript library alongside jQuery, we can return control of $ back to the other library with a call to $.noConflict():”

<script type="text/javascript" src="other_lib.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $.noConflict();
  jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
    // Code that uses jQuery's $ can follow here.
  });
  // Code that uses other library's $ can follow here.
</script>

It’s simple as that. It’s simply why the rest of the world and I love jQuery..!!
More info can be found here

This blog post is not about the real ones, but the clones who try to ride the luck of their successors. Anyone with a basic Web Development knowledge can setup such Websites. A lot of companies and individuals saw this as an opportunity to make money online and started to set up more and more of those. The main objective of course is to generate content that would increase their revenue through click/impression ads and various other forms of advertisements.

These Websites wanted to make themselves look real. So they took the easy way out. They started grabbing advertisement posted by sellers on most popular Websites. They even grabbed ads from print media to generate content on their Website.

Sellers were affected by these clones. Specially if you are someone who occasionally sell your used goodies. You are supposed to remove your ad once the item has been sold. But when you still get inquiries for the items you have already sold, you tend to realize your advertisement appearing on Websites that you didn’t even think of advertising.

I’m quite used to sell my used electronic goodies using a popular Website and removed the ad once the item was sold. To my annoyance I still get calls asking for my laptop I sold almost 2 years back. The list goes on for my camera, monitor etc.. In January this year I put an ad to sell my car and then decided not to. Despite the ad being removed for almost a year, I still get calls and the recent one being last week. While I can google and find where my ad exist but I cannot remove them coz I didn’t put them there in the first place.

Actually its quite a sad situation. Whether to give out our mobile number is a tough call we need to make when advertising our goodies for sale. It’s likely that most of them won’t contact us via Email if they only find an Email address as a contact point. What are your thoughts and experience in the matter?

Maintaining and monitoring your WordPress site requires performing certain tasks on a regular basis. The term regular will depend on how often your Website gets updated. Depending on the frequency you will need to plan this out. If you run a Website that gets updated daily (eg: news), then taking daily backups is a high priority. Performing these tasks manually can become a tedious process. There are plenty of tools and techniques available to automate them.

Monitoring a Website

You might want to use a Website Monitoring Service to check whether your website is up and running. There are plenty of services over the Internet if you Google for it. These services offer monitoring your Web Server (HTTP), FTP, Mail Server (POP & SMTP), SSL, DNS and custom TCP ports on regular intervals. If any of these don’t respond, the service will alert you via Email or SMS. Most of them offer limited options for free while you need to pay based on the additional services you require. This type of monitoring is not WordPress specific and can apply to any Wesbite.

If you are a developer you can code your own monitoring system which will be cost efficient and can be expandable according to your monitoring requirements. Using socket functions and tools like curl can assist in doing that.

In any of the case above, you will need to specify the port of the service you wish to monitor. In certain cases, the port can occasionally differ from the default port that particular service would run depending on how it is configured on your Server. So you need to specify the correct one.

There is one instance that most of the Bloggers/Web Developers fail to address. While your Web Server/Apache might run smoothly, there is a possibility that your database might not respond. This can happen when your DB gets corrupted, privileges get messed up or your MySQL Server crashes for some reason. In this case WordPress will send you this ugly message on a plain white page.

It’s not suitable to show an error message of this nature to your visitors. Most importantly the HTTP status code for this response is 200, which means Search Engines will pick it up as your content for the site. If this message hangs on for long, you will get indexed on Google with this Error Message.

Here is how you can display a custom error message with your design template and get notified at the same time when your DB doesn’t respond.

Create a file called db-error.php and store that file under the wp-contents folder.
The contents of the file should be..

header("HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Server Error");
mail("webmaster@mydomain.com", "DB fail", "Down at : ".date("Y-m-d H:i:s"));
echo "<html>Your customer error message with yout HTML template</html>";

It’s that simple..!

WordPress will execute the above script when the DB doesn’t respond. The first line will send the HTTP response code 500 (Internal Server Error) so that Search Engines won’t index it. The next line will send an email to you, notifying the time the DB went down. Third line will output the HTML of your template where you can include a custom error message. You can extend this piece of code to fit into your needs. Instead of Email, you could use SMS/Twitter to get instantly notified.

Backup

Taking regular backups of your WordPress installation and most importantly the database regularly will help to restore your Website within minutes if any data loss occurs. A hard disk crash, server failure or even a hacker wiping out all your data can be some of the reasons how a data loss could occur. While your hosting provider might do the backup for you, its always good to have your own. If you take regular backups, you are never a loser.

One of the important folders to backup is the wp-contents folder, but I would advise you to backup the whole WordPress installation directory. You will also need to backup the MySQL database. A simple MySQL dump would do. If you are the average blogger, then there are quite a lot of WordPress plugins for backup which would do the job for you. If you have shell access, I would advice you to write a shell script that would backup the files and database. Add a cron job to execute the script based on how frequent you wish to take backups. If you don’t have shell access, you can try using the options in your Web Hosting Control Panel.

Security

When it comes to security, applying the correct patches and upgrading to the newest version of the core and plugins of WordPress will prevent the hackers from trying to exploit the vulnerabilities in your Website. While this can be automated, it is advisable you do this process manually to reduce complications that may arise after an upgrade. It will depend on the plugins you use and the purpose you use it for. Golden rule before upgrade is to backup your WordPress files and DB so that you can restore it if something goes wrong.

Before choosing the right plugin to use, make sure to check the compatibility of the plugin with the version of WordPress you are running. Also make sure to check the ratings of the plugin. All these information is available on the plugin’s page.

Good luck..!!

When I planned to revamp lkgeeks.org some where around the end of last year, I wanted to make it happen within a month. But things got bit dragged and new ideas came in and now I have almost taken it to the next level. The website has been re-launched. You can check the site out at www.lkgeeks.org. There is a dedicated Twitter account and a Facebook fan page to connect all the Sri Lankan geeks. A new Twitter List has been created, so the Twitter Feed on lkgeeks.org will be based on this list.

While the initial idea of aggregating the blog posts and tweets of Sri Lankan geeks still remains, lkgeeks.org will provide more interaction among the geeks in Sri Lanka. From being connecting everyone virtually, it has gone a step further up by trying to get all of them physically together to share knowledge and experience. While this is a challenging task, lkgeeks.org has taken up this challenge to arrange workshops/meetups which will be free or at an affordable price (to cover the cost).  The workshops will be conducted by our own local experts in their relevant field. The topics will be based on the latest emerging technologies which will be a great way for the Sri Lankan geeks to start adopting to it. Topics/date/time/venue will be announced soon.

So keep checking the website, follow lkgeeks.org on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook to be first informed. Let me know your thoughts and comments as it will help in a great deal to improve on what I have built so far.

When you use PHP’s built-in mail() function with the basic parameters, the email is sent out in plain-text.

<?php
mail("user@mydomain.com", "This is the Subject", "Hello World");
?>

To send out HTML Emails using the built-in mail() function, you will require to add another parameter where you can specify the headers of the email. Here I will add some additional headers to send out a proper a Email with a from address as well. The additional headers should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n).

<?php
#Specify a From Address
$addHeaders = "From: webmaster@ourwebsite.com" . "\r\n";
 
# Set the content-type to send out the email in HTML format
$addHeaders .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$addHeaders .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
 
# Mail Body consists HTML tags
$mailBody = "<h1>Hello World</h1>
                 <strong>Example: </strong>How to send a HTML Email";
 
mail("user@mydomain.com", "This is the Subject", $mailBody, $addHeaders);
?>

In most of the cases there will be a requirement to embed images into HTML since the particular Email template will consists logos, photos etc.

There are actually two ways to do this.

1. You can specify absolute paths to the images on your site.
2. You can attach images into the message and link it with a special URI.

For the first method I will use the built-in mail() function itself.

<?php
#Specify a From Address
$addHeaders = "From: webmaster@ourwebsite.com" . "\r\n";
 
# Set the content-type to send out the email in HTML
$addHeaders .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$addHeaders .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
 
# Mail Body consists Images with an absolute URI
$mailBody = "<h1>Hello World</h1>
                 <strong>Example: </strong>How to send a HTML Email with images
                 <img src=\"http://www.mydomain.com/images/photo.jpg\" />";
 
mail("user@mydomain.com", "This is the Subject", $mailBody, $addHeaders);
?>

But this method has few drawbacks. Most of the Email clients do not allow displaying images from absolute URLS coz someone can track the people who will be opening this Email. Its a privacy issue, and you can enable to display images from absolute URLS in your Email client. But you can’t expect every user who will be checking this email to have this option enabled. So the best option is to use the second method.

Using the built-in mail() function to attach images and link it with a special URI can be a painful process in my opinion. It is possible but maintaining that code can be a real pain if the Email templates have to be modified over and over again.

PHPMailer is a life saver when it comes to sending Emails using PHP. Though the built-in mail() function fulfills most of our requirements, special cases like SMTP authentication, attaching files, embedding images can be done effectively and easily with PHPMailer without doing any modification to the Server settings.

You need to download the PHPMailer library files from here first.
The following code explains how you can send Emails with inline images. I added the code for SMTP authentication as well.

<?php
require_once('class.phpmailer.php');
 
require_once("class.smtp.php"); 
 
$mail = new PHPMailer();
 
# Follwing code segment uses a SMTP server to send email
# Comment this segment if you don't wish to use a SMTP server
# Use a SMTP Server
$mail->IsSMTP();
# SMTP Server address                  
$mail->Host = "smtp.mydomain.com"; 
# SMTP Port
$mail->Port = 25;
# Enable debug for SMTP (Only for testing purposes)
# 1 = errors and messages
# 2 = messages only
$mail->SMTPDebug = 1;              
 
# From address and Name                                            
$mail->SetFrom("user@mydomain.com", "User Display Name");
 
# Message Subject
$mail->Subject  = "Message Subject"; 
 
# Enable HTML Email
$mail->IsHTML(true); 
 
# Embed Images into the Email Body
# Attach file logo.jpg and give it an identifier name 'logo'
$mail->AddEmbeddedImage('logo.jpg', 'logo', 'logo.jpg'); 
# Attach file photo.jpg and and give it an identifier name 'photo'
$mail->AddEmbeddedImage('photo.jpg', 'photo', 'photo.jpg'); 
 
# Use the identifier in the special URI format to link with the attached image
$mail->Body = "<h1>Hello World</h1>
                <img src=\"cid:logo\" />
                   <img src=\"cid:photo\" />";
 
# alternate text if the Email client doesn't support HTML
$mail->AltBody="This is text only alternative body.";
 
# Add recipients of the email
$mail->AddAddress("you@yoursite.com");
$mail->AddAddress("you@anothersite.com");
 
# Send out the email 
if(!$mail->Send()){  
    #if Email failed to send
    echo "Email not sent";
    #Debug purposes only
    echo $mail->ErrorInfo;
}
else {
    # If Email was successfully sent out
    echo "Email sent";
}
?>

From the Blogpost :

There is some amazing stuff out there on the Web-resources, tools, tricks, and tips. Problem is, as a Web developer, you spend so much of your time just keeping up with new technologies – learning, playing – and this doesn't leave much time to go hunting for the latest and greatest tool, or for a better way of doing things.

So we've put together a list of over 100 resources to help make your life as a developer easier; where to find snippets of code, sites that automate processes, cheat sheets, lessons, useful tools and a couple of silly videos to give your brain a break if you make it through to the end. Please enjoy!

14 "OTHER" Ways to Use RSS Feeds

The thing I like the most is the extendability of certain features. Also it has a very good documentation. I could easily add JavaScript code when an image is dragged or when dropped. I used Ajax in this case. When the user drags and drops an image I updated its position via Ajax to his user record on the server. So next time he logs in I could load the image in the position where he placed it last. Some basic stuff like that. It could really add a lot of interactivity to a webpage.