Alex Ivaylov web developer blog.
 

 

a new fancy dress website

Posted on July 28th, 2011 in category Uncategorized

Me and the guys from Sco.Biz have just finished working on the Chicken Shop’s website: http://chickenshop.co.uk


about passwords and web security in general

Posted on June 30th, 2011 in category Articles, Usability

The topic about passwords never gets old. They are the unique string which a user has to enter into a web site in order for the system of that site to know who the user is.. But you already know that of course.

In the beginning passwords could be anything from just a single letter to 20 chars. Then password polices got a little stricter and most of the websites made a requirement for at least 4 characters, then the limit was lifted to 6 characters. Now in the last few years some websites have lifted the limit to 8 characters and others have also added additional security requirements such as having both upper and lower case characters and numbers in the password.
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flooring website

Posted on June 28th, 2011 in category Projects

OK, this is our latest project. It’s a flooring website for a flooring company based in Fife. See

ukwoodenlaminateflooring.co.uk


New Properties website

Posted on May 28th, 2011 in category Projects

Me and the Sco.Biz team are pleased to announce the completion of our latest project – a website for a lettings agency:

easymove-everytime.co.uk


new ecommerce website

Posted on April 28th, 2011 in category Projects

We have just finished working on the bay furniture’s website -> http://thebayfurniture.co.uk/


URL shortening service

Posted on April 26th, 2011 in category Projects

I have just finished working on a URL shortening service – Lex.CX. Finished this in less than 4 hours (I am definitely getting faster).

I was lucky enough to get such a short domain name (which also has part of my name in it:) so I decided it will be best if I share it with everyone 🙂

So, check it out:

Lex.CX


mass website hacking + LAMP vs .NET comparison

Posted on April 3rd, 2011 in category Uncategorized

As I am writing these lines, history is happening. The biggest mass-hacking campaign in the history of the web is happening right now. The campaign is named LizaMoon and more than 1.5 million websites have already been hacked and counting.

The infection uses vulnerability in the security of the Microsoft .net based web applications. The two worst nightmares me and every other web developer have are SQL Injections and XSS. While everyone is talking about XSS, I was left with the impression the SQL Injection vulnerabilities are not that common anymore and that XSS was a bigger issue.

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LAMP: installing imagick on Ubuntu and CentOS + some thoughts

Posted on March 11th, 2011 in category Uncategorized

So I need to get Imagick php extension for an old web system i’ve got to work on these days. This is made so easy on Ubuntu:

root@webdev:~# apt-get install php5-imagic

Then just restart the web server:


root@webdev:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And that’s all! One line in ubuntu and we have that extension working. Life’s good!

Well it’s not, because we decided that Centos will be a better choice for a server operating system. The reason for that is because it is the free version of Redhat and it’s supposed to be “enterprise class”, so as you know in the IT industry, business class products are supposed to be better.

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Web based IDE

Posted on December 5th, 2010 in category Articles

If you are like me and you travel all the time, from one place to another and you use different computers all the time you probably miss most of your software all the time. Well, at least one problem could be solved with this web based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by Mozilla:

http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/

I’ve not had the chance to fully test it yet, but will extend this article when I have time.


Making a dynamic URL look like static

Posted on November 29th, 2010 in category Articles

1. Introduction
Static URLs are preferred by search engines and are more user-friendly and meaningful than the dynamic ones.
An example of dynamic URL is:
http://example.com/page.php?id=1545

of course this URL tells nothing to the user and search engines won’t like it, because they will know it is dynamically generated.
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new project..

Posted on November 29th, 2010 in category Projects

Here is my latest creation – The website of Hamish McLaren Engineering, Leven:

hamishmclarenengineering.co.uk

I am using JD gallery on the front page (a very good mootools gallery plugin).

The website is (of course) W3C valid XHTML/CSS, generated by LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP & MySQL), combined with apache’s mod_rewrite to make it look like a static website.


about WYSIWYG editors / green web development

Posted on November 21st, 2010 in category Uncategorized

I hate WYSIWYG web editors and I never use them. Read one of my stories about Dreamweaver. The idea of this type of web editors is great but it will work properly may be after 5 or 10 years when HTML5 is the current web standard and all the web browsers are based on similar standard rendering modes (we are getting there just hold on tight). I’ve read the book “Weaving the web” by the creator of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he states that he wants people to be able to publish materials on the web without the need of html or any other technical knowledge. Well, I am afraid that’s not possible. Not yet.
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What software I use

Posted on November 21st, 2010 in category Uncategorized

As you know I am a LAMP web developer. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL that are all free open source software products working together to bring you this website and most of the rest on the web.
Linux is my operating system. On my servers I use CentOS and on my personal computers/laptops I use Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu with KDE).

Speaking of LAMP, why dont you like my Facebook page about LAMP? I post a lot of interesting stuff there. Thanks!

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Food quality management website

Posted on October 9th, 2010 in category Projects

I have just finished working on this for a friend from South Africa:

http://topqualitymanagement.co.za/

They will need to change the text, because they didn’t send me everything…


These days

Posted on October 6th, 2010 in category Uncategorized

I am now just back from Bulgaria and I am starting work on a few projects. The most interesting one is a content management system (CMS), which I am doing from scratch for a client. You don’t realise how much work is involved and how much functionality there is behind a CMS (such as Joomla, wordpress, drupal, etc) until you start doing one like them yourself. At the moment I am doing a system for managing self describing data (I am not talking about XML), which means managing the data about the data, which is provided by the user and doing advanced operations and calculations with it.


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