Web | Spacebug Open Source Initiative

How I Save Time Filtering Spam Comments with Mollom

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 26-11-2009

Category : Tips, web

I get spam comments all the time, it drives me crazy and make me wish I didn’t have a web site at all. Spam really bring the evil side of most site owners.

Yesterday, I finally had enough, I got 300 spam comments and only 4 real ones – I had to go over 3 pages and read bogus comments like:

“I have a question [link to gambling site]“
or “nice post [link to viagra]“
and the ho-so-known “dgsdgsdghsdfhdf [link to a SEO company]“.

I went to drupal and looked for the most popular anti-spam module they listed and found Mollom.

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. When site moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.
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IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2 Released with TinyMCE support

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 02-09-2009

Category : AJAX, IPWEditor, Open source, release, SAAS, Software development, web

IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

Up until now IPWEditor has integrated only with FCKeditor. The major feature in this release is integration with TinyMCE, a popular WYSIWYG editor.

Developers can now choose to run IPWEditor with either FCKeditor or with TinyMCE editor using the same IPWEditor code.

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.1 Released

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 23-07-2009

Category : AJAX, Open source, Software development, web

IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

As reported by some members of the community, due to jQuery issue with IE 7, IPWEditor 1.0 had some issues around IE usability.

Thanks to these inputs and some refactoring around the jQuery limitation, these issues were resolved in this IPWEditor 1.1 release. Continue Reading

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor with FCKeditor and JQuery Editable

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 15-06-2009

Category : AJAX, IPWEditor, Open source, Software development, web

An In-Place editor, such as jQuery Editable plug-in, lets you seamlessly replace texts on web pages with inputs, for on-the-spot editing (see example 1). WYSIWYG editors, such as FCKeditor, provide easy, word-like editor on the web (see example 2). Basically, the two are advanced User-Interface JavaScript tools that help users edit content on the web in an easy, intuitive and productive way.

Wouldn’t it be great if we combine the two to create a really cool, web 2.0 user experience for editing content on the web? Unfortunately, FCKeditor and Editable are not fully compatible and some tweaking is required to make them interoperable.

In this article will demonstrate how, with little modification, FCKeditor can be integrated into Editable to create an In-Place WYSIWYG editor (see example3).

If you want to skip this documentation and just go to download the code and examples you can do so here.

Most Useful / Best Drupal Modules

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 26-05-2009

Category : Drupal, PHP, Software development, Tips, web

I have recently upgraded my cats idol site to Drupal 6 and enhanced its functionality. I have also created several other sites (including this site) using the following set of useful Drupal modules.

Here is my list of useful (AKA Best IMHO) Drupal modules:
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Apache Crashes on Windows – Check Your Ports

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 20-05-2009

Category : PHP, Software development, Tips, web

Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the market today. It usually runs on Linux-based machines but lately there are more and more deployments, for development as well as other reasons, of Apache on Windows. Nowadays, running Apache web server on Windows is very common for PHP developers. Many developers develop their PHP application on their home windows or Mac and deploy to a remote Linux server.
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Shared Hosting or Dedicated Hosting? Now it is easier to choose.

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 07-03-2009

Category : Reviews, web, web hosting

When you want to host your website with a hosting proivder, one of the first choices you’ll need to make is whether to go with a dedicated server or shared hosting.

This is the key decision that this choozza helped me make. Choozza takes a different approach to this question; I defined my priorities and got the decision which was fine tuned for me.

You will make the decision based on these criteria:

1) Big Websites Fit – Does this hosting option fit a big website, with a large volume of traffic?

2) Control – How much control do you have over the server?

3) Cost – How expensive is each of the options?

4) IP Address Issues – Will your website have its own IP address?

5) Performance Implications – What type of performance can you expect to get from the hosting? What can affect this performance?

6) Security – What are the security implications of going this way or the other?

7) Small Websites Fit – Does this hosting option fit a small, low-to-average traffic website with no special needs (e.g. a blog).

I filled this choozza for one of my small web sites and the answer was Shared Hosting. The details provided really justified my decision.

How to: Adding wildcard pages to robots.txt

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 03-03-2009

Category : Software development, Tips, web, web hosting

Tags: google, SEO

Sometimes we want to exclude a page from search engines. For example, repetitive pages that might lead to page rank penalties.

If you want to exclude pages with a specific name from several locations in your site – for example you might have a comments.php or a help.php in multiple parts of your site, and you want to hide it from search engines, you need to modify robots.txt.

Here is how you do it:
1) Create or edit robots.txt in the root of your site
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