Tutorial: Adding Hotlink Protection to Wordpress

Published on May 21, 2008 in Blogging, Development and Tutorials. 1 Comment

What is Hotlinking?

Hotlinking (also known as inline linking, piggybacking, leeching and bandwidth theft) refers to when one site links directly to an object on a second site. Typically, the object is a picture that can then be displayed on the linking site without the owner having to copy the actual file from the second site.

How Hotlinking can Affect your Wordpress Blog

Hotlinking not only allows another site to use your content without permission but also uses your bandwidth to do it. Every time a user surfs to the page of the offending site, the actual image shown is downloaded from your server to the user’s browser, even though the user is not on one of your web pages. This can degrade performance on your site or even cause your site to run over the bandwidth limit allotted by your web host - typically resulting in additional charges or even a suspension of service.
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Fixing the CPanel HotLink Error in Wordpress

Published on May 19, 2008 in Blogging and Quick Fixes. 1 Comment

Identifying the Problem

Using CPanel, you turn on Hotlink protection to prevent outside hot linking to your files from unauthorized sites.

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Enabling Hotlink protection causes a 404 error for previously-working Wordpress URL’s

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Excel Tutorial: Using Conditional Formats for Traffic Lighting

Published on April 12, 2008 in Tutorials. 0 Comments

Simplicity is key when presenting statistics to management or customers. Data analysts are often tempted to put as many details as possible on the standard “one sheet” template; however, too many numbers on a page can cause confusion about where to initially focus. When reducing the number of statistics on a page is not an option and summary stats are not appropriate, traffic-lighting is a quick and effective method to highlight trends or draw attention to information that need to be addressed.
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SAS Tutorial: Creating Categories with PROC FORMAT

Published on February 28, 2008 in Development and Tutorials. 0 Comments

When performing data analysis on a cohort population, it is often desirable to categorize characteristics can have many values. Age, income level and credit card score are examples of population attributes that can be placed into “buckets” and easily analyzed based on broad categories (without having resort to linear or logistic regression). While variables can be quickly encoded using IF statements, SAS’s Format procedure provides a more elegant and portable solution.
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SAS Tutorial: Loading Tab-Delimited Files

Published on January 25, 2008 in Development and Tutorials. 0 Comments

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Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data offers several advantages:

  • Ability to redirect data to multiple data sets
  • Ability to clean and modify data during load time
  • Ability to delete unwanted data
  • Portability and reusability

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The $699 Memory Stick

Published on January 23, 2008 in Journal. 0 Comments

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When buying electronics, two factors remain relatively consistent -

  1. If it’s new, it costs a lot more
  2. If Sony is involved, it costs a lot more

Yet, even these two truisms fail to account the the $699cdn (roughly the same in American dollars) price tag placed on a (third-party!) Memory stick currently being advertised at Staples. Granted, 4GB cards are relatively new but can be obtained for less than $150 if you are fortunate enough to have an SD slot. Given Sony’s penchant for being proprietary and expensive, perhaps we should not be so hasty to give up on HD-DVD?
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Tutorial: Spotting a Phishing Scam in your Email

Published on December 26, 2007 in Tutorials. 0 Comments

Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the hackers. Personal information can then be used for fraudulent purchases, resale to third parties and even identity theft. While there are no universal statistics on the number or nature of phishing scams, most security websites agree on the following –

-Financial Services is the most targeted industry sector overall
-Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the major banks are the most targeted companies
-North America is both the primary target audience and the region were the largest number of phishing sites are hosted
-Websites are by far the most popular portals through which to gather information, although an increasing number of phishing scams instruct targets to call a telephone number

Below are screenshots from a phishing email I recently received. Have a look at the warning signs –
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Tutorial: Manually Adding Digg Support to Wordpress

Published on December 20, 2007 in Development and Tutorials. 3 Comments

What is Digg?

Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves.

How Digg can benefit your blog

Two words: heavy traffic. A popular Digg article can easily send thousands of new visitors to a website in a single day. A website does not need an explicit link to Digg in order to receive the benefits of Digg exposure; however, adding a link at the end of every post will give regular and special interest visitors the opportunity to promote an article to a large news-oriented audience. The larger form of the Digg button also specifies the number of times an article has been bookmarked, which can be used as an indicator of its popularity among targeted visitors.

How to add a Digg button to Wordpress Posts

Digg support can be added directly to a Wordpress blog via editing the PHP code for certain files within the blog’s theme. The main challenge is finding the correct files to edit, since Wordpress themes can have different file structures. As such, this tutorial will be more of a strategy for altering a theme to add Digg support. To address most of the common issues users will encounter, a more complicated theme will be altered.

Prerequisites:

  • A Wordpress installation with the ability to edit theme files (generally speaking, online services that do not allow you to upload your own themes also won’t let you edit existing theme files)
  • An account with administrator privileges (required for editing theme files)

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Tutorial: Two Ways to Lookup Your Own IP Address

Published on December 17, 2007 in Games, Networking and Tutorials. 0 Comments

What is an IP address?

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique address within a network used by devices to communicate with other devices within the network. Computers, printers, routers, and network hard drives are examples of devices that could have an IP address within a network.

IP addresses are generally assigned according to country and internet provider. There are also some specially reserved IP addresses or IP ranges that are universally understood:

  • Local Machine IP – The IP address 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is always synonymous with the local machine. This IP address is valid only within the local machine environment, as every computer is its own “localhost”.
  • Private Network IP’s – The IP ranges 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254, 10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255 and 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255 are reserved for private internal networks, such as a home networks or corporate intranets. These IP addresses are only valid within the local network and cannot be used if, for instance, a user wanted to connect to another user over the internet. Thus, it is typical for a computer to have an IP address for the local network (e.g. 10.1.2.1) and an IP address visible to the Internet (e.g. 65.34.24.24), which is itself one large network.

For the purpose of this tutorial, private network IP’s will be referred to as internal IP’s while internet-accessible IP’s will be referred to as external IP’s.

Why would I need to know my IP address?

  1. Network gaming [internal or external]
  2. Running a private server (e.g. FTP, HTTP) [internal or external]
  3. Windows file sharing within an home network [internal]
  4. … and any time another computer or service needs to identify your machine for commication or software deployment

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Hamachi Patch for AOE 3 (all versions) and AOM

Published on November 12, 2007 in Games and Networking. 48 Comments

It was some time ago I wrote the original tutorial on how to make Age of Empires 3 work with a freeware Virtual Private Networking (VPN) program called Hamachi. There have been many questions about where to find the AOE3VPN.exe patch referenced in the tutorial, with some readers were to find it from the supplied Google search bar.

The good news is that a much-improved patch is available from Crea-Doo Continue reading ‘Hamachi Patch for AOE 3 (all versions) and AOM’