It’s sweeter than candy!  I just finished a new mod for LJScript exchanges which I call the ‘buffs mod’.  If you’ve ever played an MMORPG, then you’ll know what a buff is, but if you haven’t they are basically a spell, item, or similar object that will increase a particular stat in the game.

The buffs mod offers similar rewards while surfing.  These rewards affect the duration of the surf timer, the surf rates for credits, banner impressions, and text ad impressions, and a special buff that allows a user to ‘possibly’ receive random referrals for the rest of the day.

Buffs are fully configurable from within the admin area, where you can set how often they show up, just how much the buff effects, and how long it lasts for.

Users can recieve instant buffs which become immediately active, or collected buffs which they can save and use later for when they want to get their powersurf on.

Buffs disappear when a user logs out/logs back in, so if they leave they will lose any buffs they currently have.

The mod comes with 6 buffs ready to go, and others can be programmed in to work with any unique features your website may have.

It is my hope that this mod will increase the activity at your website as well as the quality of your traffic, but it can only do that if I can install it.  I’m offering this mod for $60 + $15 for any additional buffs you’d like programmed into it.  It can be made to work with any feature so long as you have an idea for how you’d like the buff to work.

You may see a demo of this mod in action by surfing at my LJScript sandbox.

Purchase the buff mod today!

Tim Linden of StartXchange wrote today about Traffic Exchange owners who aren’t complying with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Article: The Big Bad List

This law, in a nutshell, was signed by President Bush in 2003, sets forth requirements for businesses sending commercial email, and did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of SPAM sent over the internet. It states that “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)” must have the following.

1. An unsubscribe link, that works, in all emails sent
2. Requests to unsubscribe from a list are honored within 10 days
3. Opt-out lists are only used for complying with the law (and not sold to someone else so they can add them to their list)

Tim listed 20 traffic exchanges that sent him emails without an unusbscribe mechanism in place to comply with the CAN-SPAM act, most of which are LJScript exchanges. In order to opt out of an LJScript you would typically need to delete your account. The script itself does not supply an easily usable link to simply unsubscribe/delete the account.

Until now.

I’ve recieved two inquiries in the past couple weeks about a mod that would do this, and after reading Tim’s post I decided to push it out quickly. The Easy Unsubscribe mod is ready for use by LJScript exchanges. It will cost $25 and could be installed in a matter of minutes.

The mod allows users to click a link, which will be in each email sent out by the Admin, and unsubscribe. At the page, they will be asked for their password for security purposes. After they provide the password they click unsubscribe and their account is deleted.

Update Tim informs me that asking for a password isn’t CAN-SPAM compliant either, and while not as secure, the mod is updated so it will request their email address instead.

I have a new mod available that will clean up some of the tables in LJScript’s admin control panel for users, user sites, site reports, contact requests, banner rotator, and text rotator and allow you to sort these lists by their fields. This mod is only available for LJScript exchanges.

Before	After

This mod is available for sale for $50. Check out the mods page for details.

Installing PHPDev 5 Beta on my laptop today I ran into some trouble with the paths to the installation. The error code hinted that the problem was with the php.ini having long windows paths rather than short.

For some background on that, windows uses two types of paths when referring to the files on your computer. The long version is the one typically seen when browsing your computer.

C:\Program Files\Some Program\somefilehere.exe

The short version, however, is archaic and hard to determine. It basically comes down to a capitalized part of the directory, one of those wavy dashes (~), and a number for directories. It might look like this.

C:\PROGRA~1\SOME~1\somefilehere.exe

This removes spaces and other characters that might interfere with some programs and cause them to crash. In order to get phpdev5 working, I’d probably simply have to replace the long file name in php.ini – the php configuration file – with the short one because it appears the spaces are causing errors.

This is an easy fix, but finding short path names on your computer is not. There used to be a trick I knew within windows to find this, but I’ll be honest and say if there is I can’t remember it.

I went looking for this old trick and found this instead, courtesy of DevX.

@echo off
if not exist %1 echo %1 – no such file or directory exists&goto :EOF
echo.
echo Full PathName : %1
echo.
echo Short PathName : %~s1
echo.
echo.

This is a batch file. I used to talk about batch files a lot when I wrote my column at The Nettle Magazine called Format C:\.

These days batch files are rather archaic as well. Most people do not use them, and I must admit it’s been several years since I have as well, but they can still be very useful. Just like the one above.

Here is the trick. Simply create a new text document in the C:\ folder on your computer, copy the above code and paste it in. Save this file as pathname.bat. The article on DevX says to run this using Visual Basic, but it can also be run through the command prompt in Windows.

Go to Start->Run, type cmd, and press enter to bring up the command prompt. Now, if you want to know the path to a file all you have to do is type the following.

C:\pathname.bat C:\Program Files\Some Program\program.exe

Naturally, you would replace the path to the file with your own pathname and file you’d like to find, and you will then be treated with both the long and short filepaths and names.

I hope this is as helpful to you as it was to me.

I have just finished developement of a captcha mod for traffic exchanges. This mod is an anti-cheat feature which will ask the user to input a 6 digit code every so many pages surfed. In the case of the LJ Script it will replace the surf verification feature that is default in that script, but may be turned off in the admin area (which will return your site to using the questions as before).

Captcha is a common turing test feature among many of the latest open-source scripts and e-commerce websites and is very efficient at preventing bots from using a particular service. If you’re worried about bot activity and would like to purchase this mod now please visit my Mods page. It costs $45 and can be running in as little as 15 minutes.

Demo: Captcha Mod Demonstration
Demo: Sign up and surf to see it in action

The GD library allows a server to render simple graphics. It’s not photoshop, but it is highly useful. Especially for CAPTCHA pages, a typical feature which I am in the middle of developing for traffic exchanges.

CAPTCHA stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart‘, and typically uses the GD library to create a graphic with a random string or word, sometimes distorted, that a human can decipher and input back to the server but bots can not.

There are many other uses for the GD library, but this is an extremely common one these days.

When developing a script which uses image rendering through the GD library sometimes (usually) you get to a point where you have to check if the library is installed on the server. It’s a big plus to a developer if the code he’s writing can actually work.

So I was really pleased when I found a simple script by Dagon Design that tells you straight out that GD is installed. You can look at phpinfo() to find this info, but I find this nicer and more to the point.

Perhaps this will be as useful to you as it will be to me:
Script: Checking for GD support on your server

I came across an interesting article today on weeding out weak programmers. Simply ask them to program FizzBuzz.

Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding

FizzBuzz is a game children play in the UK where they each sit is a circle and begin to count. The catch is that if the number is a multiple of 3 you have to say ‘Fizz‘, if it’s a multiple of 5 you say ‘Buzz‘, and for multiples of both 3 and 5 you have to say ‘FizzBuzz‘.

Supposedly many computer science majors and other applicants for programming jobs can’t do this simple task.

On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes down to actually producing code they just don’t seem to be able to do it well.

You would probably think they’re a good developer if you’ld never seen them code. This is why you have to ask people to write code for you if you really want to see how good they are. It doesn’t matter if their CV looks great or they talk a great talk. If they can’t write code well you probably don’t want them on your team.

After a fair bit of trial and error I’ve come to discover that people who struggle to code don’t just struggle on big problems, or even smallish problems (i.e. write a implementation of a linked list). They struggle with tiny problems.

FizzBuzz sets out such a simple task that anyone who can program should be able to write up a code that can do this in a couple of minutes. It’s amazing to hear that many of the applicants who apply for a programming job aren’t able to do this.

Perhaps the question is too easy. At first I thought there had to be some sort of catch to it. A trick question. But no, it is that easy. Simply write a program that will count from 1 to 100 replacing multiples of 3 with ‘Fizz‘, multiples of 5 with ‘Buzz‘, and multiples of both with ‘FizzBuzz‘. No tricks. No hidden catches.

So naturally as a programmer myself I immediately had to set out to prove my competence by writing FizzBuzz in PHP. While my design is far from elegant, I assure you that it works, which puts me in that club of programmers who can program.

// SET TWO VARIABLES
$multiplesofthree = 1;
$multiplesoffive = 1;

for ($i=1;$i<=100;$i++) {
if ($multiplesofthree==3 AND $multiplesoffive==5) {
$tehprintout=”FizzBuzz”;
$multiplesofthree=0;
$multiplesoffive=0;

} elseif ($multiplesofthree==3) {
$tehprintout=”Fizz”;
$multiplesofthree=0;

} elseif ($multiplesoffive==5) {
$tehprintout=”Buzz”;
$multiplesoffive=0;

} else {
$tehprintout = $i;
}
$multiplesofthree++;
$multiplesoffive++;

echo “$tehprintout
“;
}

Article: Why can’t programmers.. Program?