Since Alexa stopped offering their free thumbnail service last year a lot of thumbnail services are available now. Some of them offering limited free services and others only a paid premium version. On of the bigger and better services is Girafa, a thumbnail service with a free service and also premium services for users with more then 2000 image requests a month.

Joining the service for free is fast and easy, within an hour my account was up and well. (more…)

Today finalwebsites.com announced the release of the Attachment Mailer class version 1.2. This release is the first mature version of this e-mail script featuring:

• HTML mail with inline images
• Alternative text version (for clients doesn’t except html mail)
• E-mail address validation (testing against a regular expression and MX records)
• Multiple attachments (inline and attached)
• Support for multiple clients (tested with Gmail, Outlook (Express), Hotmail, Firebird)
• …

The PHP class is released with a BSD type license and can be downloaded here.

These days version 2.0 of eSyndiCat the commercial directory (PHP powered) script has been released. According the company there are a lot of new features in this version like:

• Brand new admin panel
• Improved security
• Improved performance
• Improved banner management
• Improved link checking
• Improved banner management
• …

I decided to use eSyndiCat for the my directory website some month before because of all the functions and the abbility to modify templates and code with easily. The scripts is mostly OOP based and is using Smarty as template engine. My first thought after I heard about the release was, what do they changed to make this script better? (more…)

The latest update of the Access_user Class was focussed on a better security especially while usage on shared web hosts. Philp Olson noticed me about the problem of session storage on most of the shared hosting platforms.

I added to the class an external object which is based on a Zend tutorial, this way it was possible to solve this problem very quick. Further the password strings are encoded after the user has entered his password and submitted the string to the database. Also the password stored in the cookie is md5-encoded now.

I created for the existing user a list of all code updates in as special thread of the Access_user support forum.