This blog site is not meant to be any information that is distributed to the general public. It is to serve as shared documentation between the DNSTC developers; however, if you find something useful and would like to use it, go right ahead.

Friday, December 14, 2012

IP Tables–and removing blocked IP

firewall-antivirusWe have been doing a lot of work lately with the firewall and IPtables.  I came across this blog site that is very handy when it comes to easily explaining Linux command line commands.  This site was extremely useful for removing IP addresses that got blocked do to people forgetting their passwords and trying to log in too many times. 

Here are some of the commands:

List IP’s that are being blocked with the line numbers:

iptables -L INPUT -n --line-numbers



Once you have the line number you can delete the entry

iptables -D INPUT 10



Saving the iptables listing

service iptables save



For the complete blog page and other great Linux stuff, visit: 
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/iptables-delete-ip-address-subnet-from-linux-firewall/

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

EXIM Cheat sheet

exim-blue-ldI Found a great web page that gave a nice cheat sheet for EXIM commands.  I wanted to document this page since I will be using most of the commands to develop an monitoring system that I can use on my phone and desktop widget.

The page is located at:  EXIM CHEETSHEET

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The 10 Golden Rules to Attracting Authority Links

Through some research I was doing, I came across the term “Authority Links.”  Of course I wasn’t sure what these were, what this a new buzz word on the net, should I know what these are?  Well, I highlighted it and hopes of having some time to come back to it and do some research.

Monday, October 15, 2012

E-mail Addresses as Images

imagesCAP2F58BSpammers always scan websites looking for e-mail addresses; however, one of the best ways to have your clients contact you is through e-mail.  One of the ways you can remedy the issue of spammers “scraping” your website for staff’s e-mail addresses is to place them on the website as an image.

I found a nice little utility on the Internet that will take what you type in as an e-mail and then create the image of the e-mail address.  It can be found here:

http://safemail.justlikeed.net/

Monday, September 24, 2012

Presenting Blogging for Business 101 Tonight

bloggingDNSTC will be presenting tonight at the Mahoning Valley Wedding network meeting a short presentation on Blogging 101 for businesses.

Tonight's meeting is at Buffalo Wild Wings at the Southern Park Mall.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Trend Spotting to Stay Ahead



If viral advertising, social media, and apps are foreign concepts to you, it might be a good idea to freshen your familiarity with the trends that are happening in the world around you. It is easy to fall into the trap of doing business as you always have, but in today’s global business climate the best way for your business to stay competitive is to utilize the hottest trends to make them work for you and keep your business up to date. There are a wide variety of trends that may or may not be right for your business, but this article from smallbiztrends.com offers four trends that your business should be taking advantage of right NOW.


Friday, June 22, 2012

DoItHere.net Schedule Now On Facebook Page

eventschedAttention DoItHere.net On-Site Event Photography Fans, we have a great announcement to make.  We now have our schedule as a  tab on DoIthere.net’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/doitherenet.  We also added the tab to the main DNS Technology Consultants, Inc. Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/dnstc.  You can now see where we will be at during the season if you want to stop by and say hello… or even get your picture taken on the Green Screen!

Friday, June 1, 2012

PHP Date Time Picker

CaptureI found this code that is FREE, but have used it a couple of times in applications where the date is to be asked.  I am adding it to the blog here so that we can have access to it if we need to go back and reference some information.

The calendar component written in php script. It contains 2 modes: normal display calendar and date picker.

This is really a great utility and has worked very well.

http://www.triconsole.com/php/calendar_datepicker.php

Monday, May 21, 2012

YourCustomItems.com–DNSTC Welcome New Corporate Client–Subzero–Wolf

188729040604724966_qwBsSxXm_cYourCustomItems.com (DNSTC) would like to welcome Subzero / Wolf as new corporate rose clients.  We are now supplying them with corporate gifts of roses to their distributors across the nation.

You can find out more about Sub-Zero (Refrigerators) and Wolf stoves on their corporate website.

If you are interested in Corporate roses for your company, you can find out more information here.

You can also view other examples of corporate roses on our Pinterest Board.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Dimensions for Facebook Images

facebookImages

With Facebook forcing everyone one including business fan pages to go to the new timeline, there are some advantages.

One of these advantages is that you customize several of the images on the timeline.

I am often looking this information up, so I thought it would be helpful to me (as well as others) to do a post with the dimensions of the images that are used on the new Facebook Timeline.

  • Cover Image:  851 X 315
  • Profile Picture: 180 X 180
  • Custom Thumbnails: 111 X 74

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Are business cards a sign of the times?

LA 170617.fi.0221.businesscards1.gf.jpgThe 2-by-3.5-inch pieces of card stock have long been a staple in business, but in the digital world they are seen as irrelevant and wasteful says Matt Stevens, from the Los Angeles Times.

Young web savvy business executives are viewing business cards as being somewhat a waste of time.  If you have a smart phone, e-mail, and a LinkedIn account, why even bother carrying them.

About 85 million people manage their professional networks with LinkedIn. Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the Bump app, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information.

You can find the full article on the link below…

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-business-cards-20120316,0,7418219.story

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Come get in the Caribbean mood!

cruiseflyer0001

The Newton Falls Relay For Life Team – Connect 4 will be sponsoring a Cruise for a Cure benefit Saturday, March 3, 2012, 6-11 p.m. at the Newton Falls Community Center.

There will be food by Guys BBQ, music by Happymon Band and of course, Photos by DoItHere.net

Also available will be computer gaming by The Dragon’s Lair – Ultimate Gaming Arena, Raffle Baskets, 50/50, and a cash bar.

Tickets are $20.

Hope to see you there!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Button Sponsorship Available

3-3BadgeDNSTC assists with the promotion of Gaming Tournaments with The Dragon’s Lair – Ultimate Gaming Arena. These tournaments can draw hundreds of gamers to the events; however, we also provide gaming as an activity for other events to help in drawing in attendees to events. We have booked several venues throughout the area and would like to offer the opportunity to other small businesses to be sponsors for our venues. Costs relating to maintaining and purchasing the equipment needed for these gaming events are very high and there is a very limited budget for marketing materials. This is why we have several sponsorship programs where you get “Get the word out” about your business, while we provide marketing materials for our gaming events.

We have an event schedule for 3/3/2012 where you can be a button sponsor. 

Here is what you will get for your $25 sponsorship:

We will distribute buttons with the event name on them. These buttons will be attached to cards that will feature your business name and phone number. We will also have a sign on our tables stating that the event buttons are sponsored by, listing the button sponsors. We will also place the sponsor names on our membership handouts and on the webpage for the event.

Deadline for sponsorship is:  Wednesday, February 29, 2012.

The application form can be found here.

Down on Main street Event - Austintown Ohio

domImage

VENDOR TABLES STARTING AT $100.00.  This is a great opportunity to get the word out about your business or the community, and other small businesses.

The Mahoning Valley chamber of The MainStreet Chamber will be presenting the first annual “Down On Main Street” small business expo. It’s an affordable alternative for small businesses in the Valley to showcase and sell their products and services at an affordable price, while creating an opportunity for Valley citizens to buy local.

MainStreet Chamber has already secured media sponsorship, so this event will be highly publicized in the Mahoning Valley. Admission is free to the public and our market research indicates that approximately 5,000 individuals will attend this exciting event. We have vendor spaces available and would like to invite you to join us for this valuable business opportunity.

VENDOR INFORMATION
Austintown Expo Center, Austintown Plaza, 6000 Mahoning Ave. Austintown, OH
Saturday, March 24, 2012 - Operating Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
(Set up and tear down information will be provided upon receipt of payment.)

Here is a link to the event flyer.

Here is a link to the vendor application.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Blocked Spammers and Hackers List Added to Site

deniedAttention all DNSTC clients.  I have added a new section to the DNSTC website called Blocked Spammers and Hackers.  This page will give you a listing of IP addresses that have been blocked on the server to do failed hacking attempts or reported spammers.

DNSTC reserves the right to block access from anyone who wishes to either attempt to hack our server or spam our clients. We have a zero tolerance policy for this activity, and in the case where we can obtain the IP address, it will just be completely blocked from our servers.

Here is the link to the Blocked Spammers and Hackers page.

Monday, February 20, 2012

DNSTC WSMS Version 2.7 Update Release

boxCoverForWebIt has been almost a year before a major update has been released for WSMS, and this one was a little overdue.  We made a few enhancements and a couple of bug fixes to the WSMS software to make it even better than before.  The software has been operational for almost a year and has even made a server upgrade with no issues.  We now have several clients running this software behind their website and plan on using it from now on as our official CMS system.  For more information about the WSMS system, please visit the DNSTC WSMS Webpage.

As for this update, please see the release notes below:

Testimonial Page Upgrade

Created an upgrade to the testimonials page what will allow visitors to leave testimonials.  This enhancement requires and update to the testimonials table to work correctly.  You also have to go into the configuration table in turn Upgraded Testimonials to Y.  Once this is done, there will be a form that appears on the testimonials page that allows users to submit their testimonial.  When they do, an e-mail is sent to the admin e-mail.  The admin then needs to log in and approve the testimonial in order for it to be shown on the website.

About this page information updated

Added a display for the meta descriptions and the meta keywords when you select the page for editing.  This then allows you to quickly look at the page to see what is configured for the page description and keywords and allows you to select information to be copied to other pages.  You should not have two pages with the same description; however, you can have the same keywords on multiple pages.

Sorting on page catalog listing

Added the ability to sort the main page selection either by page number or by page name which was the default.  When you have multiple pages within WSMS it is not as easy to find the pages so we needed the ability to sort the listing by the page number as well.  Also added the description (text) of the page types to the right instead of the numbers.  This way we now know the page type without looking up the numbers.

Reports and Utilities Section Added

We added a new utility called Reports and Utilities.  This section will be housing miscellaneous utilities and reports to help manage your website.  The first report that has been added is the Meta Page Information report that lists all of the titles, meta description, and meta keywords for all of the pages.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

8 Tips to Defend Against Online Financial Fraud Threats

network_securityI constantly receive and read e-mails and articles that help small business owners with Internet issues.  As I come across some important information to share, I will post it here to our blog so that others may benefit as well.

Here is an interesting article I came across the other day written by Thor Olavsrud on cio.com.

The tag paragraph for the article reads as followings:

Criminals are increasingly seeking to hijack the accounts of business owners and executives to initiate fraudulent wire transfers that can cost organizations a fortune. Here are eight steps you can take to defend your organization against such attacks.

The following is a summary of the 8 Tips:

  1. Talk to your financial institution.
  2. Perform regular security audits and risk assessments.
  3. Install an anti-virus solution on your computers and network and keep it completely updated.
  4. Dedicate a computer for financial transactions and only use it for financial transactions.
  5. Segregate responsibility for initiating wires from the responsibility for authorizing them, and ensure that each party uses different computers with different authorization credentials.
  6. Keep a suspicious mind when you receive email that asks you to click on a link, open an attachment or that seeks your credentials-even if it's from a trusted source like your bank.
  7. Be careful when following links on social networking sites or when asked to give information over the phone.
  8. Review your online banking records on a daily basis.

The article goes on and explains what you can do if you think you have been compromised.

For the full article:  http://www.cio.com/article/700354/8_Tips_to_Defend_Against_Online_Financial_Fraud_Threats?page=2&taxonomyId=3089

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Code needed to make CSS/text buttons work correctly in Firefox

cssWe are supposed to develop websites to work in all browsers.  There is an issues with the IE CSS settings and the text buttons we use not showing up correctly in Firefox.  In the past, I did not care and just told people, is it what it is; however, this does not work for Smart Phones.

Therefore, the following needs to be added to the CSS block of the navigation buttons in order for them to be displayed correctly.

display: inline-block;


This will fix the display for smart cells phones as well as Firefox display.

Friday, February 17, 2012

DNSTC and YourCustomItems.com will be hosting meeting

mvweddingsNet

DNS Technology Consultants, Inc. and YourCustomItems.com will be hosting this month’s Mahoning Valley Wedding Network meeting at Fab Limousine, on Feb. 27, 2012.

Marianne will be covering our custom products that can be used for weddings or business promotions and I will be going over 3 of our major Internet marketing services that any small business can use to help their business grow.

Todd Herron - Spaghetti Dinner Benefit - Scheduled

405422_10150561333912709_502407708_9224802_793078665_n

DoItHere.net will have the green screen photo booth available at the Todd Herron – Spaghetti Dinner Benefit – on Saturday, March 10, 2012 at the American Legion in Lake Milton, Ohio.  2-6 p.m.

All 4x6 photos will be for donation only, and we will be giving all donations to the event.

Todd is diagnosed with a Grade IV Glioblastoma malignant brain tumor.  He is currently undergoing radiation and chemo at the Cleveland Clinic.  This benefit is to help with medical expenses.

Come on out, support the event, get your picture taken!

Ohio Senior Olympics Website Renovation

osoDeanna Clifford, web designer for Ohio Senior Olympics, has renovated their website using the DNSTC WSMS system and layout design by DNSTC.

The new website with updated content went live on-line this morning after several weeks of moving over and cleaning up the content.

Ohio Senior Olympics sanctions Senior Games competitions in the state and is responsible for the yearly state Senior Olympics competition.

Senior Olympics is open to men and women ages 50 and older. Regional competitions are held around the state. The state games are also held yearly. In even numbered year, the Ohio Senior Olympics State Games acts as a qualifying event for the National Senior Games, which are held in odd numbered years.

Visit the new Ohio Senior Olympics website for more information.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

We are all now on the new server

I wanted to provide an update and closing of this project.  We are all now running on the new server and the old server has been off-line now for about a week.  I want to say thank you to everyone I have worked with on this project and hope that we get as many years of great operations out of the new server.  If you experience any issues with your website, please contact me to get them worked out.  I think we have identified any problems and fixed them all by now.

We are all now on the new server

Latest-hp-computers-3I wanted to provide an update and closing of this project.  We are all now running on the new server and the old server has been off-line now for about a week.  I want to say thank you to everyone I have worked with on this project and hope that we get as many years of great operations out of the new server.  If you experience any issues with your website, please contact me to get them worked out.  I think we have identified any problems and fixed them all by now.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Checking the values of a submitted form

phpOccasionally you may way to check to see what data is being submitted form a form.  I have used this simple little code in the past, and it has help solved mysteries while trying to program.  Simply put this code before any section that would save the data to the database and it will display the results of the submitted form to the screen instead of saving it to the database.  Just remember to go in and either comment out the code or remove it.

echo "<pre>";
print_r($_POST);
exit();
echo "</pre>";



Monday, February 6, 2012

Blocking IP addresses from the server

deniedI really got tired of dealing with spammers so I just started blocking IP address from these people who just want to submit garbage to our forms on the websites.  Here is how I block and IP address.

1. Log into the root account.

2. Enter the code below at the command prompt:

iptables -A INPUT -s x.x.x.x -j DROP



To list what is in the iptables:


iptables -L




That is pretty much it, and they should be shut-down from the server completely!

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Redirecting the Browser to a Mobile Web Page

imageIn this day in age, most web visitors are now coming from cell phones or mobile devices.  You need to have a version of your website that is designed for mobile devices.  One of the major issues with this is having the ability to detect if the browser is a mobile device.  There are hundreds of different browsers out on mobile devices right now, so I found the following website to help with this:

http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/

This site has the open source code you can use to add to your main webpage.  If the webpage detects it is a mobile device, it will automatically redirect to the mobile version of the page.

The following is the .PHP example of this:

Resizing the Web Page to Fit the Cell Phone Screen

imageOne of the issues we ran into when we started creating webpages for mobile devices was to have the screen auto-zoom so that the visitor did not have to take the extra step to zoom in on the content.

After several searches on the Internet, I came across the following code that you add as a meta tag to solve the problem.  We actually tested this on 4 different mobile browsers and it seemed to work just fine.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0">

What this code does is resize the screen to the scale of the cell phone (or mobile device) browser.


That’s it.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Reading a Textarea Field Into Separate Lines

imageOn occasion, you may run into the need to create a small utility the will read each line of a textarea field and process each line separately.  I have done this on a few occasions (like the domain upload for YourPopLinks.com or the Quick Task function on DNSTCcontact.com). 

Here is the code:

1.  You setup a field in your form that is a textarea, let’s call it dataList.

2. On the processing side, you would use the following code:


$dataList = trim($_POST['dataList']);
$dataProcess = explode("\n", $dataList);

foreach ($dataProcess as $line) {

$cleanData = trim($line);

...
process $cleanData
...

}


 


The first trim will remove the carriage return bit at the end of the data, the second trim within the foreach loop, will remove the carriage return at the end of each line.  I have seen examples of this where it used the second trim above, but it does not leave the ability to split the data into the $dataProcess array.


That is pretty much how you do that.  Works pretty good.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Garbage Characters Being Displayed from Blog Posts

imageThe following describes an issue that we had with pulling RSS feeds from WordPress and displaying them on web pages and how we resolved the problem.  The main issue was that some characters where being displayed as garbage on the screen.  It took many months of research and testing out different things to get this issue resolved.

 

Problem

The main issue lied within the character encoding of the page where there information was being displayed.  The information coming from WordPress and the RSS feed was encoded with UTF-8 which allows for more than 128 ASCII characters; whereas, the HTML page it was being display on was encoded with iso-8859-1.

Solution

Change the encoding on the HTML page to UTF-8.  This fixes the issue and clears up all of the garbage characters.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Additional Resources


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8


http://phpplanet.org/stop-junk-characters-%E2%80%98aetm%E2%80%99-from-appearing-instead-of-an-apostrophe/

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Server Cut Over Update

imageAfter several days (15 days) of moving over accounts, checking for errors, fixing issues, changing password, and so on, we are down to 4 more domains left to complete the move to the new server.  So far, everything has been working out great and the new server is working better than expected.   If you have not heard from DNSTC directly, then you site is probably already on the new server. 

You can check by sending a ping request to your domain and it should be pointing to 74.219.116.125 instead of 74.219.116.123.

This has not been a stress free project, but one that needed done desperately.  In the past 10 days, the old server has locked up about 20 times and it is slowly dying.

We got a great 7 years out of that server and billions of packets of traffic.  It will be sadly missed; however, it will under go some slight surgery and will reappear as a gaming server in a week or so after everything has been moved over.  I will post another update once everything is moved.

Server Cut Over Update

After several days (15 days) of moving over accounts, checking for errors, fixing issues, changing password, and so on, we are down to 4 more domains left to complete the move to the new server.  So far, everything has been working out great and the new server is working better than expected.   If you have not heard from DNSTC directly, then you site is probably already on the new server. 

You can check by sending a ping request to your domain and it should be pointing to 74.219.116.125 instead of 74.219.116.123.

This has not been a stress free project, but one that needed done desperately.  In the past 10 days, the old server has locked up about 20 times and it is slowly dying.

We got a great 7 years out of that server and billions of packets of traffic.  It will be sadly missed; however, it will under go some slight surgery and will reappear as a gaming server in a week or so after everything has been moved over.  I will post another update once everything is moved.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Server Migration Under Way

imageWe are currently in the process of migrating over to the new server for website and e-mail hosting.  So far the project has been going along fantastically.  We need to get all sites moved as soon as possible do to a temporary hosting license.  If DNSTC does not maintain your domain registration, we will be in contact with you for the new server's settings.

Server Migration Under Way

We are currently in the process of migrating over to the new server for website and e-mail hosting.  So far the project has been going along fantastically.  We need to get all sites moved as soon as possible do to a temporary hosting license.  If DNSTC does not maintain your domain registration, we will be in contact with you for the new server's settings.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Formatting MySQL datetime field in PHP

If you would like to get a nice format on the datetime field stored in MySQL, use the following code:

<?php

    $datetime = strtotime($row_links['dateAdded']); // The date time field
    $formatDate = date("m/d/y g:i A", $datetime);
    echo $formatDate;

?>

This will output something like:

01/01/12 8:07 PM

If you want more formatting options for the date(), you can review the manual on PHP.net here.

Form Validation with JS

imageOne of the important elements in form design is the implementation of form validation.  This helps to ensure that the data being submitted is cleaned and that the user enters the required information that you want for the form.  If you do not include any type of validation on your form, then it is possible to get corrupt data or open your form for possible hacking attempts.

To create a great form validation system, there are four steps to implementation:

  1. Make sure each of your fields have an id attribute.
  2. Include the validation functions within the heading of your page.
  3. Create a unique validation function for your form.
  4. Add the validation code to the onSubmit attribute of the form.

Validation Functions

We have created several functions that can be used to help with the validation of a form.  These functions will check to see if the field is empty, check to see if the field is numeric, check to see if the field is alpha numeric, check the length of the field, check to see if an item has been selected, and check to see if a valid e-mail address has been entered.

Add the following functions within a javascript section within the heading:

function notEmpty(elem, helperMsg){
if(elem.value.length == 0){
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus(); // set the focus to this input
return false;
}
return true;
}

function isNumeric(elem, helperMsg){
var numericExpression = /^[0-9]+$/;
if(elem.value.match(numericExpression)){
return true;
}else{
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus();
return false;
}
}

function isAlphabet(elem, helperMsg){
var alphaExp = /^[a-zA-Z]+$/;
if(elem.value.match(alphaExp)){
return true;
}else{
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus();
return false;
}
}

function isAlphanumeric(elem, helperMsg){
var alphaExp = /^[0-9a-zA-Z]+$/;
if(elem.value.match(alphaExp)){
return true;
}else{
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus();
return false;
}
}

function lengthRestriction(elem, min, max){
var uInput = elem.value;
if(uInput.length >= min && uInput.length <= max){
return true;
}else{
alert("Please enter between " +min+ " and " +max+ " characters");
elem.focus();
return false;
}
}

function madeSelection(elem, helperMsg){
if(elem.value == "Please Select"){
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus();
return false;
}else{
return true;
}
}

function emailValidator(elem, helperMsg){
var emailExp = /^[\w\-\.\+]+\@[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.[a-zA-z0-9]{2,4}$/;
if(elem.value.match(emailExp)){
return true;
}else{
alert(helperMsg);
elem.focus();
return false;
}
}

Unique Validation Function for the Form


You will not have to look at each of the fields that you want to validate, and create a function that is called when the form is submitted.  The following is an example of how this will work.

function validateForm() {

var valid = false;

var subcat = document.getElementById('subcat');
var name = document.getElementById('Name');
var email = document.getElementById('email');
var linkText = document.getElementById('linkText');
var linkURL = document getElementById('linkURL');
var siteDescription = document.getElementById('siteDescription');
var reciprocalPage = document.getElementById('reciprocalPage');

if(notEmpty(subcat, "You need to select a category.")){
if(notEmpty(name, "You need to provide your name.")){
if(emailValidator(email, "You need to provide your e-mail.")){
if(notEmpty(linkText, "You need to provide a title for your link.")){
if(notEmpty(linkURL, "You need to provide a URL for your link.")){
if(notEmpty(siteDescription, "You need to provide a description for your site.")){
if(notEmpty(reciprocalPage, "You need to provide the URL to the page you placed our link.")){
valid=true;
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

return valid;

}

Explanation:


Here is the flow as to how this function works…



  1. The variable valid is set to false.
  2. The value of the fields you want to validate are assigned to variables.
  3. The nested condition statement goes through each variable and validates the fields calling the appropriate functions.
  4. The function then returns the valid status back to the form.  If the status is true, it is submitted.  If the status is false, then a window pops up and tells the user what they need to correct in order to submit the form.

Adding the validation function to your form


The last thing you have to do is add the validation call to a “OnSubmit” attribute of your form.

<form action="post.php" 
name="myform"
method="post"
onsubmit="return validateForm();">

Now when the submit button is clicked, the validation system should check the fields you want validated.