<script type="text/javascript">
function rand(x, y) {
    var random_number;
    if (isNaN(x) == false && isNaN(y) == false && x < y) {
        random_number = Math.ceil(Math.random() * (y-x)) + x;
    } else {
        random_number = -1;
    }

    return(random_number);
}

//example
document.write(rand(4,8));
</script>

Now, let me explain a little bit how the function works. First, I declare a variable which will store the random number. The second step is to make sure that first parameter is smaller than the second one. Finally, we can generate randomly a number using a method of the Math object called random(). But this method generates only values between 0 and 1 such 0.6357802708373617 for instance. This values are pretty ugly. So, we have to polish what we get from random(). To do that we use another method of Math object called ceil(). This method rounds a number upwards to the nearest integer.

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1. How do I generate the current date in a language other than English?
2. How do I grab email addresses of a web page?

The above PHP script generates the current date in a language other than English. As everybody knows, the PHP function date() returns values only in English language which sometimes might be pretty disturbing. But this PHP script fixes entirely this issue.

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The above PHP function extracts the extension of a file. It is useful when we create upload forms or when we read dynamic a folder of files. For instance, a folder of images used by an image gallery or a folder of fonts used by a CAPTCHA.

When we create an upload form for adding images we must not allow the user to upload on our hosting server whatever his mind wants. We must make sure that what the user uploads is truely an image and not something else. Let’s say a malicious executable or scam pages which obviously can harm our server, website, image. So, each time when we develop server-side code we must keep in mind that what the user enters is not trustable. Therefore, we must add all restrictions which are required.

Usually, an image gallery feeds dynamic with the images of a folder of the hosting server. This PHP script helps us to be sure that it grabs only the images of the folder.

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1. What do I need to develop websites?

1. What languages do I have to know?

There are two types of languages:

• client-side languages: HTML, CSS and Javascript. A code is client-side if it is executed by the client program which in our case is the browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Apple Safari). For this reason, the client-side code must be cross-browser. That means the website must behave identically in all browsers and on all screen resolutions. Whether we like it or not, Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most popular browser. That is because of Windows operating system. Therefore, I must test the code in it first time.
• server-side languages: PHP and MySQL. A code is server-side if it is executed by the server program which in our case is Apache. No matter what a server-side code does its output is eventually client-side code (HTML, CSS, Javascript).

Now that I know which are the main languages…what does each language work with?. So…

• HTML or HyperText Markup Language works with tags only. This language defines the structure of the website.
• CSS or Cascading Style Sheets works with rules only. Using the CSS rules I can control far easier the properties of HTML tags.
• in Javascript I create client-side scripts. Based on this language there were developed a couple of technologies as DHTML(Dynamic HTML), jQuery and AJAX (Asynchronus Javascript and XML). DHTML and JQuery came to replace the heavy Flash animations and AJAX was developed because of the desire to communicate in real time with the server for a frindlier web page. It is really annoying to see how the whole page has to reload for a bloody tiny thing. But AJAX technology fixed entirely this problem.
• in PHP or PHP Hypertext Preprocessor I create server-side scripts. The name of the language wants to say that the output of any PHP script is always client-side code. For instance, the bellow PHP script generates dynamic the absolute URL of the current page:

  <?php
  echo 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
  ?>
  

• MySQL or My Structered Query Language works with database queris only. This language helps me to organize far better the content of my website. The main database queris are CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE.

To get the right picture about web development, I have to asociate in my mind HTML with tags, CSS with rules, Javascript with client-side scripts, PHP with server-side scripts, MySQL with database queris. All these 5 languages work together to ensure the whole functionality of what is called “website” or generally speaking “web application”.

2. What programs do I need?
There are two types of programs:
- programs I creat the design of the website with:

• graphics editing program: Adobe Photoshop, Gimp. Adobe Photoshop is the most popular graphics editing program. Using it we can edit pictures and create logos, banners, website layouts. It has plenty of tools and the interface is very friendly.
• vector drawing program: Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw
• animation program: Adobe Flash

- progams I edit and test the code with:

• source-code editor: Notepad++, Adobe Dreamweaver. Personally, I advise the beginners to avoid Dreamweaver as much as possible.
• browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari. It helps me to check if the client-side code (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is cross-browser or not.
• local server: Easy PHP, XAMPP. It helps me to test the PHP scripts and the database queris.
• FTP client: Filezilla. It helps me to upload the files of my website from the local server to the hosting server once the website is done.

3. How do I organise the files of my website?
I create a folder and I call it, for instance, “accesinterzis”. This folder will contain all files of my website. Inside of it I will find a couple of subfolders:

• images: here I will store all the slices of the website design exported from Photoshop and all images of the website
• css: here I will store all CSS files . An important CSS file is reset.css. This file overwrites all the default settings of the browsers because the default settings are different from one browser to another.
• js: here I will store all Javascript scripts
• includes: here I will include all PHP include files. A healthy habitat of progamming is to call these files “genericname.inc.php” instead “genericname.php”. In this way, I will know that I work with PHP includes and not with PHP web pages as “index.php”, “about.php” and so on.
• swf: here I will store all Flash animations
• xml: here I will store my XML files
• backend: here I will store all files of my backend if the website has an administration section behind it

Besides these subfolders, there exist the pages of website (index.php, about.php, contact.php, portofolio.php and so on), the robots.txt file and the .htacces file. So, eventually, the root folder should look like in the bellow image:

Now, anyone can open in the brower the subfolders and see what files are there. For instance, if anyone will type in the address bar “http://www.mywebsite.com/includes” will get a list with all files of subfolder “includes”. To avoid this I must put in my subfolder a file called “index.php” which contains only one line of code:

<?php
header("Location:http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
?>

This line of code redirects the visitor to the main page of the website each time when he tries to open the subfolder “includes”.

4. What about the SEO of the website?

In Search Engine Optimization, everything is mainly about words. The goal of each website owner is to get on the first page of the most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. So…how can this be done?

First of all, I will start with the source-code of the website. The source-code of the website must have no erros. For that I must validate it using an add-on of Firefox browser called Web Developer 1.1.8. After installing it, I can see if the web page has errors or not going to Tools – Validate HTML and Tools – Validate CSS. It is important the source-code to be valid because the crawlers can dig easier in it.

Also, it is inportant to have on the website more text than code. The more code exists in the source of the web page the harder it is for crawlers to get properly the content of the web page.

In HTML exist a couple of tags called meta tags which were created to provide informations about website to the crawlers. These metatags are:

• keywords: here I add my keywords separated by comma. These keywords together with the commas can count up to around 256 characters
• description: here I add a short desciption of my web page. It can have up to around 156 characters
• abstract: it can have up to around 100 characters

Besides these metatags these is a tag called <title> which contains the title of the web page. This tag is very important in SEO and must contain up to around 65 characters.

The golden rule of SEO is to post text on the website as much as possible. In this way the website will be indexed naturally by Google, Yahoo, Bing and all others search engines.

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1. How do I extract the extension of a file?

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
	cout << "How many prime numbers are between X and Y?\n";
	int start, end, contor = 0;
	cout << "Enter the first positive integer:"; cin >> start;
	cout << "Enter the second positive integer:"; cin >> end;

	cout << "Between " << start << " and " << end << " are the following prime numbers:\n\n";
	//the loop which finds the prime numbers
	for (start; start <= end; start++) {
		//the array which stores all the divisors of the number which is checking if it is prime or not
		vector<int> divisors;
		for (int i = 1; i <= start; i++) {
			if (start%i == 0) {
				divisors.push_back(i);
			}
		}

		//checking if the number is prime or not; if the number is prime then it will be shown on screen
		if (divisors.size() == 2) {
			if (divisors[0] == 1 && divisors[1] == start) {
				cout << start << "\n";
				contor++;
			}
		}
	}

	cout << endl;
	cout << "The number of prime numbers found:" << contor << "\n";

    return 0;
}

For instance, between 159 and 14 789 are 1696 prime numbers. The last five of them are: 14 783, 14 779, 14 771, 14 767 and 14 759. 14.055 seconds took to the program to find them.
As IDE, I used Code::Blocks 8.02 on Windows 7 operating system. And I have an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz processor.

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I’ve started to enjoy drawing banners in Adobe Photoshop CS4. Too bad that I’ve installed some updates of Windows 7 and Photoshop tells me now that my screen is defect. And because of that the colors aren’t so clear. WTF…before installing the updates the screen worked properly and after that Photoshop tells me that I have to calibrate it? Pretty awkward.

But I don’t blame Windows because I’ve installed Linux Ubuntu 9.10 (called Karmic Koala) a few days ago and this operating system was released with a bug . Because of this bug you can’t set the Internet connection. Finally, after a long research on the Internet and big headeaches I found on an Ubuntu forum a solution which fixes the problem. I applied it, it worked and I went quickly to Update Manager to be sure that my PC is up to date. So, Linux downloaded and installed the updates and what a surprise… I got with no sound. The conclusion? Everywhere are bugs. Even in operating systems as Linux. I am wondering now what will happen if the black hat hackers will stop developing malware for Windows and redirect their attention to Linux. Will they find bugs as many as they did in Windows?

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1. My first banner made in Adobe Photoshop CS3

So, I got to my second banner. This time I’ve drawn it in Adobe Photoshop CS4. Finally, I could get an CS4 setup without any “beast” inside it. I had to make it for the same reason as I made my first banner: link-exchange.

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An important feature of the script is that it can run very well on a local server as EasyPHP or XAMPP. It doesn’t have to run on a hosting server which might has restricted the use of PHP function file_get_contents(). For our records, this resctriction is done editing the php.ini file of the Apache server. More exactly, the following line: allow_url_fopen = Off.

<?php
$url = "http:/www.genericwebsite.com/contact.php";
//getting the source-code of the web page
$sc = file_get_contents($url);
$sc = strtolower($sc);
$forbidden_symbols = array('?', '!', ',', ';', ':', '+', '=', '/', '\\', '"', '\'', '`', '’', '“', '”', '#', '$', '%', '^', '&amp;', '*', '(', ')', '[', ']', '{', '}', '|', '<', '>');
//removing all symbols from the source-code less "@", "." and "_"
$sc = str_replace($forbidden_symbols, ' ', $sc);
//storing all words from the source-code into an array
$words_found = explode(' ', $sc);

//verifying each word from array if it is an email address
for ($i = 0; $i < count($words_found); $i++) {
	//if the word contains the symbols "@" that means it is an email address
	if (strpos($words_found[$i], '@')) {
		//I make sure that the email address has no empty spaces in the beginning and in the and of it
		$email_address = trim($words_found[$i]);

		//I make sure that the email address has no symbols in the beginning and in the and of it
		//I apply all these cleaning filters because the source-code can be pretty messy
		$first_char = substr($email_address, 0, 1);
		while (!ctype_alpha($first_char)) {
			$email_address = substr($email_address, 1, strlen($email_address));
			$first_char = substr($email_address, 0, 1);
		}

		$last_char = substr($email_address, strlen($email_address) - 1, 1);
		while (!ctype_alpha($last_char)) {
			$email_address = substr($email_address, 0, strlen($email_address) - 1);
			$last_char = substr($email_address, strlen($email_address) - 1, 1);
		}

		//I make sure that the extracted string is really an email address
		if (eregi("^[a-z0-9\._-]+@+[a-z0-9\._-]+\.+[a-z]{2,4}$", $email_address)) {
			echo $email_address.'<br />';
		}
	}
}
?>

Starting from this script, there can be developed far larger web applications with plenty of form inputs, all kind of jQuery features and a database behind it where might be stored the email addresses. So feel free to develop your own application based on your interests. I’ve just presented the core, the main idea. I’ve just shown the way we can get the source-code of a web page and from it to collect whatever we want. For instance, email addresses, URLs, keywords and so on. It depedens of what intents we have.

Before ending the article, I just want to mention that the script has nothing to do with spamming. Spamming means unsolicited mail. So, as long as the script doesn’t send unsolicited emails with comercials the script can’t be called a spamming bot. It looks more like the spiders of search engines (Yahoo, Bing and obviously the migthy Google) which gather information from all over the Internet digging deep in the source-code of the web pages. The script can be adapted to gather URLs or the entire text of the web page or whatever your mind wants instead email addreses.

Regarding email addresses of the web pages, I’ve seen on the Internet people trying to protect their email addresses replacing “@” with “[at]” and “.” with “[dot]“. This method has two big issues: the first one is that there can be developed scripts which easily break this system: the script looks for “[at]” instead “@” in the source-code. So it will get the email address in this format: “accesinterzis[at]gmail.com”. The next step is to replace “[at]” with “@” using PHP function str_replace() and it gets eventually the email address. The second issue is that the email address looks gross. Or at least unfriendly. So, the best way, perhaps unbreakable, to protect an email address is to generate it on the screen using Javascript as I did on my Contact page . We need only a few lines of code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var first_half = "accesinterzis";
var at = "@";
var second_half = "gmail.com";
document.write(first_half + at + second_half);
</script>

Using these Javascript lines we fix entirely the problem: any bot can’t grab the email address from source-code of the web page and the email address looks far friendlier in the browser. The main concern of using Javascript is that the code might not be cross-browser. But in this case, the code is pretty simple so we shouldn’t worry about it.

I wait suggestions to improve/optimize this algorithm of extracting email addresses of a web page. Cheers!

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The above banner is my first banner. I had to do it because I need it when I make link exchange with someone for a better off page SEO. The banner isn’t something astonishing but I like it. Actually, I feel pretty proud of it. That`s why I felt the need to post it on the blog.

It is made in Photoshop CS3. I know that most of the people use already CS4 version but each time when I download the setup of CS4 from torrents I take a trojan horse which disable my AntiVirus (Avira) and Windows Defender. And it didn’t happen once.

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An important feature of the script is that all emails are different from one another. Each time the script sends an email, the sender is different (for instance, keagon.goldsmith@gmail.com, kurt.taylor@yahoo.com, estelle.cook@hotmail.com and so on). Same for the body and the subject of the email. So, each email has its own sender, subject and body which is very important because only a few emails will get in Junkbox. Most of them will get in Inbox which is our purpose.

The disadvantage of the script is that it can’t hide the source of the attack. But for that it can be used a proxy server.

As everybody sees, the script is 100% black hat. Therefore, I won’t show the source-code of it. But if someone wants to have it the script is for sale. I ask for it 25€. Or shall I say ONLY 24.99€? So, if any one wants to get in touch with me my data contact can be found here. Cheers!

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