Archive for November, 2005

Weird morning…

By
Andy
 – November 8, 2005Posted in: Hardware

I´ve found a design flaw with the iPod range (maybe not the Shuffles).
 
I was sitting on the back seat of the bus this morning listening to mine and was a guy in front was listening to his. Nothing special.
 
All of a sudden he started wiping his nose on the front of his iPod. "What the hell is he doing?", I thought. Then it occured to me that he was wearing really big gloves and he was only adjusting the volume with his nose. See how many people you can spot doing it this winter.
 
And don´t take the piss out of me. It was early.

PEAR::Mail leaving the To field blank

By
Andy
 – November 7, 2005Posted in: Email & Spam, Web Development

Update: As mentioned, i was trying to get a php mass mailing script working. It seemed to be working well in the first little test except that it was leaving the "To:" field blank.
 
After a lot of searching which threw up no answers I started looking at disabling parts of the programme starting with the sending of html and other multipart mime mails (try saying that after a good night out). As soon as I´d done this it all started working fine. As soon as I enabled it again it stopped working again.
 
After doing some messing with headers from Outlook generated emails and a few others I found out it was because I was setting the "To" header last, after the Mime version and content type. To get it working properly you just need to set the "To" header before the others. This gets it showing up in mail clients the way it should.

 
Time for the next series of tests…

Does the iPod Nano break easily?

By
Andy
 – November 4, 2005Posted in: Hardware

A month or so ago someone saw me with my iPod Shuffle and said "Ooh, what did you get one of them for? The batteries always go in about 5 minutes". My reply was along the lines of "You don´t exactly know what you´re on about do you? Stop reading the tabloids you pleb!". It must have been Monday.
 
Now I´ve got my iPod Nano someone said. "Why did you get one of them. The screens always break". Well, just to prove that you´re all morons and the world would be a better place if you were all locked away, here´s a scientific test. Since I don´t have a car and don´t plan on getting run over, I should be alright.

Blatant advertising coming up:

PHP Mass Mailing Solution

By
Andy
 – November 4, 2005Posted in: Email & Spam, Web Development

I mentioned before that I was having problems with a mailing script to a large number of recipients. I´ve been looking around for a solution so that I get some mailings done without making everyone mad by getting a dozen or so copies of the email.
 
After searching around for a while I was reading the PHP manual page for the mail() function and read the bit that says "don´t use the mail() function for mass mailing". Apparently it opens a new connection to the server for time it is called and if used in a loop for a large number of people, it can obviously cause problems. The solution it suggests is to use the PEAR::Mail functions that are built into the PHP download as default.

 
I´ve now modified the script to use this and am running a few tests on my own mailboxes with about 12,000 made up addresses. The other advantage of it is that it lets you use and authenticate with any SMTP server so I can use our webhost instead of my poor little overloaded mail server in the office. I´ll post again when I know if it´ll work or not.

Whats up with php.net

By
Andy
 – November 4, 2005Posted in: Domains, Web Development

Seems that the php.net site is having a few difficulties. So’s the PEAR site as well now I come to think about it.

I’ve been getting DNS error pages for the last few days. It’s really annoying since I’m trying to get a massive program coded and need both the sites. I also use the php.net site every day when I can’t quite remember the syntax for a function.

Hopefully it’ll clear up soon.

Messing around with the archives

By
Andy
 – November 3, 2005Posted in: Blogging

I was a bit bored this morning so I was thinking of ways to get more traffic around the site. One of the shortcomings of the current way I do things is the Archive part. I was basically a series of pages (i.e. 1 | 2 | 3….) with links to all the posts on them and a line or so from the start of the post. It worked but wasn’t exactly search engine friendly. Plus the link to the archive was just a single link from the sidebar. Again not the most search engine friendly way of doing it.

I decided to redo it in the way some other blogs do with links to an archive page for each month and then displaying the posts for that month in abreviated form with a couple of paragraphs from the post and a link to it. It’s more search engine friendly (content is king!) and should help the spiders get around a bit easier.

I didn’t really need to post about this but I didn’t have anything for “November, 2005″ yet!

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