Franz Kelsch on Tech

Long before most people had up a personal website, I started a website at one of my domains, kelsch.com. The problem with websites is trying to keep them current and updated. Eventually the information there was so out of date that I gave up and changed kelsch.com to a family blog. Blogs, such as this one are much easier to keep up and post new information.  I have setup several blogs for different purposes, as have most all of my children.

I still have several websites I do maintain. I decided to do a make over on all of them using some of the techniques I have found including:

• Flash based slide show that goes through about several images.
• RSS feeds from the various blogs and photo galleries.
• Contact form

So with these feeds the website keeps current without any need for me to do anything. I can change the images for the slide shows at any time by using Lightroom, selecting 30 images, and doing an export to the right folder, then FTPing them to the site. It only takes a minute.  I also setup a photo gallery on the website, which is accessed at http://www.kelsch.org/gallery .  This is a gallery created entirely within Lightroom send directly to the webserver.  I am still playing around with this feature.

See the screen shots below.  Click on any of them and visit that website.

Here is a screen shot of what Kelsch.ORG looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what the FranzKelsch.com site looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what KelschFamily.NET looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what my Photography site looks like now [Visit Site].

Here is a screen shot of what my Tech site looks like now [Visit Site].

I did have one issue with the kelsch.org site that that showed up only on Windows based browsers. I am using a Spry hortizontal menu and when I would click on the menu item, the drop down portion of the menu would be hidden by the flash slide show below.  Doing some research, I solved this by adding this command to the flash slide show coding:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />

This makes the background transparent.  Inside Dreamweaver, select the Flash slide show and in the properties select Parameters.  Add “wmode” with a value of “transparent”.  Change the order so this is the first parameter in the list.  That solved the issue.  For more information refer to this item:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15523&sliceId=1

It might be good to list down now all the domains I have, along with the subdomains, and what they are currently being used for.

Google Earth for the iPhone and iTouch has now been released and this is one amazing application.  It integrates with things such as your contacts list.  When I selected to search, and started to type my own address, my full address showed and I was able to just select it.

You zoom in/out using the usual pinch finger.

It was speedy using the WiFi connection. It includes the Panoramio and Wikipedia layers under the “Geographic Web” by default. Click on a blue photo icon when you see one, and it will load the Panoramio photo for that location.

Read the blog entry by the Google Earth team.

Here is a video released by Google.

I am part of a two man relay team that will be competing in a 508 mile bike race called the Furnace Creek 508.  I setup a website for our team and wanted to have a way to update it while on the road using only my iPhone.

You can see the solution I developed here: http://www.ultracycle.net/prairiedog/index.php

Embedded into the website are two different RSS feeds.  One is from a gallery on SmugMug and the other from a WordPress blog.

I use two applications on my iPhone.  One is called SmugShots that allows me to take pictures with the iPhone and upload them to a gallery on Smugmug.  The pictures are saved on the iPhone until I am in a location where I get network access.  The thumbnails will soon appear on our team website.  I set the coding to show the last 7 photos.  If someone clicks any thumbnail they are taken to the SmugMug gallery.

The other application called WordPress allows me to post blog entries to a WordPress Blog.  The first part of the blog entry will show up on the website via RSS.  Those than want to read the whole entry just click on it.

Both applications are free.  This seems to be the easiest way to update the website using only the iPhone.  I would like to figure out one other item.  Near the top of our website I am using a Flash player to show a slideshow of images.  I am using some photos from last year’s race by our team but would like to figure out how to use the iPhone to upload some of the photos to the right folder on the webserver.  If anyone has an idea how to do that, please contact me at franz@kelsch.com.

In the prior blog entry I talked about moving my domain for email over to GMail. Hosting my website at Dreamhost makes this simple.  I configured Gmail to allow POP access and changed my settings in Entourage to use the Gmail POP and SMTP settings.  It all seemed to work fine, except I notice that not all the emails were being downloaded.  When I checked my Gmail Inbox using a browser, I found messages there that did not download.

It was difficult to find out what was going on.  It seems that unlike most POP clients, with Gmail when any device downloads using POP, it marks the message as downloaded and then when another device tries to download the message, it does not download.  I had my iPhone setup for POP access, as well as using an app in MyYahoo to see the messages.  I view this to be a issue with Gmail that should have been fixed since all other POP clients can tell if a different device is attempting a download.

So how to fix?  I found this information: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47948

Basically you setup the mail client by adding “recent” in front of the username, as in “recent:name@gmail.com”.  You have to also leave a copy on the server, but that is true for all POP clients if you want to download to multiple devices.

When I added the “recent:” in front of my user name, I was able to get a bunch of messages.  I have to see how this works and see if I get multiple messages in my Inbox.

If you host your domain, you can use Google Apps using your own domain name, including using their gmail application.   If you use Dreamhost the steps are different and much simplified.  Be sure to setup the new email accounts in Google BEFORE you change tell Dreamhost to make the chagne, or you change the MX Records or you will lose emails.  Google provide excellent help on how to do all this, including videos.  However these don’t take into account what Dreamhost is doing for you so I have written these notes.

1. Sign up and sign in.

Dreamhost: If you are using Dreamhost to host your domain, go to your Dreamhost control plane and select Domain/Manage Domain.  Select to edit the domain.  Towards the bottom look for Google Hosted and click the link “register at Google Apps for your Domain”.  Do NOT try to have Google host yet since your email will be routed to Google and you have not yet setup user accounts.

Other: If you are not using a hosting company that provides the support, from the Google Apps home page, click ‘Compare Editions and Sign Up’ to get started and access to the control panel.  For most everyone the free Standard Edition would provide all that is needed.  You might wish to pay for the Premier Edition if you need more disk space, need to migrate your old email over or want 24/7 support.  After you make your selection on which plan, then enter your domain name.  Be sure to check that you are an administrator.  Learn more

2. Verify domain ownership.

Dreamhost: For one domain I setup I did not need to verify.  It seemed that once I clicked in the Dreamhost control panel to switch over to Google mail, verification worked.  For another domain I had to follow the steps below.  I choose to create a HTML file and upload to the domain.  It might be that for this second domain I had a WordPress blog setup on it instead of a website, as was the case for the first domain I switched over.  Once I had it verify using the HTML file I uploaded it said it woudl take up to 48 hours to verify domain ownership, however it worked in a matter of minutes.

Other: Otherwise go sign in and go to the dash boarad and then confirm that you own the domain you signed up with to activate Google Apps.  If you did not purchase your domain from Google, you will need to verify you are the owner.  This requires you to ypload a special file to your site and then create a special CNAME record for your domain. Learn more

3. Customize Google Apps.

This is the same if you use Dreamhost or not.  Google Apps lets you easily modify a variety of settings that apply to your entire organization.  Learn more

4. Create User Accounts.

This is the same if you use Dreamhost or not.  From the Google  control panel, create your user accounts accounts to match the users email accounts you already have setup.  Do this BEFORE you change the MX records in the next step.  You can bulk upload a list of user accounts if you wish.  Learn more

5. Turn on Email.

Dreamhost: If you are using Dreamhost, go to the Dreamhost control panel there and select Domains/Manage Domains.  Select Edit for the domain you are hosting and click “Google Host this domain now”. Dreamhost will re-route your email rather than you needing to change the MX records for that domain.  Then go to the control panel in Google Apps and activate email.  Although I did not actually change the MX records, I had to tell the google control panel that I had.

Other: If you are not using Dreamhost, to receive your email at Google, you need to modify the MX record for your domain.  You do this at the company where you have your domain registered.  Once you make the change, your email will not longer be routed where it was previously sent.  If you wish to check things out before you change the MX record, you can use a temporary email address to send to using this format: user.name@your_domain.com.test-google-a.com. You can use the webmail function in Gmail to send out an email directly.  Learn more

6.  Migrate Email.

If you use Micosoft Windows, Google offers a tool to migrate your existing email from some applications, such as Outlook, to your new Google Inbox. For Mac users, I did find one commercial program.  I also found one approach but have not tested it:

• Using Thunderbird connect to your old email account through IMAP,
• Do the same with your new Gmail account. You need to have Imap activated in Gmail in order to access it from Thunderbird. .
• Copy email from each folder of your old accout to gmail.

If you are going to continue to use POP access it is not really important since you will use your email client to retrieve your new email and it will go into the same inbox as before.  If you wish to switch to IMAP, then prior emails will not be online, but that will be an issue of less importance as time moves on.

So cool! There is a new Word press app for the iPhone that allows me to write or edit a posting to a WordPress blog. I am using it for this entry.

Too bad it does not yet support images from the iPhone camera

A friend showed me how to install some files on my own web server that can be used to do a speed test, which I have done. I have installed on my server so you can test it out. The image below is a screen shot of what it looks like when running. Click the link below to actually run the test.

RUN SPEED TEST

The necessary files and instructions to setup this on your own server can be found at http://www.speedtest/mini.php. There are versions written in PHP, ASP.NET or ASP.

You can also test your speed at their main site by clicking the button below.

I have mostly relied on the tools offered in WordPress to create and edit my blog postings but I have always wanted more. Since I have Adobe Creative Suite 3, I also have a copy of Adobe Contribute, which allows you to do direct editing of websites and blogs. Although this software has some nice features, such as the ability to insert tables, I have found using it to be rather annoying. If I try to edit an existing post, all the paragraphs are run together. It just seems to do havoc to the html code in the existing post.

I did stumble upon a neat plugin for FireFox, called ScribeFox. By clicking on the icon in the tool bar, I get a split screen, with the upper part of the FireFox window showing the blog and the lower one where I can create or edit a post. See below for what the input screen looks like. I did find there were no easy tools for setting the image attributes, such as the size. This software may not have all the bells and wistles but it is an elegant and straightforward approach to creating and editing blog entires. Also when I go back and use the built in tools in WordPress, I don’t get a scrambled mess like I do with Adobe Contribute.

Setting up a WordPress blog is an easy way to do frequent posts, much easier than using a web development tool and uploading the files. One issue that causes some problems is the image size with prior postings.  Although this seems to be addressed with version 2.51 of WordPress you may have a lot of postings with a prior version that don’t contain the needed code to resize the image to fit within the blog column.

To fix those you have two choices. You can either resize the image before you upload so the width is around 450 pixels (this should work with most themes), or you can set the image size in the html code so the image is resized properly.

Some themes, such as the WordPress default theme, do a pretty good job of resizing of image but when you switch to a different them, you may see that larger image spills over. To fix it without the need to set the display size for each image if it is too wide. Here are the simple steps.

• Edit the post
• Select the Image
• Select the button to insert/edit an image
• Set the width to something like 450 (I use 470 on some themes)
• Leave the height measurement blank
• Change the Alignment if you want.
• Click Update

This basically will write the html code for the image size. If you leave the height measurement blank, most modern browsers will resize the image proportionally to fit the width you set. If you enter both the width and height measurement be sure to keep them proportional with the original image.

For some images you will want to upload a size larger than what will fit within the selected WordPress theme so that when the viewer clicks on it, then see a larger size.  Since I am making this post using version 2.51 of WordPress when I insert the image below, which is much wider than 450, and select to insert the full size, the WordPress editor automatically set the size for me with a witdh of 499 so  I don’t need to manually change it.  When someone clicks on the image, they can view the real full size.

I was listing to a Security Now pod cast on the long drive home. The topic was SQL injection threats. It was the first time I heard about it but it is cleariy something I need to consider on our webpages that take user input.

Basically what it is that a portion of a SQL statement is used for user input. A simple example would be a log in form that askes for a user name and password. Let’s say that those two fields are used to see if there is a matching recording in a login MySQL database. The SQL statment might be something like this using a form input:

Here is a sample basic HTML form with two inputs, login and password.

<form method=”post” action=”http://mywebiste.com/login.php”>
<input name=”UserName” type=”text” id=”UserName”>
<input name=”UserPass” type=”password” id=”UserPass”>
</form>

If for the user name they enter “Bill” and for the password something like this: ‘anything’ OR ‘x’='x’

The SQL statement might make this check

SELECT FROM * WHERE UserName=Bill AND UserPass = anything OR ‘x’='x’;

By using a SQL command in the data filed the query is changed in a way never expected.

On some SQL servers such as MS SQL Server any valid SQL command may be injected via this method, including the execution of multiple statements. The following value of “UserName” in the statement below would cause the deletion of the “users” table as well as the selection of all data from the “data” table (in essence revealing the information of every user):

a‘;DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM data WHERE name LIKE ‘;

There is no patch on a MySQL database or any firewall that will stop this type of attach. What is needed is a check of the data. I will write more about that after dong some additional research.