The first time I tried to add DIGG buttons to my wordpress blog post I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I looked at DIGG and found the various image buttons but not how to link to the page. Of course I am fairly new to using DIGG on a regular basis, so this might be more evident for someone with more experience with DIGG. Here’s what I did:

(You’ll have to view the source of the page to see the proper code……. as I still have not found a good way to display code in wordpress).

For the button above I use the anchor url as http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattgregg.com%2FFileName.html … Note that the url= portion of this url is urlencoded where a / becomes %2F and colon becomes %3A.

The icon type shown below is a bit more difficult.

In the wordpress wysiwyg editor, </iframe> does not seem to get carried over (from the html edit box) after saving. So what I do is manually add </iframe> directly after this icon within the wysiwyg editor each time before resaving the blog post.

I had to install another Godaddy turbl ssl certificate today and I thought I’d take some screen shots of the process.

First purchase the certificate here: SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Next login to WHM to Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request:

Fill out the form with the appropriate values and click “create”. Next you will see the crt and key information:

Leave this WHM window open and go back to Godaddy.

Next go to the SSL certificate section of your Godaddy account. You will see something like this:

Click on “Set up certificate”. Then you will see this:

Then you will need to create an SSL account or login if you already have one:

Select the ssl certificate to use:

STEP 1: Fill out the form:

STEP 2: PASTE THE CSR (certificate signing request) THAT YOU PREVIOUSLY GENERATED IN WHM:

Review and confirm the information

Check your email for the notice. Click on the link in this email to download the bundle and crt:

When you click the email link you will arrive at this page, select the server and contine:

Then you can download the zip file containing the crt and bundle

This shows the contents of the zip file:

Now Open a NEW Window and go to WHM again and click on Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain. Paste the CRT from the www.—.com file in the zip file downloaded from Godaddy. Enter the domain, account username, and dedicated IP address for the domain. The next box for Key is the same one generated earlier from the “Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request” process in WHM and begins with “—–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–“. The last one, CA Bundle, is the other file in the zip file from Godaddy. Copy and paste the entire contents of the file here, click Do it and if all goes well you will receive a success message and are done. Scroll down to see a screen shot of the WHM form.

If you found this useful, please Digg it by clicking below:

For the first part of this article, see here: Godaddy SSL Turbo Certificates

If you haven’t already purchased the SSL certificate, you can do so here:  SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

If you haven’t already purchased the SSL certificate, you can do so here:  SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

In Unix or Linux Apache with mod_rewrite this is easy.

Simply add the following to your .htaccess file in your public_html directory.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase  /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R]

If you have subdomains, this will redirect all of them to http://www.domain.com/, to prevent this do the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase  /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^subdoamin1.domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^subdomain2.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R]

After looking for a SSL cert that was affordable and provided good browser recognition, I found the GoDaddy Turbo SSL certificate, check them out here: ” SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com .” I did some research online about this ssl certificate and although priced much lower than any other certificate it seemed to provide the same features, security, and browser recognition as higher priced certificates from other companies. I went for it at $17.99/year with a 2 year commitment. Other certificates such as Comodo or Rapid SSL which still aren’t brand name certs (these used to be the discount guys) run about $79.99/year. The turbo SSL cert from Godaddy provides a secure connection for your customer, and all the other standard browser security features that a browser will normally show (the closed lock icon, etc.) The certificate has 99% browser recognition, which basically means that only browsers that are years old will not recognize the cert and will show the website visitor a security warning. Since most people aren’t using these browsers anyway, this should not be a concern for most website owners.

SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

The installation of the godaddy turbo ssl certificate was pretty easy. I was waiting for an email from godaddy but one never came so I checked my godaddy account. Login to godaddy, click my account, click on “Manage Secure Certificates” from there it will show you your SSL certificate credits and allow you to proceed with setting up the certificate. Be sure when you set up the ssl certificate, if you want it for www., you must specify www., if you just put domain.com then www.domain.com will display a security error. If you want it for both, you must purchase 2 certificates or a more expensive wildcard certificate.

I use WHM on my servers and it makes it easy to install a SSL certificate. In WHM, first give the site a dedicated IP address if it doesn’t already have one by going to Change Site’s IP Address in the account functions section. If you don’t have an extra IP, you will need to purchase one from your web hosting provider. Note that this may cause your site to go down until the DNS propagates throughtout the internet. Next go to Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request enter the required info and click create. Save the important key data that is generated.

SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Back at godaddy, you will need to download the key files. Once you have all this data, go back to WHM and click on Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain and copy and paste the info, including the start and end line text. Save it and that should do it.

For more information or to purchase, visit Godaddy at SSL Certificates from GoDaddy.com

Below are some screen shots of the new secured site (domain name removed):

Here’s a tip for clearing up potentially large amounts of space on your WHM/CPanel webserver.

First, you can go to WHM to “list accounts” to see the usage of each account. If anything seems out of line, you can go to that accounts Cpanel and look at “disk usage”, this will show you the size of each folder. One to note for this discussion is the tmp/ folder and its subfolders.

The tmp folder contains stats program data that runs backend on default cpanel/whm installs.

The biggest user of space I found was the analog program which may fill your server with potentially gigabytes of data. Since I don’t use the analog stats program or the webalizer, I just deleted these folders via ftp or ssh.

Next, to turn off the programs entirely, I went into WHM and clicked on “Statistics Software Configuration” near the top of the left menu. Here, check the box “Allow users to change their web statistics generating software.” and click save. Now it will allow you to turn off the stats programs you don’t use.

I freed up about 38% of my web space by doing this.

Out of the blue I received this error tonight when looking at my awstats stats

“Failed to write temporary history file”

First I thought something happened with the permissions because I had recently been playing with the .htaccess file. After a few failed attempts with adjusting permissions and the htaccess file I looked elsewhere.  

The problem was I had run out of disk space. I added some disk space to the account and all is well.

Bluehost Review 

If you intend to use Bluehost for Shared SSL service, read this first:

All customers of bluehost are sharing 1 SSL cert on 1 server. All customers.

The secure address is https://secure.bluehost.com/

The massive amount of activity on this 1 server makes it unusable at times and very slow at the best of times.

Bluehost does offer ability to upgrade to a private SSL for a resonable price but I can’t see upgrading there because of the low limits they put on CPU usage before they 301 redirect your whole account to a CPU overuse message page that makes that sends a website visitor into la-la land. Since they are redirected, if they try to reload the page they will never get back to your site and using the back button will only further redirect every page to the same CPU overusage page. They can go all the way back and still never be able to just hit reload to bring the site back up. If they go all the way back they’ll have to type in the URL to try to reload the page or close the window and start over.  

Phone support at Bluehost is good but email support is horrible usually taking 3-5 days or more for a response if you get a response at all.

If they would just fix the shared SSL problem and the CPU overuse and allotment they would have darn good service.

There is a significant problem in using Paypal for the sale of digital downloads. On the surface it seems handy and convenient for both parties, the buyer and the seller. Integration with Paypal’s IPN or PDT can allow the buyer immediate access to the download after a completed purchase without the seller doing anything. The problem is the buyer can request Paypal to reverse the transaction right after they download the software. Since Paypal will only accept the shipping tracking number as proof that the seller sent the goods to the buyer, the seller is left without recourse on purchase of digital downloads from a dishonest buyer. Any amount of data provided to Paypal in the case of digital downloads is not enough, not the IP address of the purchaser, the IP address used to download the software, the applicable dates/times, the software license code…. nothing.

In essence the buyer is a thief and the scenario equates to writing a check for goods then going to the bank to cancel the check and keeping the goods. With this scenario, the seller can at least take the case to court and win. However with Paypal, often all the seller has is the buyers name and email address.

Apparently Paypal is aware of this problem and is working on a new feature called Paypal dropbox. Currently I can see the only workaround would be to not allow digital downloads and instead mail the buyer a CD of the software so that a tracking number is available should the buyer decide to reverse the transaction. Then again, if the buyer reverses the transaction, the seller is out even more with the shipping fees and time involved. Hopefully, when implimented the Paypal dropbox feature will have Paypal as sort of an escrow company so that when the digital files in the dropbox are retrieved, Paypal can be assurred that the buyer received the goods and the seller will have some amount of recourse should the buyer reverse the transaction.

MySQL injection attacks occur when the code of a MySQL query can be altered by the user due to improper escaping of variables.

See http://us3.php.net/mysql_real_escape_string for a  great example of an SQL injection attack.

MySQL injection attacks can be prevented by using mysql_real_escape_string($mystring) for each variable inputted into a MySQL query.