Using JavaScript to capture contents is the easy bit – adding it to the clipboard is a lot more difficult. IE has a JavaScript command built in, other browsers vary. Unfortunately, other browsers (e.g. Firefox) also restrict this ability for security reasons. This is because the ability to write to the clipboard also comes with the ability to read from it as well – quite why this functionality can’t be detached and restrict just the reading I don’t know.

So, using JavaScript is problematic.

Thankfully I’m not the first to come across this problem and a third party script named ZeroClipboard is available. This uses Flash to update the clipboard, which doesn’t have the same security limitations. Of course if you’re viewing from a device that doesn’t support Flash (cough, splutter, iPad, iPhone, cough) then you’re still out of luck. None-the-less this seemed a perfect solution.

Unfortunately, my limited JavaScript skills failed me – I found the program to be over-complex for what I needed and failed to be able to get it to work.

At this point I found an alternative – ZClip uses ZeroClipboard but is controlled via JQuery (which is built into WordPress) and provide a much easier and friendly method of access.

I was now in a position where I had a working plugin. Until I used Admin Bar. That seemed to affect the positioning of the Flash overlay so you had to click slightly above the “Copy to clipboard” button to get it to work.

The customer, though, didn’t have an issue with this and I could only hope that they didn’t have anything else within their theme or plugins that could affect it in this way (I did try contacting the developer of Zclip but got no response).

What really ended it all though was the limited way of capturing text in zclip, which I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. ZClip can capture in 2 ways – from static fields (e.g. the text between a SPAN) or dynamic (e.g. from a field). The first doesn’t capture any formatting, even paragraph breaks – returning everything as one long line of text. The second did, but by capturing the HTML.

The customer wanted the customer to be able to copy to the clipboard long paragraphs of text – neither offered a neat solution to this.

Then I gave up. One day I may return to it – certainly ZeroClipboard will probably allow me to do what I need it to, but I’ll have to get my head around how to first.

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This article is provided by Kevin Moor who writes for different sites, which inter alias are working to find better registry repair.

WordPress is powered by PHP and MySQL which is an open resource blog gizmo and a publishing platform as well. WordPress have many features like plug-in architecture and a template system. Actually, WordPress has been widely by thousands of biggest websites in the World Wide Web.

For sure as computer enthusiasts, you have already come across on any feature from a blog. You may wonder how you can get this in your WordPress blog. You do not need to worry anymore because here are some tips that you will absolutely find it effective and very useful.

• Use Custom Page as your Home Page in WordPress
  This is the first thing that you must have to know on how to create a custom page. There is a need for you to duplicate your page.php or you can create a new .php file and enter the following code at the very top of it: <!--?php /* Template Name: WPBeginnerT1 */ ?-->.You may change the name of the template and can even change the style on the page depending on your preference. Just go to your WordPress admin panel and choose your desired template. You will then have to publish this page and go to Settings and select Reading in the admin panel. Choose the page to be your homepage and you can now have a Custom Home Page.
• Create a Page that Displays Random Posts
  For sure you have seen this cool feature somewhere on web site, right? Want to try this cool feature for your site? Simply paste the following code on your custom page template: 

  <?php
  query_posts(array('orderby' => 'rand', 'showposts' => 1));
  if (have_posts()) :
  while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <h1><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
  <?php the_content(); ?>
  <?php endwhile;
  endif; ?>

• Display External RSS Feed on Your Site
  Have you noticed bloggers who display their blogs on other’s web site? Do you want to try it too, to earn extra traffic on your website? To do this, just paste the following code in your theme:

  <?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/feed.php');
  $rss = fetch_feed('http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpbeginner');
  $maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity(5);
  $rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
  ?>
  <ul>
  <?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '<li>No items.</li>';
  else
  // Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
  foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
  <li>
  <a href='<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>'
  title='<?php echo 'Posted '.$item->get_date('j F Y | g:i a'); ?>'>
  <?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a>
  </li>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
  </ul>

These tips will surely help you. Just remember the tips and for sure your success is within reach.

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There is plenty of competition already in the market and because it is so new, there aren’t any reviews available – this is a new site trying to get a foot on the rung. The owner doesn’t intend to contribute but, instead, rely on customer submitted reviews. This is has in common with many of the alternatives. Personally, I think this is an opportunity wasted. With so many competing sites, you really need some kind of USP. Customer submitted reviews can sometimes be their own worst enemy with people complaining about issues that really weren’t the hosts problem, or giving them full scores simply because they hadn’t experienced any issues up until then. The big tech review sites ignore Web Host reviews as well, so this would be a great opportunity to have the reviews led by a single person doing a fair comparison between the alternatives.

Hosting Sites Reviews only has a handful of hosting companies on their list at the moment – this list, however, is consistent with many other sites so I wonder if it has anything to do with their affiliate schemes. If a site wants to show itself as fair and all-encompassing, it should really give the opportunity to everyone. I use Memset and (grumble, grumble) Streamline.net but neither are on the list (I’d love to write a review of the latter!).

But, this is a new site and I’m sure it will grow and improve over time. Already is show promise by dividing the companies into categories – green, php, asp hosting, etc. It even has it’s own Facebook page.

Website hosting is rarely taken as seriously as it should be so more and more sites dedicated to the reviewing of these companies can only be a good thing.

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Rather than adding lots of new features, this release is going to concentrate on speed improvements and restricting the WordPress minimum requirements (this will allow existing code to be removed and will make adding code in future easier).

The requirements changing are…

• PHP 5.2.4 required – WordPress will simply be dropping support for PHP 4 (i.e. there won’t be very many new PHP 5 features added)
• MySQL 5 Required – like above, WordPress will simply be dropping support for MySQL 4
• Internet Explorer 6 – no more fancy IE6-only hacks. WordPress will be officially discontinuing support for IE6 and instead providing a “use a real browser” nag screen (something this site already has installed)

With support for long-outdated technologies being dropped, they promise this will be the fastest and lightest WordPress in quite some time. To this end they will also be focussing on speed improvements all around, including (but certainly not limited to) the Dashboard and admin menu.

Two further announced changes are…

• New Fullscreen Editor -  a new fullscreen editor that’s “more beautiful, more useful, and simpler.”
• Better Upgrades – only changed files will be upgraded in future. Yay!

WordPress have also promised faster release cycles in future (concentrating on what’s promised and not adding further changes later on).

Certainly, I’m excited by this

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Now, though, I’ve installed MantisBT – a free PHP based bug tracking system. I’ve installed it on domain, configured it up and I’m in the process of adding content – my Simple Social Bookmarks is the guinea pig.

Anyone can view it, but I wanted tighter integration with this site. Plugins exist to do this but they rely on using a SOAP interface – my host doesn’t have this installed, so I can’t use it. Instead I’ve written my own code that directly accesses the MySQL database – and very well it works too. On the bottom of the plugin pages on this site are two new sections – Known Bugs and Planned Enhancements. Under each are listed any entries from the MantisBT database relevant to that category, as well as a link to the roadmap.

Before you go looking for this, it isn’t yet visible, as it’s part of the site revamp that I’m working on.

Right now, I don’t intend to release this as a plugin, but if there’s enough interest I may do.

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In it, he provides not only a piece of SQL that you can run to see how your site is affected, but even provided a PHP script that you can upload to your website to graph the results. Mine is to the right. I have my spam cleared out quite regularly, so the results are only recent ones.

As you can see, one of my posts was generating nearly 47% of all the spam. This is usually due to keywords within the article – the fact that it’s about a forum is possible a key. The second place “magnet” is a my review of  a Microsoft keyboard. I have no idea why, maybe because of it being Microsoft related.

I’ve resolved the first post by simply closing off comments (it was an old post and I think everything that needs to be said has been). The review, well, I’m not sure what to do there. I want to keep comments open on reviews. Others are mainly WordPress pages, which I need comments available for feedback and support. However, the fact that the plugins are related to PayPal, Facebook, AdSense, etc, I’m sure is no coincidence, and probably help to attract the spam.

So, not a huge amount I can do (having said that, I’ve reduced my potential spam input by 47% – assuming they don’t just target another one of my posts!), but interesting to know none-the-less.

Having said that, I’ve never really thought about closing comments on posts before and it’s something I will do in future – especially when I announce new or changed plugins, as comments can be placed on the main page itself.

Update: A WordPress plugin has been released of the code to produce the spam charts.

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I initially used PicNet Mouse Eye Tracking – this is free, but an advert for the service appears at the foot of your site. However, I soon came across the OpenSource ClickHeat. You can use this on any kind of site and is a PHP-based installation.

After much gnashing of teeth, here’s how I got it installed…

• Download the latest version of ClickHeat and unzip it
• Install this into a folder on your server
• Now, from the address bar of your browser, open up the folder. e.g. If you installed it to www.mysite.com/clickheat, you’d go to this directory in your address bar.
• This will start the installer. I found errors straight away – make sure the config, log and cache folders are writeable.
• Done. You simply need to add the code to start tracking – return to the ClickHeat folder to access your heat map and make settings changes.

To test it’s working, simply append ?debugclickheat to the end of any of your sites URLs.

For WordPress, there is a plugin available, but I couldn’t get this to work. Instead I added the JavaScript (which is generated from the ClickHeat admin screen) directly to my footer.php file in the theme folder, wrapping it in a check to ensure that an admin isn’t signed in (so it doesn’t track my clicking!).

One more problem I cam across – in the ClickHeat admin screens I kept getting the following error…

Warning: ob_start() [ref.outcontrol]: output handler 'ob_gzhandler' cannot be used twice in /xxx/clickheat/index.php  on line 51

Obviously, I’ve replaced the directory path with “xxx” for security reasons.

After some searching around, I decided the best solution was to make a modification to the ClickHeat code itself. Open up the index.php file within the ClickHeat folder and attempt to find the line that starts with the following…

if (@ini_get('zlib.output_compression')

Before this line, add the following…

ob_end_clean();

And that’s worked for me.

I’ll report back on how I get on with ClickHeat.

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And what did I learn?

Well, a lot. First of all, the questions I should be asking the prize providers. Instead I kept badgering them as I kept asking some pretty basic questions…

• When do you want the competition to start?
• How long do you want the competition to run for
• Are the prizes all for one person, all a “first” prize, or staged (first prize, second prize, etc)
• How long until delivery
• What will you provide if a product is no longer available?

Whilst running the competition I kept an eye on the entries to ensure that I wasn’t receiving multiple entries per person or household. And, after only 24 hours, I appeared to have found a problem – 3 people, each with an AOL email address, and the same IP address. Suspicious? It looked like it to me.

However, the fact that AOL is their ISP is the key here – they use a proxy-based system, meaning that many users may share the same IP address. Wikipedia has discussed such an issue before on their own site.

The database I created to hold winner details held a name, address, email, competition answer and IP address. Based on the AOL problems I now realise that I should also store a time stamp and user agent. I’ll be making these changes for next time.

I did a lot of work on the competition coding to ensure SQL injection problems. None-the-less I realised a few days ago that although the competition entry form disappears after the closing date, the code to submit the form details into the database still exists. This means that a third party script could inject entries (although not anything that would affect security) after this time. Again, this will now be fixed for future.

Lastly, I had so many entries that just trying to keep track of “rule breakers” became a lot, lot harder – more work on flagging such things at the point of competition entry will be useful, and I feel an automated email coming on!

Meanwhile, I have contacted the 3 winners and am just awaiting a confirmation of their postal addresses before details are announced.

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The problem? Well, it’s a bug in version 4 of PHP, so there’s not much I can do about it (sorry!). It’s fixed in PHP 5, though.

One suggested solution is to force your server to use PHP 5 – many have version 5 installed, but just not set as the default. To do this simply put AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php in the first line of your .htaccess file.

I use html_entity_decode for the post title. At the moment I do this whether you ask for the title or not – I’ll make a change for the future to ONLY do this if requested. That way you can omit the title to prevent this error from occurring. This will definitely also affect Simple Social Bookmarks and Simple Facebook Link.

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Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work as I intended. Kind of. In this case, I swapped to using a different file routine, but one which now only works with PHP 5. So I’ve now published a newer version of the same plugin using another new method, and one that should now be compatible with PHP 4.

The problem here is that there are security implications with reading files externally, so there is a way for hosts to turn this ability off.

My new plugin, I suspect, doesn’t actually resolve this and there isn’t a great amount I can do about this – if your host has decided to prevent you from reading external files then, well, you’re stuffed. My host doesn’t, which might explain why I didn’t recognise the problem at first.

The file system I’ve used now, however, should allow you to specify local file names – at least that way files hosted by yourself should be readable. I’ve not tested it though, so feel free to provide feedback.

I’m now going to upgrade my other plugins with the same code process.

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