BizzarScripts

I realized when I moved back to Wordpress, I lost my post that had to do with what I support, so I’m going to rewrite it so people can understand where I’m coming from and know exactly how and what I support. Here’s the rules for support for this site.

1. All support is done in the forum. Do not email me unless I ask you to. The reason is that your question is probably similiar to someone else’s and this saves me the time of answering the same emails. Plus, I’m a chaotic person. I never remember to email people back. You have a better shot in the forum of getting answer.

2. My scripts are designed for PHP5. I get random reports of errors, and I can easily tell people are still running php4. PHP4 has been end-of-lifed by php.net and therefore I don’t support it either. If you can’t upgrade to PHP5, find a new host. If you can’t find a new host, visit webhostingtalk.com to find some good ones. If you can’t afford hosting and your stuck with php4, and my scripts don’t work for you, then I’m sorry, but I’m not rewriting my scripts for your legacy hosting. Hosting is cheap. I’ve used HostGator.com. $5/month for some decent hosting. If you can’t afford that, then you probably should be doing websites.

3. I support my scripts and nothing else. Sometimes I have been known to offer up some server settings or other configuration options, however these come with the expectation you know what these settings are and probably just overlooked them. The problem is that almost no 2 servers are ever the same. What works for one person, will probably not work for everyone. My scripts are meant to be as universally friendly as possible, but ultimately they won’t work for everyone. It should be a law of the internet. I do NOT support your server, your website, your integration ideas, your custom additions to the scripts, training you on html, training you on php, or training you on system administration. These are things that should be learned before attempting to integrate php scripts.

4. I do this for fun and I am not a security/php expert. I write php scripts because I enjoy doing website work and I’ve learned early on to share what I’ve done, so that it might inspire others to do the same. This I believe is the most important fundamental piece to the whole open source software movement. I do the best I can to keep my scripts simple that even php beginners should be able to look at the code and understand what it’s doing. However if I think your ignoring the code and just trying to get me to do the setup of the script for you, I will probably ignore you. I WANT YOU TO LEARN. And you won’t learn by having me do the work for you. However these scripts come as is with no warranty whatsoever. Make sure you know what the code is doing before trying to use it.

5. PHP to me is a hobby, not a job. I know it’s geeky, but I really enjoy writing it. It gives me a sense of pride when I figure out how to do something or find a new way to make things easier for myself. I host and run a number of websites so I use php pretty much on a regular basis. However I also work a full time job, I have a wife who requires my attention, a house I need to take care of, and plenty of friends and family that absorb most of my time. I have sort of checked off learning php on my life’s todo list and so far I’m ready to move onto other things. This site just serves as my way of sharing and inspiring. But this isn’t my whole life. Maybe 1% of it.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do an update for phpAnti-Leech, but someone just pointed out to me that pretty much, it wasn’t blocking anything. Of course, not to be proved wrong, I had to set up a test page. Sure enough, phpanti-leech wasn’t anti-leeching anything. Figures. I’m not sure what happened, but it really wasn’t working. I’ve updated PHP to 5.x from 4.x so maybe that broke something, but the piece that wasn’t working has been rewritten a little differently. I had issues with the in_array() function before so basically I wrote my own. Here’s the new download link to the new version…

Click here to download Bizzar phpAnti-Leech 5.2!

If you are upgrading, you ONLY need the download.php and download-functions.php files. Everything else can stay the same. The only change is I added a new function that checks the referring domain and moved the failed condition to the bottom of the download.php file.

I’m also putting together a demo links page for phpAnti-Leech…

Click here for the demo of phpAnti-Leech!

I read a bunch of blogs throughout my days on the internet, and this morning, there’s supposedly a new search engine that’s being put together with the intention of rivalling google’s. Really? And they raised all kinds of monay? Huh, must be something worth checking out. Now, I do not own a trademark on the “bizzar” brand, but I’ve used it as one of my key words on my sites and it helps me find my site quickly on new search engine products. Trust me, either you have my content or you don’t.

So, off to searching I go… http://www.cuil.com is the site (it’s supposed to be pronounced “cool” and indexes over 112 billion sites), and I entered “bizzar”. I get 112,000 results, none on the first page me. 1/2 are porn, the other 1/2 are the Insane Clown Posse CD that I am aware of (and hate). Huh, I’m probably on the second page then. Click the 2. Nothing. Click the 3. Nothing. A link to anything I’ve done on the internet doesn’t show up till page 7, and even then, it’s a link to one of my scripts from a garbage site. Page 8 has a couple links, but not to my site.

I found more porn than useful content with this search engine. What good is having a new rival to google if all it does is index porn and bury me on the bottom of the list. If I’m under sex, I’d at least like to be sweaty and enjoying it. Cuil.com, I am not enjoying. In my opinion, it’s garbage. Other searches are equally skewed.

So, final opinion… forget cuil.com. Cuil should be pronounced, “see you later” as in I’m closing my browser and ignoring your site. Also, the servers are now crashing and not returning anything. All that money and you didn’t invest in architecture??? Hi, this is 2008. Welcome to the internet. On a side note, google has “907,000 results for bizzar” and on the first page there’s 2 links for BizzarServer and 1 for something else I did. Thank you Google! Your algorithm is much better!

All, I’m taking a short leave of absense from this site to make sure I’m focused on my new job. I’ve taken a position with an incredible company in center city Philadelphia, PA. The company is called Sungard and it’s probably the biggest leap I’ve made in my career so far. My official title is Application Managment Engineer, but basically I’m a server admin working with the development group on their large portal which is the backbone for the company. I just started, but things are going really well. Here’s a link to the site if anyone is interested… http://www.availability.sungard.com

I have some ideas and updates planned for the site, but for now, I’m just taking it easy. I’ll still be availble in the forum if anyone has any questions, but other than that, don’t expect too much any time soon.

I’ll keep everyone informed with how the new job is going.

I read slashdot often and I wanted to share this one article here since I don’t think most people are aware of the software that this article mentions. I didn’t, so I did some googling and after reading some of the sites, I feel it my internet duty to pass these things along to people who might not know about them. The poll is basically this…

“Last week we took nominations for a Slashdot category at the SourceForge Community Choice awards. Our category was ‘Most Likely to be Shutdown By Government Agency’. Your nominations were tallied, and we arbitrarily selected a few that we think are the best. Today is the day where you can at long last determine the winner, using the incredibly scientifically accurate Slashdot Poll. Our nominees are Truecrypt, EFF Patent Busting, GNU Software Radio, WikiLeaks, Cryptome.org, Tor, Freenet, and CowboyNeal”

Read more…
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/06/09/1612250.shtml

Here are the links to the sites mentioned in the article…
http://www.truecrypt.org/ [truecrypt.org]
http://w2.eff.org/patent/ [eff.org]
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ [gnu.org]
http://www.wikileaks.org/ [wikileaks.org]
http://www.cryptome.org/ [cryptome.org]
http://www.torproject.org/ [torproject.org]
http://freenetproject.org/ [freenetproject.org]

I also added the links and thumbnails at IDugUp.com also!

This is something fun I put together. This site is like digg, but I like it better. It’s basically a place for me or anyone to dump links to cool or useful resources and web pages online. All posts require admin approval before being displayed, but should prove to be useful for anyone. I’m hoping to add search, tagging capabilities, but for now, I’m just collecting links. So if you have some cool things you’d like to share, go dump your links there and it’ll get added!

Click here to go check out IDugUp!

I figured since I’ve changed the license of this to the GPL, I opened a project over on Sourceforge for it! I’m pretty happy since I have a couple of SF projects, but this is my favorite!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpanti-leech/

Bizzar Host Blocker is not exactly a breakthrough in ad/spyware blocking. This is a technique I learned through reading different sites. Basically, this script will add entries to your local hosts file that will prevent IE and/or Firefox from loading websites that contain garbage. This not only speeds up your browsing time, but also prevents you from accidently loading malware intended content. It is not a perfect system and you should definitely consider getting some real protection, but it’s a start and it’s free so it’s worth a shot.

Click here for more information and a link to download!

I’ve been tinkering with code off and on for a while that would let me generate thumbnails for urls on the fly. No matter what I’ve tried though, a lot of scripts and programs just would not work out. But I know it’s possible since I know other sites are doing it, so I kept at it. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve found a method for generating the thumbs that is pretty efficient. Here are a few samples.

These are just a sample. To view your own thumbnail, use the following url:

http://www.urlthumbnail.com/thumb.php?url=www.bizzarscripts.com

and just replace the url value with the url of your site or whatever site your trying to load. What will happen is my script will queue your site for parsing, generate the thumb, and upload it for hosting to the service. It should happen fairly quickly (usually less than 5 minutes) but this service is still BETA so it might not work for all sites, but I’ve found it works for most. If it gives you trouble, make sure your trying it without the http:// part. There’s something up with the html encoding process, but I’m working on it.

For more information, visit www.urlthumbnail.com

I’ve been using my holiday weekend to get more of these scripts online and updated. Basically, the scripts listed on the right side are finished and ready to go. I also have a handful of other scripts coming like the mailing list script, the php/png countdown script (revised and updated). The sudoku script I was selling a while ago is also posted since I’m not selling scripts anymore.

I support all my scripts http://www.bizzarscripts.com/forum/