Strictly Software

As you might have noticed to be compliant with new EU law about cookies (oh those evil dreaded virus spreading cookies LOL). I have created a generic EU Cookie / Privacy JavaScript Object that can be added to any site in a global footer which makes the site comply with the EU's new law on website privacy and cookies.

The EU Cookie Compliance JavaScript can be downloaded from here and added to any site. The parameters at the top of the script that display the message and the wording for the buttons are all customisable and you can modify the code to pass in different variables as you see fit.

The script also handles browsers where the user has totally disabled cookies either through a toolbar like the Web Developer Toolbar or through the browser itself and if the user has done this the message won't even appear.

If the user decides they don't want to use cookies and make use of the site then they are taken away to another customisable URL (see the source code) otherwise they have a cookie set called "EUCookie" for 365 days and everytime they re-visit the site it rolls over for another 365 days unless they have cleared the cookie from their browser. This other URL could be a "cookie free" version of your site or another site altogether. I have defaulted it to blog.strictly-software.com for now.

As most non techie people don't know what cookies are I have tried explaining in my message what cookies are and how they don't lead to viruses etc. Feel free to use the code on your own site (with credit of course) and change the message as you feel fit.

To get the code working on your site just add in a <script src="http://www.mysite.com/scripts/EUCookieCode.js" ><script> reference to the scripts location at the bottom of your site before the closing <body> tag and the code will run automatically as it's wrapped in a self calling function.

You can download the EU Cookie Privacy Compliance code here.

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Strictly Software Domains and Websites for Sale

I am in the process of selling a number of domains and if you are interested please contact me to discuss a price.

Most of these domains also have either code associated with them, Twitter accounts and automatic TweetBots that post to those accounts or post articles to the website. If you are interested in purchasing this code as well as the domain name then obviously this will cost you more.

The sites are:

www.hottospot.com, domain, website, Twitter account and Tweetbot.
www.hattrickheaven.com, domain, website, Twitter account and Tweetbot.
strurl.com, domain and website. A site I have had to take down due to my hosting company not "agreeing" with people being able to provide shortlinks to their websites!

The prices are all up for negotiation and you can contact me by using the contact link in the footer of the page.

Strictly Software Twitter HashTag Scanner Application

I have recently created a windows form application in .NET C# that allows users to hook into the Twitter API and scan a number of keywords and search terms to find out the most popular #HashTags and @Accounts that are related to those terms.

This has been great for me and some other people who have used it when opening brand new Twitter accounts as you want to find the most popular Hash Tags that are related to the main terms your site uses so that you can AutoTweet (maybe with my TweetBot) or follow accounts with the most members that also use those terms.

You can read up all about the application and get a copy from my new Strictly Software Applications page or directly go to the Twitter HashTag Hunter page to see more details and view some screenshots.

Strictly Software Free Scripts and Licences

I have been inundated lately with requests about licences for various scripts I have put up on my site including my HTML encoder script which seems to be very popular.

I can only assume that if you contact me asking about various licences it is because you want to pay me for my work otherwise you would have just taken the script and used it. Therefore before emailing me I would request that you make a donation to my site as I won't be able to respond to every email and the bottom line is I wouldn't put the scripts online if I didn't want people to use them.

You can donate here, and then once you have you may download the script and use it with whatever licence you wish!

Strictly Software Wordpress Plugins

I am on to my fourth plugin for Wordpress now and you can find a list of all my plugins at the following location: Wordpress Plugins

So far I have Strictly AutoTags which is designed for generating tags from article content and is currently being well recieved by users.

I also developed Strictly System Check which is a tool for checking the status of a site and if problems exist it will attempt to run some fixes as well as reporting on any issues to a designated user. I have also updated the report to include some MySQL stats such as slow running and non indexed queries.

I also have a Google Sitemap plugin which I developed specifically to overcome the performance issues the existing plugins were causing my site. You can read all about those problems here.

My latest plugin is Strictly Tweetbot which I developed so I could post multiple tweets to multiple accounts whenever a post appeared on my site. It also helped me get to grips with the new OAuth method of authenticating remote requests.

You can find a list of all my plugins at my Strictly Software Plugins for Wordpress page.

Getme Javascript Framework

I am currently working on a Javascript framework to help with loading and reformatting content loaded remotely. As a basis for this framework I have created an example called Getme.js which is discussed in detail at the following blog article, Build a CSS Selector Framework. This article shows how easy it is for anyone to create a library that allows for CSS Selectors and chainable method calls just like JQuery, Prototype, YUI or any of the other popular frameworks but without all the extra bloat that usually comes but is never used. If you are one of those people that tends to download and use any code that gets the job done you are probably duplicating functionality in numerous places and probably not using 90% of it anyway.

Javascript Compressor Tool

I have been working on my own compressor tool over the last year which was a very good way at learning regular expressions in detail as well as learning all the intricate quirks related to trying to get Javascript, HTML, CSS and server-side script such as ASP and PHP as compressed as possible and still functional. I have put a cut down version of this tool up on my site for others to use. You can either upload a file or paste in content as well as having some advanced options which allow you to set 20 functions and 20 objects to rename. This is good if you have a file that references global functions frequently such as event handlers, element getters and so on. Its regular expression based so not perfect but I have compared it against JSMin and YUI compressor and it holds it own with certain files reaching 70% compression ratios.

Translate Twitter Feeds

If you have been keeping up with my site lately you will have seen that I have been working alot with the free online translator tools that are available such as BabelFish and Googles Translator as well as the APIs provided by Bing and Google. Although not perfect in their translations they are valuable in getting your content spidered in multiple languages and therefore bringing your site to a potentially larger audience. I have just released a new online tool that allows you to translate your favourite Twitter feed into any of fourty plus langugages. Please visit this twitter translator tool and have a try.

Hattrick Heaven and Google Ajax API's

I recently looked into Googles APIs which contain a number of very useful frameworks for quickly developing content for a site. With just a few lines of code you can add content such as videos, search facilities for numerous feeds and news, geo-location data and much much more. You can read my blog article about developing with the Google APIs here. You can also visit the site I developed using those frameworks which is a football based site called Hattrick Heaven that delivers regional based news, blogs, videos and league information from around the world.

Site Security - SQL Denial Of Service Attacks

We have heard of SQL injection and also Denial of service attacks however you may not have heard of the specific term "SQL Denial of Service Attack" where the attacker tries to exploit the fact that a) Most sites use an SQL backend and b) Most sites allow the users to enter search criteria to bring back results. Therefore this particular type of attack exploits poorly written search queries that use the LIKE keyword to run CPU intensive queries that return no results and therefore search the whole database. These queries will max out the SQL servers CPU, take a long time to return results and therefore if the attacker can run a number of search requests they may also consume all available connections to the database making the site unusable. These SQL DOS Attacks could be a very effortless way for an attacker to take down a site. Read the details in my blog article here: SQL Denial of Service Attacks.

You will also find traces of SQL DOS attacks in the query statistics SQL keeps in memory with the DMVs (dynamic management views) they introduced in SQL 2005. Running a report such as this beast will help you find queries that have maxed out your servers CPU or caused huge wait times. Plus its a very handy one stop report for showing you a database or a whole servers worth of systems performance as it runs up to 20 specific reports (CPU, I/O, Wait times, Index Fragmentation etc).

Site Security - SQL Injection Attacks

More and more websites are falling victim to automated SQL injection attacks originating from China, Russia and other Eastern European countries. Even though the techniques hackers use to attack sites with SQL injection is widely known it seems from posts that I have read from developers who have suffered a successful attack that the first place to point the finger of blame is still browsers and operating systems and someone will always ask:

"Is there a patch for Internet Explorer that fixes this hole".

In truth the cause of a successful SQL injection attack is always going to be poorly written front end code. I don't know whether future developers are being taught about injection techniques at college (which they surely should be doing) However I personally think that a lot of sloppy code comes about not through ignorance but rather the developers natural inclination to copy and paste code from other sources and especially for newbies doing so when they have little or no idea about what the code they are using is actually doing. If the code being copied is from an old system or from an ancient but well ranked web page detailing how to write SELECT statements using string concatonation then the developer could be saving time now only for it to be taken up when the site goes live and gets hit by one of the thousands of hackbots around as soon as the page appears in Google. Nowadays a developer only has themselves to blame if they don't by now a) understand how SQL injection works and b) knows how to prevent it with correct parameter sanitisation.

View my blog to read articles detailing:

How to quickly clean up a hacked system and details of plasters which can be applied to quickly reduce the threat of future hacks.

View a list of SCRIPT URL references that you should be on the lookout for that the latest bots are using.

Hacked Database? Emergency Clean Up Script

You've just been hacked by one of those automated hack bots. You're going to fix those gaping holes in the application but first you need to clean up your database and remove the thousands of links to those virus infected sites. You have no time to write your own script and no money to buy one of those clean up packages. If your stuck and you use SQL 2005 or 2000 for your backend then this clean up script will help you out by doing exactly what those costly database clean up applications will but without the GUI or the cost. Clean Up Script use this script to find out how much data has been corrupted by searching for one or multiple hack strings at a time. Once you know how much data has been affected you can run the script to output all the necessary clean up SQL statements or run them automatically.