As Wordpress doesn't handle backwards compatibility very well, a sudden move from PHP5 to PHP7 can cause lots of errors. This is due to depreciated code that has been removed with no way of ignoring it if it cannot be run and only run code that works depending on the result of any test for it being available.

This is why I had to create 2 versions of the 5 star Strictly AutoTags plugin. WordPress doesn't let you host premium plugins when they should be helping coders out in reality, especially as they let theme developers charge for themes. However as they don't allow this I have made a free and premium version of the Strictly AutoTags plugin for both PHP5 users and PHP 7 users when the regular expression modifier /e was removed from PHP7.

You can read more about my WordPress plugins over at my WordPress plugins page. Or just download the relevant AutoTag plugin from the list below. However I do suggest reading up about the plugin and it's features first before installation.

• Strictly AutoTags 3.0.3 PHP 5 (£)
• Strictly AutoTags 3.0.5 PHP 7 (£)
• Strictly AutoTags 3.0.2 PHP 5
• Strictly AutoTags 3.0.4 PHP 7

So either download the relevant plugin or read some more info about my Strictly AuotTags plugin here, used by over 250,000 people (on my last count on WordPress's site, which was some time ago.

Strictly Software offers a wide range of free tools and services to the web developer community.

Please help us continue to offer great free tools such as all my WordPress plugins and the many free tools on this site and tools.strictly-software.com such as the JavaScript decoder/unpacker and HTML encoder (that correctly handles double encoding with numeric or character entity codes), the Pirate Bay ISP Checker, Spam Checker Tool and Website Scanner. This is on top of all the hundreds of scripts and bug fixes I have given out for SQL, .NET, ASP, JavaScript and PHP that you can get on this site and my blog at blog.strictly-software.com.

So please support me by making a small donation. Each donation is very much appreciated and ensures that great tools such as these continue to be available for free from this site.

I have just released new pricing for my top performing horse racing website who are fed up paying over the odds for useless tips or very cheap amounts for total rubbish products made from the same cut n paste templates. Check out the full details on my join now page.

What's different about this site?

Well apart from the cost - you can join for as little as £3.99 for a day or £14.99 for a monthly subscription per month. You can also trial the site out for a whole month for just £9.99! As a member you only have access to tips that have a proven Return on Investment (ROI) over 0% over the last 30 dayss. Therefore the tips are based on proven systems (over 550 Feb 2015) that you can pick and chose from and follow whether you like laying or back betting in the place or win markets. There are literally hundreds of systems for you to follow that will suit your betting bank size.

Members who reguarly follow ALL of the tips (which I don't advise) at £10 stakes (lay, win and place) can make anything up to £1,500 a day. Obviously some days there are only a few tips and on other days there are lots. It all depends on whether they match the criteria of having a high ROI.

Even if you don't want to join the site as a member there are lots of Free Tips (average 6.5 winners a day in 2014), Horse Racing News, and many useful articles from course favourite bias charts and guides on trading and staking.

So even if you don't want to join as a member you should check the site out and see what you think - browsing costs you nothing!

Sign up to get free UK Horse Racing tips by email here.

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 two generic EU Cookie / Privacy JavaScript Scripts 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 new version accommodates the last minute change in EU law which allows you to show a message about your cookie policy and treat the users continued use of the site as an "opt in" with a button to set a cookie so the message isn't shown again. Funny how we have to use cookies to know whether to use them or not!

The first version make use of jQuery (easily fixed if you need to) and sets a panel at the top of the screen which slides in and out and offers the user a choice to hide the message in future. You can read about this version on my blog posting about EU Cookie compliance here. You can also view an HTML test page with the code working here or just download the JavaScript source code from here.. As you can see it's simple and sweet and most UK sites are using a version of it at the moment to comply with the EU law.

The second version is a lightbox that will appear if cookies have not been agreed to and is a more forcful approach as the user HAS to read it and either confirm they are happy or be taken away from the site. This EU Cookie Compliance JavaScript can be downloaded from here and added to any site in the same way as the first (e.g in the footer).

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. If the user has done this then the message won't even appear but if they decide to re-enable cookies halfway through the visit then the script will detect their availability and show the message as soon as possible.

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="//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 and if you are using the first version make sure to load in jQuery or replace the sliding animation with your own code.

You can download the slider version of the EU Cookie Privacy Compliance code here.

You can download the lightbox version of the EU Cookie Privacy Compliance code here.

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!

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 automatically generating tags from an article's content without the need for 3rd party API's or tag databases. It also has numerous SEO features including deeplinking, keyword highlighting and the ability to remove bad HTML, turn textual links into clickable ones and the ability to rank words in the title, headers and other HTML higher than plain text.

I also developed Strictly System Check which is a tool I use to check the status of my WordPress sites and if problems are found it will attempt to run some fixes e.g REPAIR / OPTIMIZE of your MySQL database as well as reporting on the issues to a designated user by email. 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 and allows you to only tweet to an account if specified words are found within the article. It also works seamlessly with Strictly AutoTags so that tweets are only sent once tagging is done so that they can be used as #HashTags in the message. You can also choose to use categories or default tags if you want.

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

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.

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 search the whole database and return no results. 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.

You can read the details about these attacks in my blog article on the subject 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).

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. This is especially so for newbies who do 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 old but well ranked web page then it could be buggy. There are lots of old bits of code out there that provide info on writing SELECT statements using string concatonation and if a copy n paste job is done 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 floating around 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.

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 Database 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 without losing any data.