Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

It has taken a little while to get to this point, but WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this weekend. The biggest thing about the new version is the completely revamped administration area (pictured to the right). It not only has a new color scheme, but has also been reworked to make you even more productive. And the cookie system has been made more secure, and so any of our users will need to login again to our site.

Note: I noticed that you can switch back to the old color scheme by pulling up your profile page. The new layout will remain intact, but the colors will be changed.

I upgraded our site to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, and I have to say that it handles itself quite well. Performance is better according to some early benchmarks I’ve done, productivity will definitely increase, and best of all WordPress is now able to upgrade plugins for you. Since nearly all of the changes have been made to the administration section of WordPress you should find that the upgrade process will go rather smoothly. Very few themes should break as a result of the upgrade, but there could be issues with some of your plugins.

I also spent some time getting our Recommended Tags plugin working on WordPress 2.5. There is now a version available solely for the WordPress 2.5 series because of the significant changes to the administration screen. I considered rolling both versions of the plugin into one, but overall the performance is better by keeping them separate.

Want a better idea of what’s new in WordPress 2.5? No problem! Here’s an overview of the features organized according to users and developers:

User Features

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets — you can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news.
• Multi-file upload with progress bar — now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
• Concurrent editing protection — now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Developer Features

• Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
• Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper.
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/.
• Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.
• Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com.
• $wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.
• Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like.
• Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Get WordPress 2.5

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s been one tough journey for AllofMP3.com as the RIAA slowly sucked all life out of their music service based in Russia.  Their woes actually started years ago, but more recently you probably remember the $1.65 trillion ($150,000 per violation) lawsuit filed against them in December? Then back in May, AllofMP3 took a hard hit as most of their ways to accept payment were taken away. Without money, the RIAA knew that the service wouldn’t be able to survive for much longer.

If you go to AllofMP3.com, you’ll notice that it’s no longer there. Yep, it’s gone, but not really. The owners of AllofMP3 have decided to start a new website called MP3sparks. It’s just AllofMP3 in disguise with many similarities including cheap music. So while the RIAA is rejoicing, it won’t be for long because they’ll soon have another target to go after.

On MP3sparks.com under the legal section they explain that the material on their site is authorized and that they pay fees. They also explain that the user is responsible for knowing whether the site is legal in their country of residence. This information was also displayed on AllofMP3, and we know how legal that was, right?

With some albums being sold for under $2, it is hardly legal despite their claims. It is no different than AllofMP3.com and just another target for the RIAA to go after.  The RIAA has got to be sick of AllofMP3 and their owner, MediaServices by now. They’re like one of those bad reoccurring dreams that never goes away!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 07, 2011 by CyberNet.

Looking up the geolocation of an IP address is something that’s simple to do because there are so many sites out there providing the service for free. One downside is that many services cap you at how many requests you can make each day to try and avoid having people abuse their systems. You may think that you’ll never make more than a handful of requests in a day, but I’ve run into situations where that limitation was a problem. One example is when trying to figure out if a set of IPs performing a DOS attack on a site is in the same geographic area. In that situation you may be checking dozens of IPs all within a few minutes.

In those kinds of situations you can use a service like utrace or ip:2:loc. Both of the services have a similar interface where you can enter in an IP address and the resulting region will be displayed on a Google map. Nothing extravagant, but they’re extremely straightforward and I have yet to see any sort of limit on them.

If you’ve got your own services you use for looking up the geolocation of an IP address please share them in the comments below.

utrace Homepage
ip:2:loc Homepage

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Google announced today that their search engine has hit a huge milestone, and it’s that they’ve come across an astounding 1 trillion unique URL’s on the web. Don’t confuse this with the number of pages that the search engine has indexed, because they flat out said that they are not indexing each of those trillion URL’s since many of them have duplicated/useless content:

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! 🙂 Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn’t very useful to searchers. But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.

It’s crazy to think that there are over a trillion different URL’s that you can visit, and yet it was just a few years ago that Google was trying to tell us that we reached the end of the Internet? Uh, not quite. 😉

The problem that we all run into now is trying to find that one website that has exactly what we’re looking for. Search engines like Google try to make the information easier to find, but sometimes they don’t get the job done. To help discover the best of the trillion+ URL’s we have to rely on other services like StumbleUpon. Just think about how many different sites StumbleUpon has introduced to people. Heck, we’ve gotten over 2,000 visits alone from StumbleUpon today, and I’m sure a majority of those people are brand new visitors.

So grab yourself a few large pizzas, a couple cases of pop, and get back to browsing the web. You’ve got a few hundred billion more URL’s to discover. 😀

P.S. I wonder what the lucky 1 trillionth URL was?

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on April 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

Penn State recently published  the results from a study which classifies web searchers.  They say that people mainly use web search engines for three main purposes, thus searchers are divided into three different categories. The three main categories are:

1. Information searchers – those who use a search engine to look for information regarding a specific fact or topic
2. Navigational searchers – those who use a search engine to find a specific site
3. Transactional searchers – those who use a search engine to find information on buying a specific product or service

What they found out of all of the research is that most people are information searchers, they’re trying to find information regarding a specific fact or topic.  They say, “Researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engine users. Findings showed that about 80 percent of queries are informational and about 10 percent each are for navigational and transactional purposes.”

What I like about this study is that a rather large amount of search queries were analyzed which gives me a better feeling that this study is accurate.  They said that other studies in the past have looked at “much smaller sets of queries, usually manually,” while this research was all about classifying queries automatically.

Also interesting is that in the future they plan to take this study to the next level. The Penn State Researcher will do this by using a more “complex algorithm that will hopefully yield a 90-percent accuracy rate using similar searching criteria.”

So what do you use search engines for? Let us know in the Poll below (you must have Flash enabled):

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com