Ernies Tech Thoughts

For a site we developed, a custom guestbook was added by us, to replace a previous 3rd party guestbook, which had been turned off a while ago due to security problems. A relatively simple affair to create, but with effort put in to make it secure against database injection and other nasties. And in this purpose it has been all good.
All entries are moderated, and this is made quite clear. Do you think this would deter the spammers? Not one bit. First week things are pretty quiet, second week about 30 attempted spam entries, and for week 3 almost 200. Wow there are some bored and desperate people. Not one of them got their viagra spam links on, but it didn’t stop repeated attempts. So possible bot activity as well.

A few extra lines of code to highlight the types of attempted spam we had seen, and auto reject the submission. This has had a positive effect, and the next week is down to under 30. I am not sure what these are trying achieve. Maybe the ‘Thank you for your submission entry’ makes them feel loved.

As an extra step we are adding some IP related filtering, and tweaking the word filtering. This should bring it back to single digits which is liveable.

We did consider captcha entry, email verification, but it was agreed this provides and inconvenience to the real users.

Web browsers are a varied beast, and great ideas can become bogged down in frustrating hand holding and gentle coercion.

With an ongoing project - devReview(), a number of requirements for the site layout were put together:

1. CSS based (and clean as possible)
2. Cross browser compatible. [IE6+, Firefox 1+ and other Gecko browsers, Opera 8.5+, Safari 1.3+, Konqueror 3,4+]. IE 5/5.5 went in the nice to have bin. Given the site is for techos, the spread was wide but more modern.
3. 3 column with a fluid centre for content
4. Content to appear first in html.
5. Viewable down to a min of 600px.

In the early development, a number of layouts were looked at, and trialled. Eventually it was settled to use the ‘In Search of the Holy Grail‘ layout from Matthew Levines ‘A List Apart’ article. It seemed to best satisfy all the requirements above.

So where are we today. Well if you look at the site now, you will notice the 3 column layout is gone, replaced by a 2 column version. Some may call this failure, I call it compromise. With relatively simple content the layout stayed together, but once it needed to be pushed and extended, some of the browsers (IE6 mainly) became such a pain. Eventually it was much more productive to dump the ‘the holy grail’, lose a bit in layout, but gain extra in maintainability, and extendability.

So of the 5 layout requirements, 4 have been kept. We could have selected a different 4 (ie dropping the content first or fluid centre), but the 2 column solution seemed the most workable.

Sometime in the future this can be looked at again. Old IE versions will not disappear straight away, but I am confident that the new browser wars are a good thing, and all web users (and developers) will benefit.

Today we released our first version of a bridge for punbb forum and Mantis issue tracking software. Both are GPL and so naturally is this bridge.