Define: LinkBacks

LinkBacks

"LinkBack" is the generalized term we use to reference three methods of communication between Websites:

• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• Refbacks

Why LinkBacks?

LinkBacks (Trackbacks, Pingbacks and Refbacks) allow you to notify another site that you wrote something related to what is written on a specific page. This improves the chances of contributors to this page noticing that you gave them credit for something, or that you improved upon something they wrote. With LinkBacks, websites are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgments and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook.

Linkbacks have long been a major force in the development of the blogging network, by creating an interconnected series of blogs and posts acknowledging one another. Not only does this improve the general community ethos throughout the "blog-o-sphere", but it also helps to make blogs into more powerful link-building tools.





Note: Links built via this method are highly relevant and do not carry the disadvantages typically associated with "link farms" or "link exchanges".

Trackback

A Trackback is simply an acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is sent via a network signal (ping) from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor). The receptor often publishes a link back to the originator indicating its worthiness.

Trackback requires both, Site A and Site B to be Trackback enabled in order to establish this communication. Trackback does not require for Site A to phisically link to Site B.

Pingback

A Pingback is also a signal (ping) sent from Site A to Site B. However, it's also a link. When Site B receives the notification signal, it automatically goes back to Site A checking for the existance of a live incoming link, if it exists, the Pingback is recorded successfully. This makes Pingbacks less prone to SPAM than Trackbacks.

Both sites must be Pingback enabled in order to establish this communication. If a site is Pingback enabled, each time you link-out you will be "pinging" external sites. Pingback requires for Site A to phisically link to Site B.

Refback

A Refback is also a link. However in this case, Site A (link originator) does not need to "tell" anything to Site B (receptor). Instead, the receptor Site "discovers" this link immediately after the first web visitor gets to the site by clicking on the link. This is done by analyzing information carried by this web visitor's browser referer header.

This is an easier method than Pingbacks since the Site originating the link doesn't have to be Pingback enabled (Posting a link back within any webpage is good enough).

PHP vs Perl

Perl vs PHP

PHP is another computer language. In a way, Perl and PHP are competitors in the programming world. Both languages have relatively similar learning curves, work well in the server environment, and have similar overall capabilities.

As you would expect, each language has its pros and cons. Ideally the webmaster would be able to use either language and choose the best one for a given project. However most programmers have a preference for one over the other and will tend to use their favourite.

In recent years PHP has become more popular with new programmers, in particular, web designers learning their first programming language. This may be because PHP is slightly easier to learn from a web design point of view. PHP pages are constructed like HTML pages, with standard HTML markup. PHP code is inserted into the page and executed when the page is requested. Conversely, Perl scripts are run as stand-alone programs and create HTML pages when the script is run.

Another issue is speed and efficiency. PHP is generally considered to be faster than Perl, although this is debatable. In any case there are certainly ways to make Perl perform as fast. PHP supporters often cite speed as a good reason to choose PHP, but in reality it is not normally a concern and any differences are usually academic.
Perl is a very powerful, robust language with more history than PHP. Although the newbie might think that Perl is more complicated than it needs to be for web development, experienced programmers will appreciate the vast array of options available with Perl.

In our opinion....
In regard to web development, we have yet to find a single thing that Perl can't do, whereas we have found limitations in PHP. We feel that the added power of Perl makes it the better choice. We have not found the efficiency issue to be much of an issue at all - in most cases it's only academic and won't actually affect the performance of your website.
In the end, either language will be adequate for most web development requirements.

Ruby on Rails New Releases: 2.3.11 and 3.0.4!

New Releases: 2.3.11 and 3.0.4

Posted by michael February 08, 2011 @ 10:39 PM

Two new versions of Ruby On Rails have been released today. As well as including a number of bugfixes they contain fixes for some security issues. The full details of each of the vulnerabilities are available on the rubyonrails-security mailing list. We strongly urge you to update production Rails applications as soon as possible. Rather than post the advisories individually to this blog, I’ll just link to the google talk archives.

Install the latest version using gem install rails. Or if you’re using bundler, edit your gemfile and run bundle update rails.

Summaries

Affecting 2.x.x and 3.0.x

• XSS Risk in mail_to :encode=>:javascript CVE-2011-0446
• CSRF Bypass Risk CVE-2011-0447

Affecting 3.0.x only

• Filter Problems on Case Insensitive Filesystems CVE-2011-0449
• Potential SQL Injection with limit() CVE-2011-0448

Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:

• RVM and Bundler in Five Seconds
• Security patch releases to Rails 2.3.x, 3.0.x
• Rails 3 Baby Steps - Part 1
• Boston Companies Using Ruby on Rails

PHP 5.3.6 Released!

PHP 5.3.6 Released!

[17-Mar-2011]

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.6. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.
Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.6:

• Enforce security in the fastcgi protocol parsing with fpm SAPI.
• Fixed bug #54247 (format-string vulnerability on Phar). (CVE-2011-1153)
• Fixed bug #54193 (Integer overflow in shmop_read()). (CVE-2011-1092)
• Fixed bug #54055 (buffer overrun with high values for precision ini setting).
• Fixed bug #54002 (crash on crafted tag in exif). (CVE-2011-0708)
• Fixed bug #53885 (ZipArchive segfault with FL_UNCHANGED on empty archive). (CVE-2011-0421)

Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.6 include:

• Upgraded bundled Sqlite3 to version 3.7.4.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 8.11.
• Added ability to connect to HTTPS sites through proxy with basic authentication using stream_context/http/header/Proxy-Authorization.
• Added options to debug backtrace functions.
• Changed default value of ini directive serialize_precision from 100 to 17.
• Fixed Bug #53971 (isset() and empty() produce apparently spurious runtime error).
• Fixed Bug #53958 (Closures can't 'use' shared variables by value and by reference).
• Fixed bug #53577 (Regression introduced in 5.3.4 in open_basedir with a trailing forward slash).
• Over 60 other bug fixes.

Windows users: please mind that we do no longer provide builds created with Visual Studio C++ 6. It is impossible to maintain a high quality and safe build of PHP for Windows using this unmaintained compiler.
For Apache SAPIs (php5_apache2_2.dll), be sure that you use a Visual Studio C++ 9 version of Apache. We recommend the Apache builds as provided by ApacheLounge. For any other SAPI (CLI, FastCGI via mod_fcgi, FastCGI with IIS or other FastCGI capable server), everything works as before. Third party extension providers must rebuild their extensions to make them compatible and loadable with the Visual Studio C++9 builds that we now provide.
All PHP users should note that the PHP 5.2 series is NOT supported anymore. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.6.
For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.6, see the ChangeLog. For source downloads please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:

• Controlling Arduino with PHP in Ubuntu
• PHP with nginx is about to Become a Lot Easier
• PHP Server API Differences

Jquery 1.51 is released!

About The Code(Jquery 1.51)

The code itself is written rather cleanly in an attempt to self-document. If you've spotted some areas of code that could be improved, please feel free to discuss it on the Development mailing list. All input is gladly appreciated!
All of the code is available in two formats:

• Compressed (which allows you to have a significantly smaller file size) and
• Uncompressed (good for debugging and to understand what is behind the magic).

If you're interested in downloading Plugins developed by jQuery contributors, please visit the Plugins page.
jQuery is provided under the following MIT and GPL licenses.

CDN Hosted jQuery

A number of large enterprises provide hosted copies of jQuery on existing CDN networks that are available for public use. Below are links to the CDN-hosted copies of jQuery that you may hotlink to.

• Google Ajax API CDN
  • https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js
  • Google Ajax CDN Documentation
• Microsoft CDN
  • http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.1.min.js
  • Ajax CDN Announcement, Microsoft Ajax CDN Documentation
• jQuery CDN (via Media Temple)
  • http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.1.min.js Minified version
  • http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.1.js Source version

Download jQuery

This is the recommended version of jQuery to use for your application. The code in here should be stable and usable in all modern browsers.
The minified versions, while having a larger file size than the packed versions (note: packed version is not available in current release), are generally the best versions to use on production deployments. The packed versions require non-trivial client-side processing time to uncompress (unpack) the code whereas the minified versions do not. The packed versions of jQuery will take less time to download than the minified or uncompressed versions; however, each time the library is loaded (initially or from the browser cache) it will need to be uncompressed which will cause a non-trivial delay in the execution of any jQuery code each time it is loaded.

Current Release

• 1.5.1 (Release Notes)
  Minified, Uncompressed
  Documentation: Changelog

Online and Web-influenced in store sales will grow to 53 percent of total retail sales by 2014

Top 10 Reasons to Choose MySQL for Online Retail

Online and Web-influenced in store sales will grow to 53 percent of total retail sales by 2014 according to independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc. *

New technologies have offered people greater choice in the way they shop. Winning retailers adopt Web 2.0 technologies and best practices in order to improve their customers' online experience, cost-effectively create "buzz" about their offerings and boost their revenues.

This Whitepaper will help you better understand how to leverage MySQL to get the most of the opportunity the social web represents.

* US Online Retail Forecast, 2009 To 2014, Forrester Research, Inc., March 5, 2010