Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

A recent project needed to get on-line quickly, easily, cheaply and with minimal effort. The site had to be able to be administered easily by non-tech types and also contain a few features such as a blog, contact forms, the ability to include custom HTML for Twitter feeds, PayPal, sharing links, etc., etc. http://www.weebly.com A number of options would fit these parameters, and obviously a content management system of some sort would be ideal. Installing, configuring, finding and paying for a host can be troublesome at times, which led me to Weebly - an on-line Content Management System with free hosting, no set up fees or issues, feature rich and easy user interface. You can pay for a pro version which gives the usual obvious benefits of own domain (instead of subdomain of Weebly), better stats (but you can just plug in your own Google Analytics code), a couple more features to include on your website, removal of the Weebly link in the footer .... anyway, ...

After some waiting around since goo.gl went live and became available to the general public in September 2010, the API has finally been released this week. Documentation can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/overview.html and a "Getting Started" guide can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/v1/getting_started.html There has been eager anticipation waiting for the release of the API and this should be pretty cool for allowing developers to use Google's URL Shortener in their own applications and projects. Thanks to Google and the URL Shortener Team for releasing this. Blog post announcing release:  http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-url-shortener-gets-api.html

Below is just a quick and simple function to convert a short string to proper case. It's not the most efficient but will do its job for short strings. The first character of the string is converted to upper case, subsequent characters that are preceded by a space are converted to upper case. e.g. "this IS A TEST sentence. followed BY ANOTHER." will be changed to "This Is A Test Sentence. Followed By Another." Function: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fncProperCase](@string VarChar(1000)) RETURNS VarChar(1000) AS BEGIN DECLARE @pos int DECLARE @len int DECLARE @char VarChar(1) DECLARE @temp VarChar(1000) SET @string = LOWER(LTRIM(RTRIM(@string))) SET @temp = '' SET @pos = 1 SET @len = LEN(@string) WHILE @pos <= @len BEGIN SET @char = SUBSTRING(@string, @pos, 1) IF @pos = 1 BEGIN SET @temp = @temp + UPPER(@char) END ELSE BEGIN IF SUBSTRING(@string, @pos - 1, 1) = ' ' BEGIN SET ...

The following SQL function will remove and strip all non-alphanumeric characters from a string. CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fncRemoveNonAlphanumericChars](@Temp VarChar(1000)) RETURNS VarChar(1000) AS BEGIN WHILE PatIndex('%[^A-Za-z0-9]%', @Temp) > 0 SET @Temp = Stuff(@Temp, PatIndex('%[^A-Za-z0-9]%', @Temp), 1, '') RETURN @TEmp END Example: SELECT dbo.fncRemoveNonAlphanumericChars('abc...DEF,,,GHI(((123)))456jklmn') Result: abcDEFGHI123456jklmn

Not really as alarming as the post title suggests but a post from Trend Micro's blog highlights a few surprising and a few unsurprising dangers on the internet from 2010. Trend Micro's blog:  http://blog.trendmicro.com/ Original post:  http://blog.trendmicro.com/2010s-most-dangerous-list/ In summary: Riskiest hardware: German ID card readers Riskiest website software: Wordpress Most dangerous IP:  Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Riskiest OS:  Apple’s Mac OS X Most dangerous website: Google Most dangerous social network: Facebook Most dangerous top level domain: CO.CC Riskiest file format: PDF More details are given in the original post from Trend Micro.