To enable passive mode ftp on a Plesk server:

SSH into your server and as root, edit /etc/proftpd.conf.

Add the line in the <global> section:

PassivePorts 60000 65534

* I prefer to limit the number of available ports for greater security.

Enable passive FTP in Plesk with this firewall rule

Login to your Plesk Panel.

Go to Modules -> Firewall to access your firewall configuration.
Select Edit Firewall Configuration.

Add a new Rule:

 Name of the rule: FTPD Passive Ports
 Match direction: Incoming (only)
 Action: Allow
 Ports:
 Add port or port range: 60000-65534
 Select TCP
 Click Add

Click OK and then click Activate (twice)

More information about Passive vs. Active FTP

What didn’t quite work for me is that my requirement was to print the logo header only on the first page (rather than at the top of every page), and to have no footer. The other issue is that while Phoco had options to cache the generated PDFs, it appeared that they were always generated on-the-fly, and with much longer processing time before showing the PDF to the visitor than with default Joomla.

Rather than try to get Phoca to do what I needed (which would’ve been a bit more time consuming as Phoca is more complex), I made the following modifications to these Joomla files:
(line numbers are approximate)

libraries/joomla/document/pdf/pdf.php

Lines 33-47, adjust var $_margin_top and $_margin_bottom depending on the height of your logo
Line 211, comment out these lines:

// Set PDF Header data
// $pdf->setHeaderData(”,0,$this->getTitle(), $this->getHeader());  // this line prints the header on each page

libraries/tcpdf/tcpdf.php

line 561, set var $print_footer = false;
leave as true to get the default Joomla PDF footer,
setting var $print_header=false; will render blank PDFs, leave that value as true.

components/com_content/views/article/view.pdf.php

line 81, modify the code section to look like this:

// prepare header lines
// $document->setHeader($this->_getHeaderText($article, $params));
echo ‘<img src=”http://www.domainname.com/images/stories/printlogo.png” /><br /><br />’;
echo ‘<h1>’ . $article->title . ‘</h1>’;
echo $article->text;

There you go!

While performing page load testing on your development machines using Firebug, YSlow, and other tools is important, nothing beats getting real world “perceived” page load times from your real visitors, along with other useful metrics.

The software works by adding some javascript to the page(s) that you’d like to benchmark and then deploying some php or other code that will save the incoming results into a database. The website below offers example code:

Try Boomerang.

This simple, free service will display all of their pertinent information and provide a handy form that they can use to email it to you. Tracking down problems that might or might not be related to browser compatibility is tricky enough, this makes the “OK, what browser are you using?” step much simpler.

Thank you to Imulus Design+Interactive for supplying this service.

Long-pressing on the microphone button next to the home screen search box widget or on the hardware itself to bring up the Voice Search window. Any word or phrase spoken will open a google search page for those terms.

You can also speak certain keywords or shortcuts into this prompt to make the phone take certain actions.

List of Android voice shortcuts:

• Call <contact name> (+ <home|mobile|work>): Dial this contact. If the contact has multiple phone numbers, and you don’t specify which number to dial (i.e. “call Dad work”), you will receive an on-screen prompt to select which number.

• Dial <phone number>: Dial your selected number: “Dial 3-1-0-5-5-5-1-2-1-2″. I’ve found that you have to speak the number fairly quickly before the voice prompt times out and starts dialing.

• Find <location>: Open a map a Google Maps displaying pins with the location(s).
  • Specific business name:  “Find Staples”, “Find McDonalds”,
  • Type of business: “Find gas station”, “Find grocery store”, “Find yogurt”,
  • Specific location name: “Find Disneyland”, “Find
  • Type of location: “Find dog parks”

• Map of <location>: See Find, above.

• Directions to < location>: Open Google Maps providing driving, mass transit, biking or walking directions to your selected place from your current location. You can use the same types of locations as with Find, above.

• Navigate to <location>: Start Google Navigate with <location> set as the end point. You can use the same types of locations as with Find, above. General requests like “Navigate to gas station” will produce an on-screen prompt to select which local gas station.

• Open <application name>: Open the desired application: “Open calendar”, “Open Facebook”, “Open Battery Info”. I’ve seen this shortcut mentioned in forums, but have not been able to get it to work.

• Post buzz <message>: Generate a Google Buzz posting of your phrase. Posting will be geolocated with your current position.  More info.

* Note that other installed Android Marketplace applications can also set custom voice shortcuts.

* Please leave a comment below if you discover any additional voice shortcuts for any Android application.

Tips:

• Speak normally and be articulate. No mumbling!

• Use conversational volume and speed; no need to raise your voice or to speak verrrryyy slowwwlllyyy — your phone will feel like it’s being patronized.

• Use in a noisy environment will give you random results.

• When Froyo (Android 2.2) is released, it should be possible to trigger the Voice Search window by briefly holding down the button on your bluetooth headset.

• Bonus tip: The voice-to-text functionality in Android 2.1+ is actually quite amazing. If your phone supports this feature, you will have a small microphone button next to the spacebar on the soft keyword. Press this button and speak phrases into the prompt to quickly send text messages or short emails.

If you see these types of accesses, you can possibly check for other accesses that occurred at the same time to discover which IP address or domain was trying to access your website.

Its not clear what factors can cause a website to be blocked. They might have some hand-created blacklist and there is likely also some automation — perhaps having certain words or phrases contained on any of your pages will get your entire site blocked.  A site might be blocked because another website at the same IP (most webservers host multiple sites) had content that tripped the filter. Websense also mentions some kind of mysterious “reputation” criteria in their documentation.

I believe, but am not certain, that blockOptions.cgi referred requests are from the IT administrator at the company that is running a Websense filter, probably checking up on your content to see what their employees are trying to browse during work hours.

Its also not clear what you can do as a webmaster to have your site unblocked. A quick perusal of the Websense company website did not provide an easy link to appeal my suspected block.  There is a way to navigate to open a Service Request, which I suspect is the right venue, but you are required to do the standard website registration rigmarole in order to start the request, so I lost interest and gave up.  Besides, it feels kind of cool to be on a list of banned websites somewhere, especially given all my dirty Android tips and subversive web developer links.

Anyhow, I noticed some additional traffic to one of my screenshot images.   The owner of an Italian website must’ve found my image using some form of image search (the name of the image was the topic of his own content.) He could’ve simply downloaded the image and placed it on his site and I probably would’ve never known, and in this case, since the image was a program’s screenshot, I would not have cared. But instead, he linked to the image on my webserver, so that whenever a visitor loads his page, the image is pulled from me, utilizing my bandwidth each time.

Spotting a hijacker

Resource hijacking, where a website links to your image, movie or javascript file, will not be displayed in Google Analytics or most other common web metrics programs as they require the HTML or PHP page that contains both the call to the resource and the call to the metrics program to be read.

One way to spot this activity is to parse the raw logs that your web server generates for every access. These logs include the hits to every page, every image, every file on the file system, so requests for resources that have been hijacked will appear here. This is how we did web metrics in the old days (i.e. 2004) and there is useful software that can parse these logs and generate nice reports for you.  Check “Top Image” or “Top Resource” reports to see if any item is getting out-of-the-ordinary usage, and if you spot something, check your “Top Referrers” reports which may identify the hijacker.  Please comment if you want an article about setup and use of log based web metrics software.

Another way to spot this activity is to use Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Web Master Tools, which can sometimes identify when an external site has linked to a resource within your site and may provide the added benefit of identifying the site that is hijacking your image.

Possible responses

So now that you’ve identified that somebody is linking to your work on the site, what do you do? Well, you’ve got options:

• Contact the website that is linking your resource and ask them to comply with your license. You may want them to simply stop linking to your work, or you may want to give them permission to continue to link to your work as long as they also provide a visible link back to your website or some other attribution.
• Rename the image to another name, and fix your content to point to the new image. This has the effect of displaying a broken image box on the hijacker’s page. You will continue to get requests to your webserver for the missing image.
• Rename the image to another name and substitute a new image for the old one. With a bit of imagination, this can have hilarious results.

For both of the last two options, you should consider adding “Disallow: /path/to-your/image.jpg ” to your robots.txt file. This will force well-behaved search engines to forget about your old image.

In this case, I choose the last option as I wanted to see how long the replaced image might continue to live on the hijacker’s website. Rather than replace the old image with an image of b00bies, or a message to not hijack my images, which was my first instinct, I instead placed a highly visible watermark across the image, giving my little low-traffic blog some free advertising to Italian computer enthusiasts.  Buongiorno my friends!

I believe that it is possible to automatically show a “Do Not Hijack My Images” image in place of any single resource on your website by adjusting your website configuration to look for visitors with initial accesses to an image rather than a page. This issue has not yet become painful enough for me to look into how to do this, but if you can point me in the right direction, please share in the comments below.

For example, the account that you create to use Microsoft Zune by default displays your name,  your location, your bio, the names of your friends, any comments left for you or by you, and your recent music played to everyone.  If you have an XBox Live account, Zune Social will import all of your XBox friends. Imagine your prospective employer googling your name to find out you have a friend named “PooBurgler.”  That said, you may want to share all of this information – I personally don’t mind sharing it with the world – but you may also want to set this to Friends Only. To get to your profile, click on your name in the upper right corner of your Zune window, then select “zune.net Profile”. You can probably also login at social.zune.net.

Pandora by default will allow your Facebook friends to be able to see (and listen to) your playlist titles. Again, maybe not a big deal, but I was surprised to be able to see this information and even more surprised to find out that one of my dear friends has a Vanilla Ice station.  You can disable the sharing of your information by clicking here and then Disconnect from Facebook. If the prior link does not work, click on Account on the Pandora page, then click Sharing, and finally Disconnect from Facebook.

iTunes does not yet have any privacy issues that I’m aware of, but the much anticipated social media functions iTunes are coming soon.

It’s easy! Take your photo with the Camera app, select your new photo by tapping it’s icon in the upper right corner while still in the Camera, or selecting your photo in the Gallery, and then tap Share. From there, you can share the photo via Facebook, Email, Twitter, etc.

Unfortunately, sometimes the uploaded photos are rotated incorrectly when sharing with Facebook, usually portrait photos are rotated to landscape mode. The work-around for this problem is to first select to Crop your photo in the Gallery.

You can resize the crop box back to the original size of the image, effectively not losing any image information, and then click Save.   A duplicate of your original image will be created that you can now upload to Facebook – it will appear with the correct rotation.