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Y2K+10 spam bug

A bug in the spam-processing software we use may have caused some messages sent between midnight January 1st and 21:30 PST to be incorrectly marked as spam. Please be sure review all [SPAM] messages sent between this period. If you would like to read about the technical details, click here. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Superify your WordPress blog

Donncha O Caoimh wrote an excellent plug-in for WordPress that does a fantastic job of caching your content. Why would you want to do use something like this? Every time a visitor views one of your pages or blog posting, a lot of work including numerous database queries is done. This isn't a big deal for a site with a casual level of traffic, but if you were ever to find yourself inundated with visitors, things are going to slow down pretty quickly. On a shared server, it will not only affect your site, but the sites of others, too. WP Super Cache works by generating static HTML files which the web server can serve up much, much faster. (MovableType has always worked this way, and it makes much more sense as the content of a posting does not change frequently enough to justify dynamically-generating everything from a database on every request.)

We highly recommend (and would even prefer) that you install WP Super Cache on your blog. In fact, we'd even be happy to install it for you with your permission/request.

PHP 5.2.8 Installed!

We have upgraded to PHP 5.2.8. For all of you requesting it, enjoy!

Protecting your email address on your website

You may not realize this, but when you put your email address on your website, you are essentially inviting an exponential increase in the amount of spam you receive. Software is used by the spam industry to crawl your site much like the bots used by search engines; however, the spam industry is only looking for email addresses. Once your email address has been harvested, you will be added to marketing lists that are sold to any Joe Spammer who pays $50 for 5 million email addresses. It is virtually impossible to get off one of these lists.

So, what can you do to help prevent this? Well, the first thing you can do is make it harder for the evil bots to get your email address. Introducing the Retrix Email-Scrambler-o-Matic! With a little ingenuity, we can scramble your email address so that to an evil bot, it just looks like a bunch of gobbledygook. But to a web browser, it looks and works exactly like a real email address link. Here's an example of what we mean:

Our support email address is support@retrix.com. For you reading this, it looks like we've just exposed our address to the evil bots about which we've been warning you. But if you view the source of the HTML on this page, you will see that our email address is actually written like this:

support @retrix.com

Fancy, isn't it? We've made our scrambler open for anyone to use. Just enter your address on the page, and then copy the resulting HTML code into your site. Happy scrambling!

National Do Not Call List

UPDATE: Of course, this was too good to be true. It turns out that the CRTC sells this Do Not Call list to anyone and their dog for a nominal fee. As a result, people who have registered are receiving more calls than before! More information here. So whatever you do, don't sign up! Too have your number removed from the Do No Call List, click here.

It's finally here. The Canadian Do Not Call List. This list has been created to give people a choice of whether they want to take calls from telemarketers. This morning was the final straw for me. I received a phone call from what looked to be a local number and when I answered it an automated repeating message saying, "please stay on line, we are calling about urgent business matter". Eventually after a minute or so the call went dead. I decided to call back the number to see what was this urgent business matter was all about. But when I called all I heard were strange clicking noises.

5 minutes of my Saturday morning were wasted! Fortunately it takes less than 1 minute to add your phone number to the Do Not Call Registry.  Ah, the silence. I feel better already.

Introducing Suhosin

In an effort to tighten up security and protect our (and by association, your) servers from malicious attacks, we will be hardening our PHP installations with the excellent Suhosin project. Depending on your coding practices, this may or may not affect you. The most common "gotcha" is when you include other files using relative paths. For example:

require('../../classes/SomeClass.php');

Suhosin will not accept this because it's too easy to exploit. Instead, you need to be explicit:

require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/classes/SomeClass.php');

The DOCUMENT_ROOT element of the $_SERVER global array will always point to the full path of your website's root. (eg. /home/user/Websites/mywebsite.com).

Please ensure you comply with this more secure style of including files.

Enhance your website debugging experience with WebKit

WebKit is an open source web browser engine that powers popular browsers such as Safari and the brand new Google Chrome. These browsers are great if you simply want to browse websites; however, if you are a seasoned website developer you'll absolutely love the features that are packed into the next generation of WebKit. The Web Inspector provides all the tools you need to debug and optimize your webiste — I'd go as far as saying this is the best web development tool ever. Not only can you debug your JavaScript and CSS on the fly, you can stay ahead of the curve by playing with features of the upcoming HTML 5 and CSS 3 specs. Stay on the edge of development and try out the lastest nightly build of WebKit.

SSL Certificate Change

If you are using SSL for sending and receiving in your mail program, you may experience a warning message as of 14:30 PDT, July 30th, 2008. We have installed a new wildcard SSL certificate. Quitting your mail program and reloading ought to resolve any errors you may encounter. If the POP3/IMAP/SMTP server hostname you are using takes the form of mail.mydomain.com, please change it to username.retrix.net, where username is your Retrix Hosting username.

Firefox 3.0 is available!

Being a web hosting company we thought it would be a good idea to let you know the latest news in the world of web browsers. Firefox 3 was finally made available today! It is the culmination of a two-year quest to build the best browser ever. And while it’s not perfect, it comes pretty close.

Download Firefox Now!