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!

What's *your* sign?

You know you're moving up in the world when you get an office door sign that is etched in glass (or at least looks that way!). Rob from Syntax Signs hooked us up with some really awesome looking sparkly frost stickers of our company logos and address that he affixed to our front office windows. And the price was ridiculously cheap for the professional quality it adds to our office front.

Come by our office in Gastown (131 Water St., Suite 210) for a closer look, or just drop by to say hello!

Retrix now offers .ca domains for only $20/year!

We have lowered the price of .ca domain registration to $20.00 CDN/year! This matches our everyday low price for .com, .net, and .org domains. This change also makes us one of the most affordable .ca registrars around. Register a .ca domain today and show off your Canadian presence on the internets.

Simply sign on to our Service Centre, click on the Domains section, choose "Add, Transfer or Register Domains", type in the domain you want, follow the next couple steps and you are done!

Stop junk mail! (the kind delivered to your home)

Here at Retrix we are in an ongoing battle to eliminate SPAM from your email account, but alas, junk mail takes on many forms. The good people at the Red Dot Campaign are trying to bring attention to a little-known Canada Post policy that allows people to stop unaddressed junk mail arriving in their mailbox or dropping through their mail slot.

We don't want to belittle the great job Canada Post and their postal workers do — we are happy with their service. It is just that unaddressed junk mail is everywhere in every form and I, like many others, don't read it. It is wasteful, and there should be an easy, fool-proof way to just say no.

The Red Dot Campaign lists these 3 easy steps you can take to help eliminate junk mail.

1. Download and sign this letter and ask your mail carrier to deliver it to Canada Post.
   
   
2. Join the Red Dot Campaign. Download your No Junk Mail sign for your mail box or mail slot.
   
   
3. Sign up with the Canadian Marketing Association's Do Not Contact Registry. This enables you to reduce the number of marketing offers received by mail, telephone and fax.