Bright Function

Creative HTML Email With Images Disabled

Nick — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:29:39 +0000

When reading emails I have images disabled by default as a security measure. Disabling images prevents my emails being tracked when opening and allows me to see what efforts companies go to when promoting products or services.

One example that has stood out recently is the following email from Pizza Express luring me to eat more of their glorious pizzas:

I love the creativity used to make the lo-fi version of the email more interesting while getting the same message across as the hi-fi version. The use of image alt text is very effective with important text larger to grab your attention. The pixel/block waiter holding the chalkboard may not be obvious until you see the hi-fi version, but it is quite clever and shows a high attention to detail:

Comparing this to a promotional email from Prezzo, a competitor, the lo-fi version is not as effective with image alt text quite small:

Looking at the same email with images enabled we can see that the lo-fi version could have given a better representation of the hi-fi version.

Image alt text is very important and can be styled to give emphasis to headings or a ‘call to action’. Pizza Express have achieved this, but took it a bit further in a creative way – as they do with their pizzas!

Preserve Comments in MySQL Stored Procedures

Nick — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:54:33 +0000

Comments in any code are good practice and can help guide yourself and others through more complicated processes.

Single and multi-line comments can be included in MySQL stored procedures using the following syntax:

# a single-line comment

select 1;

/* a
   multi-line
   comment
*/

When creating stored procedures for a MySQL database using a GUI, like MySQL Browser, any comments added are preserved (as you would expect). However, if you use the command line client you may have noticed that comments are stripped out. The command line client removes any comments before executing the script so comments are lost.

Thankfully there is a simple solution to preserve any comments. When connecting to your MySQL server simply add the option --comments and comments will now be preserved:

mysql -u username -p --comments

The default is --skip-comments which explains why comments are normally removed. There is more information about these options and others on the MySQL website.

To make sure you remember to add the --comments option you can create a batch file to run the command line tool with the option included.

Using Themed CSS Files Requires a Header Control

Nick — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:10:54 +0000

When using ASP.NET themes and you specify the global theme in web.config you can run into problems when you want to create a page that does not use the theme.

If you just remove the elements the page will error and you will probably get this message:

Using themed css files requires a header control on the page. (e.g. ).

You should be able to get round this by setting EnableTheming="false" in the page directive:

<%@ Page Language="C#" EnableTheming="false"  %>

Unfortunately this by itself does not work and you need to clear the Stylesheet and Theme values as well:

<%@ Page Language="C#" EnableTheming="false" StylesheetTheme="" Theme="" %>

Now you should be able to create a page without using the global theme.

List MySQL Stored Procedures

Nick — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:35:36 +0000

When using stored procedures with MySQL you may at some point want to get a list of all the stored procedures that exist in your database. Using the MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA database and the ROUTINES table we can easily list information about procedures or functions.

SELECT ROUTINE_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
WHERE ROUTINE_SCHEMA = 'brightfunction'
AND ROUTINE_TYPE = 'PROCEDURE'
;

This example will list the ROUTINE_NAME for all stored procedures in the database brightfuncion.

Slow `INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES` Queries

If you have a lot of stored procedures you may find that queries on the ROUTINES table start to take longer. Inspecting the table there are not any indexes so it is no surprise that queries get slower once there is more data in the table. As the table is a system table used by MySQL we do not want to think about making any changes to it.

An alternative to the ROUTINES table is to use the mysql.proc table which stores all the information for routines and has indexes on the database, name and type of the routine which makes queries a lot faster:

SELECT name
FROM mysql.proc
WHERE db = 'brightfunction'
AND type = 'procedure'
;

Care should be taken when accessing both of these tables as they are used by MySQL internally; the table’s schema and data should not be edited.

ASP.NET Server-side Comments

Nick — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:00:10 +0000

When working with an ASP.NET page or control you many want to remove code temporarily or stop some code executing while debugging. This can be achieved easily using the server-side comment opening, <%--, and closing tag, --%>.

The syntax is often forgotten and is very useful as you can place it around anything and the contents will be ignored:

Server-side Comments
<%--
	Everything inside the comments tags is ignored.
	
	<%= "Hello" %>
--%>

Easily Resize Multiple Images Using Windows XP

Nick — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:21:00 +0000

It can take a long time to upload images to a website or send an email with lots of images attached. To save time uploading files it is a good idea to resize images first on your computer and then upload or attach the smaller files. Bigger websites like Facebook and Flickr will do this for you on your computer without you really knowing but in other cases you will need to resize the files first yourself.

If you do not have any graphics software and are using Windows XP then you can easily resize multiple images in one of two ways:

Download the Windows XP Power Tool Image Resizer which adds a resize option when you right-click on a file.
Utilise the E-mail this file feature that gives you an option to resize and save images – with the images resized the email can be discarded.

Windows XP Power Tool Image Resizer

Microsoft provides a tool that makes resizing images really simple. The Image Resizer download is available on the Windows XP Downloads page under the Power Tools tab.

Download and run the Image Resizer installer following the installation instructions.
With the Image Resizer installed right-click on an image, or selection of images, and select the new option called Resize Images:
A new window will then open allowing you to specify the image resize dimensions:

The Large size is probably the best option but you can use the smaller sizes instead. The Advanced button allows you to enter custom dimensions and gives you some other options too.

Using the default options resized images will be created as new files in the original folder and will be given a new name. When resizing images it is best to keep a backup copy of the full size image somewhere else.

Resize Images Using the ‘E-mail this file’ Feature

If you can not install the Image Resizer tool for some reason then you can use the E-mail this file feature to resize images instead:

Open the folder that contains the images you want to resize:
If thumbnails are not being displayed then select Thumbnails using the Views button:
Next select the files you want to be resized and click the E-mail the selected items option from the File and Folder Tasks menu:
A new window will be opened that allows you to specify how images are resized. Click the Show more options link for advanced options:
Select the Large option for the image size and press OK.
An email window will then open showing the images as attachments. Click the File menu and select Save Attachments:
Now you can specify where the resized images are saved. If you create a subfolder called resized in the original location it will be easy to find the resized images later.
With the images saved the email window can be closed (or you can email the resized images).
The resized images will now be considerably smaller in file size and so will be faster to upload to websites or attach to an email.

Backup WordPress Database and Files

Nick — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:09:00 +0000

A WordPress website consists of two main parts:

Database - stores all of your website content including posts, comments, links and website settings (but not physical files like images uploaded).
Files - where the code is stored to access the database and make everything work. Themes, plugins and user generated files (images uploaded) are all stored together in the wp-content folder.

Backing up just the database will mean you do not have a backup of images and files uploaded which are usually very important to a website. So for a reliable backup of your WordPress website you need to backup the database and files.

There are a number of plugins available for WordPress that are written to backup your WordPress website. They all work slightly differently and backup different things. We required the following for a perfect backup solution:

Option to backup the database and files.
Option to schedule backups.
Option to email backup files providing us with a remote backup.
A free or reasonably cheap plugin.

Unfortunately we did not find a free plugin that will backup the database and website files that matches our other requirements. We did however find two separate free plugins that met our needs:

WP-DB-Backup – backup the standard WordPress database tables and also gives you the option to backup other tables that could have been created by other installed plugins or manually.
WordPress Backup – this plugin will only backup website files but lets you specify three folders and by default is set to the uploads, themes, and plugins directories. You can set one of these folders to the root WordPress folder though and get a complete backup of all the files.

Both plugins give you options to schedule the backups and email the backed up files which really is great. Using two plugins is not ideal but does actually make it easy to disable one of the backups if necessary.

Backing up is very important and these plugins really do make it easy and will help you sleep at night knowing you are ready for when something goes wrong.

Flattering Spam Comments

Nick — Sat, 07 May 2011 12:24:55 +0000

Spam is always going to be a problem when running a blog and it seems the spammers have taken a friendlier tack of late. We keep getting lots of flattering comments that are unfortunately too good to be true! I wanted to approve this comment but sadly it was not genuine:

This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article.

Although it would be nice to publish these comments the spammers are just after a link through to the website they are promoting. It is quite blatant when you check the URL submitted along with the post: online games, PSP promotions and cellulite remedies were all a bit suspect.

Another comment was:

I’m not that much of a Internet reader to be honest but your sites really nice, keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back in the future. Cheers

Searching for comments on Google can be a good way to identify spam comments; Googling this comment returns over a million results!

A Potentially Dangerous Request.Form Value Was Detected

Nick — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:00:28 +0000

ASP.NET automatically checks for HTML being sent by GET or POST requests as a security precaution and throws the following nasty error if it finds any:

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client...

To stop the automatic validation you can add the following to a page directive:

validateRequest="false"

Now you can accept HTML through GET and POST requests and validate the input as required.

This setting will not work in user controls files and should instead be added to the page that references the user control.

The setting can be applied globally to all pages in web.config but should be used with caution:

Connecting to MySQL Server Across a Local Windows Network

Nick — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:10:23 +0000

To access MySQL Server over a local Windows network you will need to open up the port that MySQL is using and also grant privileges for the user that will access the database server.

Opening Your Server

To allow network access you need to open up the port that MySQL is using, normally 3306. This is achieved by modifying the Windows Firewall settings on the computer running MySQL:

Open Windows Firewall.
Select the Advanced tab.
Under the network connection settings select Local Area Connection and then Settings.
Select Add a new service.
Name it something sensible like MySQL Server.
Enter the IP address or computer name of the computer running MySQL.
Specify the port number 3306 for both external and internal port numbers and select TCP.
Confirm your settings.
The new service should now be listed under services and selected. Now choose OK to exit each window that appears to save the changes.

With the service created you should now be able to connect to the database from another machine on the network.

Grant User Privileges

Before you can gain access to the database user privileges will need to be granted for the user attempting to connect. Privileges are granted in the normal way but you need to specify the host the user is connecting from or use a wildcard. Using Command Prompt log on to your MySQL server and then execute the following command to specify a host:

grant all privileges on *.* to ‘user’@'host’ identified by “password” with grant option;

or the following to use a wildcard:

grant all privileges on *.* to ‘user’@'host’ % by “password” with grant option;

With these changes you should now be ready to go and be able to access the database server across a Windows local network.