How to make sure your emails dont land in SPAM folder

One of the biggest problems with our clients is to ensure that the legitimate emails they send out to their users/ customers do not end up in the SPAM folder. To ensure that as a website administrator you need to follow the bext practices guidelines provided by Yahoo and Google.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/basics-55.html;_ylt=Ahc6x60yB8n8JzvfVztu4QsIJHdG

URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

One of my PHP app used to send out SMS alerts using HTTP based SMS Gateway. Everything was working fine till last week when the SMS stopped coming. On running a stand alone PHP page using the same function to send SMS as the page in the application, got this error -

"Warning: fopen(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration"

Mime Type

Many a times I need to lookup the correct Mime type so for reference purpose, below is a list:

Mime Types By File Extension

Develop in JDK1.5, deploy on 1.4 :-)

You must be wondering why the hell would I want to do that and why not just develop in 1.4? Well, for one, may be you want to use the new features of JDK1.5 but some of the customer for some reason still stuck with JDK1.4 or like in my case, due to some stupidity on our client's part that he bought license to an older version of the application server (yes, it was Websphere) which does not support 1.5 and rest of the stupidity on our part that we just assumed that the application server will be supporting 1.5.

We kept on developing the application and giving demos to the client on our server and when it came to deployment only then we realized that we are in one big soup. And as always Google to the rescue, which helped me find an open source solution Retroweaver  which operates by transforming Java class files compiled by a 1.5 compiler into version 1.4 class files which can then be run on any 1.4 virtual machine.

For more details follow the link. Hope this helps

Center align site layout using CSS

Recently I began creating 100% CSS layouts, and faced a lot of problems in getting the content to be centered in both IE and FF. After lot of googling, the final working css is :

Getting rid of the "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items" warning?

Sometimes while you are visiting a secure site, you may see your IE show this warning message "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?"

 

As a user this is not only inconvenient but some may find it a bit scary as well.

As a developer you must ensure that your users do not get any such warning, there are few things you must keep in mind. Most of the time such warnings are generated as result of including a non secure content like an image or stylesheet in the secure page with absolute URL which is using standard http protocol to get the content.

say "http://www.example.com" has an image "image.jpg" included in the page. The secure site, "https://www.example.com" is using the same image but the image source attribute is set as "http://www.example.com/image.jpg". here is your problem content. Copy the logo to the secure site and load it from there. All you need to do here is use "https://www.example.com/image.jpg" as the image source attribute and the user will no longer get the warning message about mixed content.

Sometimes this warning is also generated because of IFRAME tags in your page. If you have an IFRAME in your page, ensure that its source attribute is set. If there is no source attribute set for the IFRAME, or set to null, user will be displayed this warning message. When you set the src, make sure it points to a real file.

If you are unable to find the culprit content, try debugging it in Firefox, using the Web Developer extension or Firebug. These extensions allows you to look at detailed information including the paths of various objects/ contents in the page.