Darren Nolan

Yes it’s that time of year again. My good friend Matt has registered himself to partake this year and details can be found at Matt Barnes if you feel a warm and fuzzy feeling in your heart to help raise awareness and funds for Men’s health, please give what you can to the cause.

Funds are committed to our men’s health partners, the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue: the national depression initiative and the Movember Foundation. Together, the three channels work to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world class programs in the fields of research, education, support, and awareness.

In other news, nothing much is happening with the good ole Dags here. Just coding. Planning a big move in the upcoming weeks. Other than that, just really strapped for free time. Hope you guys are keeping yourselves well entertained on the intarwebs while I take my time to update the site here.

Cheers!

Well, what started out as a quick fiddle with CSS3 and HTML5 new elements, tags and techniques, quickly turned into my new theme here are darrennolan.com.

Behold the latest of my understandings in this new exciting world!!!

There is virtually no images involved with this layout, in fact I’m fairly sure there’s only one image used for backwards compatibility purposes.  Most elements here use the new rounded borders of CSS3 (if you don’t see rounded stuff, you really should update your browser).

If the site looks much more “boxy”, it’s a fairly certain indication that you’ll need to update your browser.  I’m fairly sure (sorry IE users) that Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t have some of the newer fancier elements used in this design.

Well, I hope you like it.  I know I had an exciting time learning and using the new aspects of this awesome stuffs.  Given more time I might even share some secrets with you 😉

Well, it’s been a little while since a post update. Extremely busy and what not, but closer to having my new theme on here shortly. Just have to do the comment template and everything else should be ready to rock and roll.

Also Putting this post here to move Nic’s comment here <_< Cause putting it elsewhere would be silly and stuffs right? Or something at least.

In the meantime, distract yourself with http://erkie.github.com/

Yet another awesome service from google. reCaptcha. More on that later.  But firstly, sending from the right address.

Helping out a friend at her new(ish) job and their contact form simply sucked.  Suppose it takes a bit of a background in both PHP web coding and more so in understanding Mail protocols than anything else.

The first thing people really need to get out of the habit is trying to send emails as the person who wishes to contact you.  Take in this small example;

<?php
	$to = 'contact@mydomain.com';
	$subject = 'Website Contact Form';
	$message = $_POST['formMessage'];
	$headers = 'From: ' . $_POST['formEmailAddress'] . "\r\n";
	mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>

Without getting hooked up on using raw entries from $_POST, basically the above code will take your contact details and attempt to send it to yourself.   You write into the headers that this email is coming from whatever address the user entered when filling in the form.

THAT'S A BIG NO NO.  More and more mail servers today (including your own, which is where some of the issue comes) checks the IP and/or domain name of where an email is being sent from, in this case it's your webserver, and looks up that domain to see if that domain or IP address is allowed to pretend to be sending mail.  I promise no one has added in your domain details to allow to send email as them.  Certainly not the bigger dogs like Bigpond, Optus etc.

This is just one method that checks mail servers use today to check the authenticity of mail getting into people's boxes.  Otherwise you can basically be sending mail out as Google or even PayPal.