Ramin Hossaini (blog) » Tools

Lets you search for links on twitter (even through URL shorteners). Useful if you want to see who's been tweeting about your website. They also have a WordPress plugin for it.

BackTweets

Twuffer

Twuffer is a "Twitter Buffer" that allows you to schedule tweets for a later time

Twuffer

Qwitter

Qwitter lets you know when someone has stopped following you

Qwitter

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments. You can also follow me on twitter

Creating a tunnel and SOCKS proxy with Putty

Ramin Hossaini — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:46:07 +0000

Why?

Secure a public WiFi connection
Bypass country-specific-content websites (e.g sites that only allow users from the U.S)
Connect to a remotely-secured MySQL database via localhost

It's pretty easy to do in Linux (and I think the command is pretty much the same in MacOS or with cygwin installed):

ssh -L localport:hostname:remoteport username@Server

This is how to do it with Putty

Open Putty and enter in the basics: the Server and port (22):

Next, create the tunnel. Enter the source port (in this example, it's 3306 - a MySQL port) and leave the destination field empty (not always left blank, but it works for most cases)

The tunnel will be open/active as soon as you've logged in. Obviously, you still have to set up your proxy settings in whatever application you're using (for those who don't know, 127.0.0.1 is 'localhost'):

Reducing spam even further in WordPress

Ramin Hossaini — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:59:33 +0000

Maybe I'm bored, but I've been spending a bit of time researching on ways to beat spam. Mind you, I haven't had anything get past Akismet anyway. This article is for all of you who want to be hardcore about your spam defences

I came across "Project Honey Pot", which is a distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots. Simply said, IPs of your site's visitors are verified against the Project Honey Pot database and spammers are kicked out.

Participating in this network comes in 2 forms. You can either install a Honey Pot (which is pretty easy) or if you don't want to install a Honey Pot of your own, you can link to someone else's.

Installing Honey Pot on a server (optional)

Installing a Honey Pot is easy enough. Start out by visiting Project Honey Pot. Once you've signed up for an account, you can begin adding a Honey Pot:

Depending on your webserver's supported languages, you can choose from a bunch:

Once you've chosen your options, you can download the files and upload it to any accessible-directory on the site you specified. Just visit the site to activate it.

The next step, is to customize your blog or site in such a way that you can actually catch suspicious activity:

Plugin: WP-Honey Pot

In order to make use of your new Honey Pot (or a Honey Pot elsewhere), install WP-Honey Pot. WP-HoneyPot enables you to add a hidden link on your blog in one of several randomised locations to ensure that spammers are less able to adapt to the solution and once you are a contributing member to Project HoneyPot then you are able to use the http:BL (which I'll be getting to just now).

Once that's set up, you'll be doing your part in helping to catch email harversters, comment spammers and other suspicious folks.

Plugin: http:BL

The obvious next step, would be to block the spammers from your site. And that's where http:BL comes into the picture.

Once you've installed and activated the plugin, all you need to do is specify an API key (which you get from the Project Honey Pot site) and the URL to your Honey Pot of choice. And that's pretty much all there is to it.

This flow-chart sums up my Spam protection for the time-being:

So far so good:

If any of you have tried something similar, or tried what I described above, drop me a line below and let me know your experiences!

New project: Blowfish encrypt/decrypt

Ramin Hossaini — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:32:21 +0000

Wrote a simple AJAX driven application to encrypt and decrypt text using the Blowfish algorithm. So if you're looking to encode your secret messages, this is just the tool for you

Possible additions:

More encryption algorithms
Emailing functionality

Let me know if you find any major bugs.

Blowfish encrypt/decrypt

Automatically insert rubbish Flickr-comments with Flickr-comment-generator

Ramin Hossaini — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:07:45 +0000

I created an AJAX application that generates somewhat generic comments for Flickr. But I soon realised that people would not use it unless it was completely simple and automated.

That's where GreaseMonkey comes into action. I've created a GreaseMonkey script that automatically retrieves a random flickr-comment and places it into the comment text-field of a picture. You get to choose whether you would like to publish the comment or not.

If you notice any bugs in the script, or any improvements I can make to the script - please let know.

Go to Flickr-Comment generator

Or download the script directly

Flickr comment generator

Ramin Hossaini — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:57:40 +0000

For anyone that's tired of coming up with comments, let the generator do the work for you:

If you would like me to add more comments to the database, comment here or contact me.

Flickr comment generator

Use Google Reader to find out rough estimate of RSS subscribers

Ramin Hossaini — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:35:10 +0000

RSS has been becoming an increasingly popular part of Web-based applications and services. For example, Flickr provides an RSS for your photo-stream and even a user's favourites.

Many webmasters will know just how useful FeedBurner can be to get an accurate picture of their subscribers. Using FeedBurner means that you'll have to display a specific-to-you FeedBurner address so that it can gather statistics (e.g. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RaminHossaini) You can't really use FeedBurner though for services like Flickr, because you have no real control of what the RSS-feed-address displayed to users on your Flickr page is (unless of course, you're advertising your RSS feed on a website of your own). The "hack" described below could help:

First, start out by subscribing to the RSS feed:

Next, click on the feed to view it then click on the "show details" link in the top-right corner:

You can then see how many people are using Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed:

This would obviously only be part of your subscriber-base. If you're happy with just approximating it, have a look at how much of a market share Google Reader has (I've looked at a couple of statistics and it seems to be roughly 60% at the moment) and use that to calculate the unknown number of subscribers.

Google Notebook to Evernote Import-Tool

Ramin Hossaini — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:54:51 +0000

If you used Google Notebook before and would like to move your notes over to Evernote (before Google Notebook gets completely shut-down), a tool has finally been released to help you out.

Import Google Notebook to Evernote

FCKeditor – Add WYSIWYG functionality to MediaWiki

Ramin Hossaini — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:32:06 +0000

I've always found it annoying that MediaWiki (the backbone of wikipedia.org) didn't provide a richer-editor for editing wiki-pages. Sure, I could learn the mediawiki-syntax, but I keep forgetting it. That just means I end up searching Google for a MediaWiki reference guide or keep hitting preview to see what the page looks like.

The FCKeditor-extension adds a much needed WYSIWYG editor. I haven't always been a fan of the FCKeditor implementation, but this works well.

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