Looking for a CAPTCHA system to stop comment spamming on your blog or other web application?
It has been calculated that about 150,000 hours of human labor is spent filling out CAPTCHA requests on web sites wishing to reduce spam. Yet another waste of time and energy expended on dealing with idiots the persist in proliferating unwanted advertising material in this world.
The reCAPTCHA project doesn’t have the answer to eliminating website spammers but it does have a solution for putting the time spent filling out CAPTCHA questions into productive use. Every time the reCAPTCHA system dishes out CAPTCHA words it is in fact using this people-power to convert scanned copies of archived books into digital format. Click here to read more about it.
If you didn’t know about the huge online media archive over at www.archive.org you may like to check that out also. There you will find a vast library of free ebooks that are digitised copies of old books that are no longer under copyright protection. There are also many other resources at this site, including archives of millions of web sites.
The following is a list of Open Source / Free online groupware applications. There are many of them out there and this list represents the more appealing ones I have come across. At some time I might update this list with more information on each groupware solution. For now, however, this list is to simply serve as a starting point for finding the right open source online groupware application for you and your organization.
If you have any suggestions of other good systems not on this list please leave a comment and let me know.
- Hipergate — http://www.hipergate.org/
hipergate is an open source web based application suite.
It’s mission is to cover a full range of technical requirements in any organization. All applications are addresses from Internet Explorer, without needing any other additional software in the client computer.
This suite is multi-company capable, and can be used in a single company, a corporate group or working as an ASP solution capable of serving an unlimited quantity of single customers.
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PHProjekt — http://www.phprojekt.com/index.php?&newlang=eng
PHProjekt is a modular application for the coordination of group activities and to share informations and document via the web. Components of PHProjekt: Group calendar, project management, time card system, file management, contact manager, mail client and many other modules. PHProjekt supports many protocols like ldap, xml/soap and webdav and is available for 38 languages and 9 databases.
- eGroupware — http://www.egroupware.org/
I am not entirely sure if this one is able to be installed a run in a purely web based environment, but it otherwise looks very good.
- Group-Office Groupware — http://sourceforge.net/projects/group-office/
- Centraview — http://www.centraview.com
Provides more than just Groupware functionality.
CentraView is a leading Open Source Centralized Business Management (CBM) solution that delivers an ideal combination of Contact Management, Salesforce Automation (SFA), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality and much more, all through a standard web browser. CentraView is much more than just CRM or SFA. We offer a comprehensive business management suite that reduces the need to purchase many different software applications that don’t talk to one another. Ultimately we provide you with that all important “Centralized View” of all your customer information.
Here’s a nice AJAX file manager. It’s still pretty slim of features in my opinion. For instance, it does not support compressing files and directories in a zip/gzip file before downloading, which is particularly what I was looking for. Otherwise it’s a nice to use file manager for web sites.
http://ecosmear.com/relay/
MySQL is a popular database system used in the backend of a huge number of web applications. Just about every database driven PHP application I have seen has MySQL working alongside it. There are various tools available (usually provided by your web host) for managing MySQL databases online (phpMyAdmin for instance). I have found that having a desktop manager can be very useful. I’ve found it particularly useful when I need to manually edit data within a range of tables and records.
The following tools are worth checking out if a desktop MySQL manager is what you want:
OPEN SOURCE
- HeidiSQL (formally SQLFront — an old favorite of mine)
HeidiSQL is an easy-to-use interface and a “working-horse” for web-developers using the popular MySQL-Database. It allows you to manage and browse your databases and tables from an intuitive Windows® interface.
With HeidiSQL you will also be able to
- generate nice SQL-exports
- synchronize tables between two databases
- manage user-privileges
- import text-files
- export table-data as CSV, HTML and XML
- browse and edit table-data using a comfortable grid
- batch-insert ascii or binary files into tables
- write queries with syntax-highlighting (next version will have also code-completion)
- monitor and kill client-processes
- and much more
- MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser (from the makers of MySQL)
Avaialble for Mac, Windows, and Linus
I find the Heidi system to be easier to use
COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
It’s important to backup content and databases we have online. Whether you run a blog (such as Wordpress) or other applications on a website, there are often many individual files to download if doing a backup manually via FTP. This can be slow and tedious if a quick backup is what you want (and why wouldn’t you?). phpMySQL has build in backup functions if you need them, although the following tools provide an easy one-stop solution.
Check out the following great tools for backing up your site content and MySQL databases.
- phpMyBackup Pro is a very easy to use, free, web-based MySQL backup application, licensed under the GNU GPL.
You can create scheduled backups, manage and restore them, download or email them and a lot more!
Major features:
- backup of one or several databases with or without data, table structure, …
- three types of compression (no compression, gzip or zip)
- scheduled backups (by a small PHP script which must be included in an existing PHP script)
- interface for management of the backups (viewing, restoring, downloading, deleting)
- backup directly onto FTP server and sending of backups by email
- platform independent - only webserver and PHP needed to run e.g. on MS Windows, Linux or Mac
- shell mode (to use manually or by cron script)
- backup of whole file directories (on a FTP server).
- backup databases from different accounts on several MySQL servers
- one installation can be used for all MySQL users of one MySQL server (used by webhosters)
- highest security through two alternative login methods (HTTP or HTML authentication)
- easy to use interface and very easy to install
- several language packages available
- PHP WebSite Backup
- PHP MySQL Backup
The current release of mailman lacks a very important feature. There is no immediately obvious way to export a list of subscribers from a mail list — at least not via the admin interface. There is, however, a way to get this data. In my case I needed it in order to move the list of people from one mail-list to another way.
I read the following was an option:
Here is how to get a list of subscribers in one shot:
Send a message to: list-request@some-domain.org where list is the actual list name (e.g. sds-request@some-domain.org)
The subject line should read: who password*
* if the listserv is locked down you’ll need a password
(if you send it without and the list is locked it will complain in a reply email) Although it seems bizarre to send your password as part of the subject
I tried this method and nothing was emailed back to me. It may be that the mailman server I am using is configured to not allow this feature to work. I am not sure, as I only have access to the lists I manage and not the entire set-up.
So, here are some other options:
Go to the following address: http://www.yourdomain.com/mailman/roster/<listname>
This will produce a page with all members listed on it. Be prepared for a long page if you have lots of subscribers. The format is this: address at domain.com as opposed to address@domain.com. If you have a lot of subscribers there is an easy way to use Excel to convert this data into the format you want (address@domain.com). There is an Excel file available right here. Just unzip the spreadsheet into a directory of your choice. Open the Excel file (it is free of macro viruses, but you may like to scan if first if you’re not convinced). Highlight and COPY the list from the web page. Past into Column A the data you have just copied. Now all you have to do is fill the formulas in columns .
Enjoy, and let me know if this helps some.
Jonathan Evatt
One of the better free Guestbook programs I’ve come across. If you have Advanced Guestbook I suggest you switch it over to Lazarus. All your settings and entries will be taken across and you’ll have a more feature rich system to use—including spam blocking, which is why I switched by guestbooks over.
What is Lazarus?
Lazarus Guestbook
Lazarus is a free guestbook script written in PHP that uses your MySQL database for storage.
Lazarus is based upon the excellent Advanced Guestbook script from Proxy2.
I took the Advanced Guestbook and added more features and several layers of anti spam protection to make one of the most feature rich and spam resistant guestbook scripts available for free.
I am always active on the forums and you can rest assured that if the spammers find a way past the current anti spam methods that I have others waiting in the wings. You can read my own guestbook to see what other people have had to say about Lazarus and my anti spam fixes for Advanced Guestbook.
Lazarus Guestbook.
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