Bot Traffic Report 2014 / DDoS Attack Trends 2014

Custom Website vs Mainstream CMS

I have recently found a great article about CMS:

Read the full article here

... If you're thinking about getting a website developed you may have faced this question yourself already -

Should I choose a main stream open source CMS, or should I choose a Custom Website?

Some will shout louder than an ocean liner in a bathroom (I seriously just made that up myself!) that an open source CMS is the way to go. More power to YOU! They are FREE! You can change your developer ANY TIME YOU WANT! There are thousands of modules and extensions developed already so you don't even have to pay for those!

To some degree they are right. On the surface, the above statements are correct. But - and it's a big hairy but... if it's all about YOUR business, and what YOU get out of it, is a free One-Size-Fits-All system all it's cracked up to be?

You see, the minute you want your website to fit your requirements, you need to do some customisation ... which is custom programming ... which is chargeable.

At that point, would you rather have someone doing the custom programming who knows the code for all functionality inside out? Or would you prefer to be paying for someone's time to research into how the code works before they even start customising? Depending on the extension, the developer may not even be able to change anything! ...

Read the full article here

High performance PHP application architecture

Limundo/Kupindo websites daily have more than 300 000 visitors which generate 10 million page views per day. During peak hours around 10 000 users are online simultaneously. On the other side, speed, stability and scalability are three main requirements that need to be matched. Currently, Limundo is a self-configurable High Availability system that achieves page loads of under 1s and 99.999% uptime, while manipulating more than 15 TB of data on a monthly basis. This paper describes software and hardware architecture spread over several server clusters hosted in the private cloud, that makes this possible.

Google bug-hunting game helps developers find XSS security flaws

Security researchers and businesses can use a new Google game to find a much-abused vulnerability considered one of the world's top three web security threats.

This security game consists of several levels resembling real-world applications which are vulnerable to XSS - your task will be to find the problem and attack the apps, similar to what an evil hacker might do.

XSS bugs are common because they have a nasty habit of popping up wherever a webapp deals with untrusted input. Our motivation is to highlight common coding patterns which lead to XSS to help you spot them in your code.

Link to game: https://xss-game.appspot.com/

PhoneGap Architecture

Installing & starting with PhoneGap on Windows for cross platform mobile development

Here are a few very useful links for Android / PhoneGap developers:

PhoneGap documentation : http://docs.phonegap.com/en/edge/guide_overview_index.md.html#Overview
Installing & starting with PhoneGap on Windows: http://chrisbitting.com/2014/01/06/installing-starting-with-phonegap-on-windows-for-cross-platform-mobile-development/
Android SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
How to use a Command-Line Interface ( cordova ): http://docs.phonegap.com/en/edge/guide_cli_index.md.html#The%20Command-Line%20Interface
Here you can generate the icons for your App: http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/utilities/icon_slayer/
This link also could be useful ( Four Ways To Build A Mobile Application ) : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/02/11/four-ways-to-build-a-mobile-app-part3-phonegap/

Here are some links which could be useful if you have a trouble with some parts:

If you try to update the SDK version but you get an error I recommend that you delete the current version of the Eclipse/SDK and download the latest version. It worked for me.

How to set the path and environment variables in Windows: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm
How to enable debugging on android phone : http://www.groovypost.com/howto/mobile/how-to-enable-usb-debugging-android-phone/

Inside the mind of a freelancer