Mobtex = Mobile Technologies

Shortcodes

2006-11-08T16:17:00.000Z

The Short Code Management Group (SCMG) has recently made some changes to the short code ranges available in the UK. These include:

Additional availability of 6xxxx and 8xxxx ranges
Harmonised UK and ROI 5xxxx short codes
Price restriction lifted on 6xxxx ranges

T-Mobile tests wifi and cell

2006-10-24T17:49:00.000Z

When will the rest of the world catch on to this little jem, it's the way forward, over the air download charges are insulting the customers and forcing them to buy their content on-portal, ala vodalive, if the world went mobile-wifi things would change for the better, users would get richer content without the download costs.

Voice over IP on your mobile phone is just a natural step forward, how many networks don't want to go there though as they'll lose minutes. Scary part is how do they compensate for it?

Digital Evangelist: Making mobile payments work 101

2006-06-19T21:53:00.000Z

Digital Evangelist: Making mobile payments work 101:

Another mobile geek! Cool reading!

Zend Optimizer

2006-04-24T17:14:00.000Z

The Zend Optimizer was recommened to me by someone I know and I finally got around to installing it today, as soon as I had I knew I should have installed it sooner as the page load speeds were quicker, I mean WOW-quicker!!

Now the site actually feels faster to me I wondered if there was something I could do to make the pages smaller and make it load even faster still.

It was time to revisit zlib compression to see if that would help make a difference, I know the Zend Optimiser made a difference but now I want to be able to measure the differences Zlib will make.

To start i load our index page and check the page size which without compression comes in at 20.97 kb / 21,743 bytes

Now I add the following to our .htaccess:

## enable zlib compression
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 1

Level 1 is the lowest compression, 9 is the most. The higher the compression the more the server will have to work, the harder the server works the slower it becomes so we're playing a balancing game here.

The Scores:

None - 20.97 kb / 21,743 bytes

Level 1 - 5.83 kb / 5,969 bytes
Level 2 - 5.71 kb / 5,843 bytes
Level 3 - 5.61 kb / 4,747 bytes
Level 4 - 5.34 kb / 5,465 bytes
Level 5 - 5.24 kb / 5,367 bytes
Level 6 - 5.20 kb / 5,326 bytes
Level 7 - 5.20 kb / 5,325 bytes
Level 8 - 5.19 kb / 5,316 bytes
Level 9 - 5.19 kb / 5,316 bytes

WOW

Level 1 is by far the most efficient in this test.

With the tiny differences in file sizes between level 1 and level 9 it's not worth the server load to go any higher than 1 but the difference between nothing at all and level 1 is stunning.

LOL This blog is pageranked

2006-04-14T23:18:00.000Z

LOL well it made me laugh, I just noticed this blog now has a humble pagerank of 2.

My www.andymoore.info site has a PR of 4 and Mobtex scores a 4 too.

So among my sites I have a collective PR of 10, lol I wish, it's only Google and W3 who have those for real I think!

PR is such a myth, this blog is a 2 and there's a shit load of content here yet http://www.ringtonesquad.com/has a PR of 4 yet all it has is a navimenu that 404s and a load of latin. It's bollocks yet it has no content and Google deem it more important. What bollocks.

Sending SMS Text Messages

2006-04-14T21:44:00.000Z

Some time back I posted a thread on Dev Shed's Forums entitled Sending SMS this was in response to the question I keep seeing over and over again "How do I send SMS text messages?"

This is the original list of suppliers I put together along with a few other, Dev Shed user contributions plus others I've picked up along the way:

MX Telecom known before as WAP MX.
Echo Vox Swiss based
Enpocket
Esendex
Fly TXT
G8 Wave
MBlox
MChex
Mind Matics
Minick
Mobile Way
2 Ergo (I've been spammed by these before)
Broad System
Crosby
Dialogue
Net Size
Opera Telecom
Telecom 1
Wincast
Zamano
ZIM Epl known before as EPL Communications
Clicktell South African based
Agile Media part of BT
Quios
SMS2Email part of AQ Limited
Brainstorm
Boungiorno
Send My TXT
Red Rock
Telsis
2 SMS
IPIPI
24 X
Bulk SMS
Fast SMS
NYT Group
SMS Everywhere
Easy text Ireland
Dimoco Austria
Bond Wireless Australia
Text Anywhere part owned by WIN Plc
WIN Plc
M Blox
Web text
T4MB

Further resources:

http://www.developershome.com/sms/
http://www.developershome.com/sms/smsGatewayProvComp.asp
http://www.developershome.com/sms/howToChooseSMSGateway.asp

If you're just an end user looking for a few free SMS check out Text Me Free where Mobtex is listed as a free SMS text message provider for the UK.

How to make Realtone Ringtones

2006-04-12T10:35:00.000Z

So you want to make realtone ringtones?

This guide will tell you how you can create realtone ringtones for fun, friends or maybe for profit. High quality, original content as mobile phone downloads can generate revenues through sites like www.mobtex.net and others on the ringtone bandwagon.

Before you can create a realtone you need mp3 and wav versions of a file which you have licence to; some cool music snip or stab you just produced on software like Cool Edit Pro / Adobe Audition, WaveLab, QBase or similar. This tutorial assumes you've already created your new ringtone masterpiece and have copies of it as .mp3 and .wav – with these files as a starting point and less than an hour we can have ready to roll realtones that will work on a multitude of mobile devices!

May I point out the world doesn't need another Crazy frog remix, Jamster / Jamba will sue you if you try and any true friend with some self-respect should disown you for wanting to make one.

Don't try the methods mentioned here to rip your favourite CD's and make them into ringtones you then charge for. It's against copyright laws and record label legal teams are officious, litigious and have more money for the court system than you have. If you want to do cover stuff though in most cases it's acceptable, get your guitar, drums, whatever and bang out as many cool tracks as you can, be creative and enjoy!

Please be aware that in the UK ringtones are licenced by the MCPS PRS Alliance who publish a list of contentious works you're better off not reproducing.

Lets get the tools we need

The first goal is to download the software you need to be able to produce all the relevant file formats to cover the majority of realtone supporting handsets.

Those file formats are:

mp3
wav
mmf
amr
awb

For each ringtone we need these five files, if we're hosting the content our importing and WAP downloading system would do the rest. If you were making your own download system you'd need to script a query against the HTTP Content Accept variable from the handset, once you have this you can work out the best suited file to serve the handset.

I ran content accept queries against thousands of mobile devices over a couple a years and the resulting handset compatability guide lists all the phones that told us they supported the files we're about to make.

Once we have the tools to create the files I'll guide you through the process of making your first multi-handset realtone.

Setup: Step 1:

Download and install Nokia Multimedia Convertor - you will need to register with Nokia before you can access the 17.3mb download but by doing so you'll find a whole new world of resources and tools at your fingertips.

To install the converter you also need to request a serial number from Nokia, they'll email this to you and once you paste it into the installer you're well on your way.

Nokia Multimedia Converter will be used to generate the AMR and AWB versions of your ringtone masterpiece.

Setup: Step 2:

Download and install SMAF Yamaha WSD (Wave Sound Decorator)

This 9.6mb download is the tool to take a wav file and convert it to MMF and as such make it available to Samsung, LG and many more handsets. More info on SMAF-MMF can be found on the Yamaha SMAF website.

Before we go further, notes on naming conventions

If you're going to do this you need to bear in mind that for each track you make there are five files, now this might not sound like a lot initially but I'm telling you by the time you get 1,000 tracks done and put down it can easily get out of hand if you don't have a sensible naming convention that you stick to religiously throughout.

There are some big players in this industry who still can't get it right, I've had huge packs of content sent from studios before where they had no idea which file related to which tone and I had to reject the content as it was worthless. Honestly, I mean big names are messing it up because they're too big with too many people working on it and they've had no standard to adhere to.

Here is the standard that works best for me and from what other ringtone producers have told me many other tone retailers. It's the most logical:

Top level directory called REALTONES
Second level directories called MP3 WAV MMF AMR and AWB

Name the first tone you make "1"
Name the second tone you make "2"

Save 1.mp3 in MP3
Save 1.wav in WAV
Save 1.mmf in MMF
Save 1.amr in AMR
Save 1.awb in AWB

You need to keep a log of which tone is which and the corresponding files, open up Excel, Calc or whatever you use and make a simple spreadsheet that looks like this:

Then for the first tone and subsequent others you make you build up the spreadsheet like this:

If you're doing this for profit: When the companies you send this content to come to import it onto their system it will be easy for them to work with, I know this may seem like teaching you to suck eggs but so many ringtone producers get this important step so badly wrong. Example: One company I was importing the content for had it all wrong, what was labelled as being Madonna American Pie was in fact something like the Bulgarian National Anthem. Their content was rejected and they ultimately went bust as all retailers they approached would have the same problem.

Some time back I wrote a post with more info on content directory structures - it's worth viewing to see the logic and may help you manage your files in the long run.

For those thinking "Wouldn't it be better to call the files by name?" NO! Macs are limited to 28 characters in a file name, spaces in file names are bad practice and if you replace " " with "_" and remove all "'" you need to make the rules clear and stick to them totally. It gets too complicated, numbering really is the best way.

Let's make realtones!

By this point you will have your original mp3 file and wav files, these should be no longer than 30 seconds as after that point most mobile phone networks will have sent the call to the user's voice mail service.

Rendering: Step 1: AWB & AMR

Open Nokia Multimedia Converter > file > open > select mp3 file

The screen should now look like this:

The software defaults to AMR with a Bit rate (KBPS) of 12.2 - leave this as it is and hit convert and your screen should show you a progress update like this:

You've just made your first AMR file, this is needed for narrow band Nokia handsets and many more, play it to make sure it sounds clean, check the file size isn't too large to download by WAP. If all is acceptable save the file as "1.amr" inside your AMR directory.

Now revert back to the original Mp3 file by using the drop down menu on the software labelled View, then under Audio select WB-AMR, this defaults to a Bit rate (KBPS) of 23.05, again leave it as it is and click convert.

Once this has rendered the mp3 to wideband AMR and you've checked file size and sound quality save this as "1.awb" in the AWB directory.

Rendering: Step 2: MMF

Now that most supported Nokia handsets and many more are covered with AMR and AWB we need to take the original WAV file and convert this to MMF to cater for the Samsung, LG and other handsets that support SMAF.

Under Help there is an option called “Sample Type Spec Sheet” this will tell you the possible file formats and capabilities.

File > Open > Select the wav file you want to convert > select MA-5 from the drop down menu, and save as "1.mmf" inside the MMF directory.

This is nice software in the sense that it will report any errors to you, things like wrong sample rate, wrong bit rate. It will only let you output a file when it knows that it's okay.

Now as long as your Mp3 and Wav files are in respective directories and you have labelled everything as an exact match to the code field in the spreadsheet you should be onto a winner.

You've taken two source files and made them into five formats that will cover all the handsets listed under this handset compatability guide - please note this is a very generic guide to say the least as there are thousands of models of cellphone and each one may have different settings or internal configuration depending on what the network specifies.

To test files you need to upload them somewhere then access them on your cellphone to make sure they work and sound as good as you wanted! We suggest the Mobtex WAP uploader as it's ideal for the job!

For more information on specific cellphone capabilities the WURFL is an XML file containing over 5,000 handset specifications. I've part documented my use of the WURFL on my blog and it's supported by Yahoo Groups with a number of active members so answers to questions can be found.

Follow up resources and tools:

Forum Nokia
Developer Discussion at Forum Nokia
Motorola's Moto Coder
Sony Ericsson Developer
Siemens / Benq Developer
Symbian Developer

WURFL and WALL Blog posting
Blog guide to configure mime types for mobile phone downloads
WAP uploader blog post

Search Engine User habits report

2006-04-12T10:22:00.000Z

Yes it is important to get high rankings, Mobtex comes first for a load of terms already and lower down for many many more yet when I check our referer log I see us listed on page 2 3 and often more of the results which tells me it doesn't matter how well placed you are in the rankings if the user doesn't like your site they click somewhere else otherwise we'd not get clicks on the terms we rank less well for.

Lynx text browser for Windows

2006-04-11T17:50:00.000Z

Worth having just to check the site out as a spider or screen reader would.

Dot Mobi TLD

2006-04-09T17:14:00.000Z

The new dot mobi top level domain is going live in May:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/tlds/mobi.asp
http://pc.mtld.mobi/switched/findaregistrar.html

About time, why they had to make it four characters though when dot mob would have been a lot better I don't know.....

Banners are dead, long live banners!

2006-03-30T11:28:00.000Z

Banners are dead, well at least the standard 468x60 flashing gif style we're so used to seeing online we've learnt to ignore them but real-world banners are very alive!

I need a nice, cost effective way of getting the Mobtex website offline and visible in the real world and for this I needed a banner and somewhere for it to live.

www.partybanners.biz is the site I ordered our banner from, I place the order on Friday of last week, 1.8m (72") x .67m (27") with my text on there to promote phone downloads like poly tones, realtones and mp3 track downloads, also to plug the free SMS and try to blast the URL infront of people OFFLINE - real people in the street or wherever my cunning plan leads the banner to be placed.

It turned up today, I am really impressed with Party Banners, the banner is 100% what I wanted, was a fantastic price and turned around in no time at all. I'm happy with them and it's not often I can say that a company has met what I expected from it with no questions asked and no stress. I can recommend them with no hesitation.

If you're thinking of banner advertising your website forget about the online options, browsers can disable ads, there's ad blockers and the human mind has modded itself to now ignore flashy gif icon banners. Try the offline option, for less than £35 you can have a real live banner, that's the cost of buying 20,000 hits from popups and expired traffic and will get your site offline and into the everyday lives of real people.

Now all I need is a spiderman costume and someone who's enough of a monkey to climb up Buckingham Palace and display it on the Queen's balcony ;)

If anyone reading this is a complete fool or from Fathers For Justice are you up for the job? There's no fiscal reward but we guarantee you will get on television and obtain a Criminal Record too. Apply here.

Promotional Banners from www.partybanners.biz

Ugly Websites

2006-03-27T12:42:00.000Z

The surprising truth about ugly websites

An interesting article which says plentyoffish.com is doing $10,000 Adwords revenue a day!

Just don't get caught looking at it by the woman or the boss, "I'm not hunting a dogging partner, I was considering the use of the font" will not work as an excuse.

I don't think it's to do with the fonts or usability of the site, it's niche is that they don't charge in a subscription model environment - it's that alone that helps it bring in a whopping 600,000 visitors a day!

Accessibility policy introduced

2006-03-26T02:14:00.000Z

I've just launched out accessibility policy page, now the frontpage of the site validates (as most pages do) to XHTML 1.1 and also meets Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 2 and 3 - the mission is on to make all of the site fully accessibile now. It simply can't happen as certain features would be diabled, a lot of this accessibility thing is knowing when you should and shouldn't use restrictive technologies like javascript or flash. There's a place for both and they can be accesible but how few quality design houses ever marry flash, seo and accessibility together?

This tool here which I've already blogged was a great help to getting this sorted out, afterall specs are always a nightmare to understand from scratch and I found it to help me iron bugs out, it did involve getting my hands dirty to fix the code but at least I never spent three years with my head in W3C / DDA documents.

If you're putting stuff online then it has a global audience so your site needs to be accessible for those with disability, those who are blind or those who can't use a mouse. Simple enough in theory, with added SEO benefits so they say it should be worth the effort but what are the SEO benefits? I'm yet to discover, having validating accessible markup hasn't got me to number one on Google for ringtones or downloads yet but it says we actually stand up as one of the few who say "We do actually give a monkies about how this works to all people"

Affiliate scheme for ringtones

2006-03-26T01:29:00.000Z

I'm pleased to say that I can now launch the Mobtex Affiliate scheme!

Here's the lowdown:

People signup using our very simple form then they link to us.

We remember they sent the client to us for 999 days.

If that customer buys we pay the person who sent them to us 70p as a finders fee and way of saying thanks!

It's as simple as that, it can be done with a hyperlink but for those who are more tech savvy there are also options to produce your own product pages by integrating our CSV, XML or SQL data feeds.

We'll give you a keyword on a UK shortcode which you can sell the content through, we'll provide you with links to our preview player which also includes our PayPal order form so you can earn revenue by passing customers to us from all over the world!

This is where it gets cool and a little techie I must admit......

Affiliates link to USERNAME.mobtex.net

Our site knows USERNAME is an affiliate click so drops a cookie that lasts for 999 days and redirects the users through to www.mobtex.net or the page they were sent to.

Once this users sees the order info the page uses the USERNAME value and prepends it to our keyword (MOB) on a UK reverse billing SMS shortcode, example, one of our users opted for username Y so his customers are instructed to send a SMS with our keyword and his ID then the product code. Example MOBY 100100

These sales are then logged, royalties and production studios paid then the affiliate who generated the sale will see an increase on the realtime stats we supply.

So far there are two users but this has been on the site for less than 24 hours so we will see how it helps build traffic, sales and long term partners for the business.

Dive Into Accessibility:

2006-03-24T17:42:00.000Z

Dive Into Accessibility

More accessibility stuff.

Silktide: Sitescore Results

2006-03-24T14:50:00.000Z

Silktide: Sitescore Results I love this tool, it lets you know how your pages are in terms of accessibility, inbound links, quality of markup, quality of content and much more.

Mobtex score 8 out of 10

The thing that holds us back is the low number of links we have being such a new site.

I really need to get more links out there to us.

Section 508 Guidlines & WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3 tools

2006-03-24T14:36:00.000Z

Cynthia Says Accessibility test tool. Covers section 508 WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3.

An excellent tool.

The index page on Mobtex passes all the tests Cynthia threw at it, I now need to sort out the template driven bits on the site to make it all pass, afterall some would say accessibility is the new SEO.

Still need a million back links though for the efforts to be worth anything!

Free SMS Update

2006-03-16T00:56:00.000Z

WOW - we've had it online about a week and we've already had over 250 people sign up to our free SMS text message service!

Today was mad, about 90 new sign ups, sadly some of those were duplicate accounts so I had to trim the fat and bar a few users. Afterall, why should they get more from it than anyone else?

Just gone midnight tonight we had a spaz-load of messages go out and I thought it was a bit too late to be sending them, I don't want to be running a late night stalking service here so I modded the platform to now only send messages between 0959 and 2259 - that way nobody gets annoyed by being distured late at night and the speed the messages are being cained will slow down a little.

I don't want it to slow down, I'm just scared seeing how fast traffic accellerated today and how many 5 pence peices we're going out the window with each message!

Social Bookmarking

2006-03-06T19:51:00.000Z

mobtex's BlinkList page on Blinklist

I really dig all this social bookmarking stuff

Free SMS Text Messages

2006-03-06T03:09:00.000Z

Free SMS Text Messages - Become a member, register with Mobtext now and get a content bundle free!

Well why not? The contract with our main SMS supplier is that we send a minimum of 1,000 messages a month, well we're a brand new site and we're not upto that volume yet so if we have to pay for them we might as well share them with whoever wants them, that way we can plug our site on the back of the message so we both win!

Free WAP Uploads

2006-02-24T01:41:00.000Z

Free WAP Uploads - Upload your files here then download them to your mobile phone

I thought some time back this would be a neat tool to offer users, it's being used and although I can't publish the links to the files people are uploading I can say some good, funny as hell stuff has been uploaded!

The following files formats can be uploaded from your PC then downloaded to your mobile phone through WAP:

3gp aac amr avi awb bmp cab gif jad jar jpeg jpg mid mmf mp3 mp4 png sis wav wbmp

The thing I like most about this page is the feature which shows an animated clock and a please wait message as soon as you click submit. I know it's only a div tag shown onclick but it's sweet and makes me smile when I see it!

Blogger links!

2006-02-24T01:40:00.000Z

Welcome to Mobtex. We are your one stop shop for ringtones and downloads for your mobile phone!
We've got one of those cool add this my blogger links now on every page of the site! Neat!

I just added Mobtex to my blog with one click, neat. Dead easy really, just understanding how Blogger takes the get requests and uses those on the create a post page:

http://www.blogger.com/blog-this.g?u=URL&n=TITLE

Simple but hopefully this will encourage people to Blog about us, we're picking up customers and steam now and it would be nice to burst onto the blogosphere!

HTTP Authentication with PHP

2006-02-10T01:43:00.000Z

I'd wondered for a while how I'd do this but didn't really have the need to go and find out till now, I wanted to be able to password protect a a few functions within a script so I've put this inside it's component and it works a treat.

Users now get forced to validate before the application runs.

Cool.

// lets not just have anyone accessing this
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {

header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Mobtex Limited SMS Sender"');
header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
echo "You need to be authorised to use this application";
exit;

}else{

if(($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']=="**********") and ($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']=="**********")){
echo "

Authenticated

";

}else{

header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Authenticate"');
header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
echo "You need to be authorised to use this application";
exit;
}

}

?>

Yes, I know the blog has been slow in the last two weeks, I'm getting around to sleeping every second night and working on the site, back end and a million other jobs so the blog is way down the list right now but we're moving along and I thought this was a nice little snippet to drop in here.

Spider Simulator Report

2006-02-01T15:53:00.000Z

I'm on the Web Credible mailing list and it came through today with a cool link to Summit Media and their Spider Simulator which I used right away, wow, a newsletter worth reading as it holds some value to me. Staggering.... lol

I don't know what it is that's made me such a standards freak all of a sudden, all pages I'm working on validate as XHTML 1.1 and the validate as CSS, the domain is running a watertight DNSreport.com report and now there's this little tool setting me another test to work upto.

robots.txt

2006-02-01T12:07:00.000Z

http://www.mobtex.net/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /gif_icons/
Disallow: /sandbox/
Disallow: /screenshots/
Disallow: /wall4php/
Disallow: /tinymce/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /content_uploads/
Disallow: /components/

Cool tool to validate your robots.txt file:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

References:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

The most paranoid robots.txt file I have ever seen:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

MySQL FULLTEXT searching

2006-01-25T16:47:00.000Z

I want users to be able to search the website for content but the way I've done this in the past sucked as it was using the user's input then checking:

where field1 like '%input%' or field2 like '%input'

This isn't efficient as a user may enter, for example 'abba money money' and the returning MySQL relults will be empty as neither field1 or field2 would contain both the artist and title of an item, I need a way the user's data can be well and truly searched.... I need FULLTEXT searching.

ALTER TABLE TABLENAME ADD FULLTEXT(cell,cell);

Once I'd queried that to all the tables so they were setup to run a fulltext search on both the cells I needed to run the full the full MySQL to get the results:

SELECT cell,celcell,MATCH (cell,cell) AGAINST ('SEARCHTERM') AS score
FROM TABLENAME WHERE MATCH (cell,cell) AGAINST ('SEARHTERM')
ORDER by score DESC

It works, spanking :)

URL Rewriting with .htaccess

2006-01-24T18:44:00.000Z

.htaccess rocks. it enables the true voodoo magick of the internet in my opinion.

Here's a couple of good reference guides for anyone wanting to spice up their site by making file.php?var1=foo&var2=bar look like foo-bar.html their browser:

http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess.php
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

First things first, I don't want people hotlinking to the images on the website. We put an end to that by adding this to our .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mobtex\.net/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|bmp|png)$ gif_icons/mobtex-site-logo.gif [L]

If you want to check this works then there is a hotlink prevention checky thing here and an ok tutorial about hotlink prevention here though watch out if you cut and paste there are ] characters missing on the end of some statements.

Someone on a forum I found while doing a Google wrote this great post on .htaccess rewriting.

RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)-([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]*).* display-content.php?code=$4

The line above is a direct cut and paste from my .htaccess so any requests in the format of /artist/title/track/library-id/ will now direct through to display-content.php?code=id

However, this means that you could change the ID value in the URL and end up with conflicting data on the page, example, the URL says http://www.mobtex.net/john-lennon/imagine/full-track-download-100123/ but if we changed 100123 to 101010 the page would say Beverly Knight.............

So I knocked up a little PHP to sort it out (get_hyperlink is a function to make a full URL from a product's ID code)

$uri = getenv('REQUEST_URI');
if(get_hyperlink($code)!="http://www.mobtex.net$uri"){
$link = get_hyperlink($code);
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header ('Location: '.$link);
exit;
}

Nice, now the URL's can't be screwed and shouldn't confuse the robots and spiders.
Not just that, it looks better too.

Alexa Screenshots

2006-01-22T13:18:00.000Z

I want to link to the sites of the artists who's tracks we have on the website but I want to do something more funky looking than a standard text link, I still want the text links as the anchor text and related URL can be a powerful friend to us in persuading Google our site's cool.

I want screenshots, just like those you see over on Alexa and DNS Report (who get them from Alexa) when you run a check on a site. Yet, when I checked the database for realtones there's over 800 distinct artists I'd have to go through manually, then check the link, then check Alexa for a screenshot, right click, save as and then upload. Screw that, too much work. Let's script it instead with PHP. I know I could link direct to the images on Alexa but then if they didn't have a screenshot of the site in question it would show the default image which would make the site look sloppy.

First, we select each distinct artist from the database, then foreach result we do the following:

Remove any spaces and make the string lowercase

strtolower(ereg_replace(" ","","$artist"))

add .com to the end of the variable that gets returned

Now I want to check the screenshot exists

$screenshot = file_get_contents("$screenshoturl");
That will return the data of the file in a string

We now compare this against a screenshot we saved earlier that says 'coming soon'
If there is not a match we simply write the image to a file.

That's it in a nutshell really. The directory you want to store the image in must be writable otherwise it will not work.

I've run the script on polyphonic ringtones, realtone ringtones, full track downloads and the mobile phone karaoke so that each artist stands a chance of getting a screenshot if we can find a matching URL image from Alexa.

I now have a collection of 1,277 screenshots and have thought about running the script that does this on a cron job but really the updates aren't going to be that big so I might as well just run it manually whenever I think it needs it.

IP to Country

2006-01-20T11:22:00.000Z

I want to be able to work out the country the visitor is in so that I can pre-propagate some hidden form fields and maybe show a flag on the website, it's also handy for internal stats tracking and a plethora of other goodies.

It appears that the original IP 2 Country website www.webhosting.info is down at least for me today it is so I've had to use a different site> www.32tech.com I've downlaod the free zip, extracted it, changed the name of the table from ip2country to IP2COUNTRY as I want all my MySQL table names in upper case (yes I know it's anal) to conform to the new in-house style.

Once that had finished the find and replace I uploaded it through phpMyAdmin and a couple of minutes later the tables were setup and propagated with data.

I also want the flags to go with this as mentioned. Best place for these that I've found is flags.blogpotato.de so I've downloaded the flags, loaded them onto the server and unpackaged them. You can download the zip I used here.

Now to start really playing with the data as I want much more than just the ISO value country code..................

So I've added an extra field to the table now called 'dial' this will be for the international dialing code of that country.

Now to get the data and import it somehow.

I've just spent half an hour scouring around the net to find a decent list of numbers from countries, I wanted something with the ISO country codes too but from what I feel now there's not one.

I had to make my own..... Painful. Based on a distinct country value from the MySQL then hand filled with the data.......

AFGHANISTAN#93
ALBANIA#355
ALGERIA#213
ANDORRA#376
ANGOLA#244
ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA#1268
ARGENTINA#54
ARMENIA#374
AUSTRALIA#61
AUSTRIA#43
AZERBAIJAN#994
BAHAMAS#1242
BAHRAIN#973
BANGLADESH#880
BARBADOS#1246
BELARUS#375
BELGIUM#32
BELIZE#501
BENIN#229
BERMUDA#1441
BHUTAN#975
BOLIVIA#591
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA#387
BOTSWANA#267
BRAZIL#55
BRUNEI DARUSSALAM#673
BULGARIA#359
BURKINA FASO#226
BURUNDI#257
CAMBODIA#855
CAMEROON#237
CANADA#1
CAPE VERDE#238
CAYMAN ISLANDS#1345
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC#236
CHAD#235
CHILE#56
CHINA#86
COLOMBIA#57
COMOROS#269
CONGO#242
CONGO, Democratic Republic of#243
COOK ISLANDS#682
COSTA RICA#506
COTE D-IVOIRE#225
CROATIA#385
CUBA#53
CYPRUS#357
CZECH REPUBLIC#420
DENMARK#45
DJIBOUTI#253
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC#1809
EAST TIMOR#670
ECUADOR#593
EGYPT#20
EL SALVADOR#503
EQUATORIAL GUINEA#240
ERITREA#291
ESTONIA#372
ETHIOPIA#251
FALKLAND ISLANDS (MALVINAS)#500
FAROE ISLANDS#298
FIJI#679
FINLAND#358
FRANCE#33
FRENCH POLYNESIA#689
GABON#241
GAMBIA#220
GEORGIA#995
GERMANY#49
GHANA#233
GIBRALTAR#350
GREECE#30
GREENLAND#299
GRENADA#1473
GUADELOUPE#590
GUAM#1671
GUATEMALA#502
GUINEA#224
GUINEA-BISSAU#245
HAITI#509
HOLY SEE (VATICAN CITY STATE)#379
HONDURAS#504
HONG KONG#852
HUNGARY#36
ICELAND#354
INDIA#91
INDONESIA#62
IRAQ#964
IRELAND#353
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN#98
ISRAEL#972
ITALY#39
JAMAICA#1876
JAPAN#81
JORDAN#962
KAZAKHSTAN#7
KENYA#254
KIRIBATI#86
KOREA#850
KUWAIT#965
KYRGYZSTAN#996
LAO#856
LATVIA#371
LEBANON#961
LESOTHO#266
LIBERIA#231
LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA#218
LIECHTENSTEIN#423
LITHUANIA#370
LUXEMBOURG#352
MACAO, CHINA#853
MACEDONIA#389
MADAGASCAR#261
MALAWI#265
MALAYSIA#60
MALDIVES#690
MALI#223
MALTA#356
MARTINIQUE#596
MAURITANIA#222
MAURITIUS#230
MEXICO#52
MONACO#377
MONGOLIA#976
MOROCCO#212
MOZAMBIQUE#258
MYANMAR#95
NAMIBIA#264
NAURU#674
NEPAL#977
NETHERLANDS#31
NETHERLANDS ANTILLES#599
NEW CALEDONIA#687
NEW ZEALAND#64
NICARAGUA#505
NIGER#227
NIGERIA#234
NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS#1670
NORWAY#47
OMAN#968
PAKISTAN#92
PALAU#680
PALESTINIAN#970
PANAMA#507
PAPUA NEW GUINEA#675
PARAGUAY#595
PERU#51
PHILIPPINES#63
POLAND#48
PORTUGAL#351
PUERTO RICO#1787
QATAR#974
REPUBLIC OF KOREA#82
REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA#373
REUNION#262
ROMANIA#40
RUSSIAN FEDERATION#7
RWANDA#250
SAMOA#685
SAN MARINO#378
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE#239
SAUDI ARABIA#966
SENEGAL#221
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO#381
SEYCHELLES#248
SIERRA LEONE#232
SINGAPORE#65
SLOVAKIA#421
SLOVENIA#386
SOLOMON ISLANDS#677
SOMALIA#252
SOUTH AFRICA#27
SPAIN#34
SRI LANKA#94
SUDAN#249
SURINAME#597
SWAZILAND#268
SWEDEN#46
SWITZERLAND#41
SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC#963
TAIWAN#886
TAJIKISTAN#992
THAILAND#66
TOGO#228
TONGA#676
TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO#1868
TUNISIA#216
TURKEY#90
TURKMENISTAN#993
TUVALU#688
UGANDA#256
UKRAINE#380
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES#971
UNITED KINGDOM#44
UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA#255
UNITED STATES#1
URUGUAY#598
UZBEKISTAN#598
VANUATU#678
VENEZUELA#58
VIET NAM#84
VIRGIN ISLANDS BRITISH#1284
YEMEN#697
ZAMBIA#260
ZIMBABWE#263

Now I'll bang this in a text file, read it with PHP then explode via the hash and update the tables with the variables we have. Sorted, and it is! ;)

GD Library Manipulation

2006-01-19T15:26:00.000Z

The blog has simmered down a little since last week, not because I've been sitting on my arse doing nothing, far from it, I've now got quite a library of mobile content to work with. I've been busy and I want to be able to keep track on the size of the library.

Rather then writing the results here it's better if I make a quick PHP script to render the number of items in each library, realtones, polyphonics and so on, inside a graphic I can call on the site, on the blog or even view it on my mobile phone.

The render an image in PHP the main requirement is GD Library which is Open Source software that does all sors of wonderful things with images through PHP.

GD Library is written by Boutelle and really is the nads and thankfully WHM has an easy install option which I took full advantage of so I didn't have to arse around with tars and recompiling etc.....

What's involved:

Setup MySQL connection
Create array on table names
Foreach value query count
Setup image headers
Echo results

This is what we're after:

This is how we get it:

Start with the headers we need to echo out so the browser knows to understand what we're giving it, I want a gif that the browser can't cache and must revisit with each request so it's always fresh:

header( "Content-type: image/gif");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");

Next we set the image dimensions foreground and background colours:

$image = imagecreate(150,74);
$foreground = ImageColorAllocate($image,0x00,0x00,0x00);
$transparent = ImageColorAllocate($image,0xFA,0xFA,0xFA);
ImageColorTransparent($image,$transparent);
ImageFilledRectangle($image,0,0,150,744,$transparent);

We need a height variable as the loop we're about to run needs to tell the image where within it's dimensions the line it is about to make should go:

$height = "02";

// setup an array of table names to query
$tables = array("BLAH","BLAH");

// loop begin
foreach($tables as $table){

Assuming that all tables have the same cell formatting:

// query and retuen
$total = mysql_query("SELECT count(code) FROM $table");
$total = mysql_result($total,0);

// add that to the data string
ImageString($image,2,2,$height, "$table: $total",$foreground);

// increment the height variable so the next line is okay and written on top of the last one....
$height = $height + 12;

// loop end
}

// do it baby
imagepng($image);

There. That's one sorted, another funky thing I want from GD is the ability to verify anyone submitting a form is a human and not a robot. It's just sessions, GD and a form which reads and compares the session, it's name is Turing Symbol Verification. This is a hack from Planet Source Code's repository.

A nice quick hack to the original script and I had it doing what I wanted it to do and in the colours I wanted too. Thanks to the guy who wrote it who's website is now going through to seeq.com

As a quick afterthought I also wanted to know how many items we had in stock in total, right now on the first day of counting there's over 16,000 which isn't too bad a starting point for a mobile media company who's so new we've not built the website for customers to buy from yet!

Content Storage Structure

2006-01-19T12:06:00.000Z

This is the content storage structure we're using.
content_files is outside the public_html directory so all content is stored away from the world wide web.

Each product library has it's own directory and within each content library folder is a folder for each relevant file type, inside the sub-directories are the files, all with a numbered value filename which would then tie up with the MySQL database tables we've put together.

FULLTRACK

full - mp3 format
preview -mp3 format

KARAOKE

full - 3gp video clip
preview - 3gp format preview

MOANTONES

amr - amw narrow band
awb - amr wide band
mp3 - mp3 format
wav - wave format

POLYPHONIC

mid - sp-midi scalable polyphony midi format
mmf - smaf mmf format
mp3 - mp3 format

REALTONES

amr - amw narrow band
awb - amr wide band
mmf - smaf mmf format
mp3 - mp3 format
wav - wave format

VIDEOTONES

3gp - 3gp wap preview
avi -avi web preview
cab - cab pocket pc format
sis - symbian installer

Mozilla Extensions

2006-01-18T14:48:00.000Z

Thunderbird and Firefox extensions. I'd quite like to create my own one day but till then here's a list of all the Mozilla Extensions I'm running. Some of these are way cool.

Thunderbird

Mail User Agent Extension 1.2

Firefox

PDF Download
IE View
Google Toolbar
Skype Toolbar
Add N Edit Cookies
Firefox Showcase 0.5.5
CustomizeGoogle 0.40
DNS Stuff Toolbar
Foxy Tunes

Configuring MIME types

2006-01-16T16:07:00.000Z

I need to tell the server to add MIME types for the following files: .amr .awb .mmf .mid .3gp .sis .cab and .wav - normally I would just VI into the .htaccess in the public_html directory of the site I want to deploy these from but I might want to save myself a job in the future if I ever decide to rent server space to mobile media producers or if I want to deploy them from another website so this time I'm going to add them to the main HTTP conf file.

Some time back I wrote a post on Dev Shed's WAP Forum (where I'm one of the moderators) with a list of the most common WAP based mime types. Now the actual generation of the WAP sites will be done through WURFL and WALL so I don't need to configure anything other than the file types:

## polyphonic and realtone mmf
AddType application/vnd.smaf .mmf

## realtone amr and awb
AddType audio/amr .amr
AddType audio/amr-wb awb

## varients of midi for polyphonic
AddType audio/midi .mid
AddType audio/midi .midi
AddType audio/sp-midi .mid

## mp3 and wav for realtones
AddType audio/mpeg .mp3
AddType audio/x-mpeg .mp3
AddType audio/x-wav .wav

## video ringtones for symbian and pocket pc
AddType application/vnd.symbian.install sis
AddType application/octet-stream cab

## video and audio clips in 3gp
AddType video/3gpp 3gp
AddType audio/3gpp 3gp

## process .m3u files as php so they can be dynamic
AddType application/x-httpd-php .m3u

Once I had cut and pasted that into into my httpd.conf I restarted HTTPD on the server and bingo. All sorted.

More info on /htaccess etc can be found here.

MCPS and PRS Licences

2006-01-13T14:06:00.000Z

Right I've finally gone and done it, I have now completed the application process for a MCPS and PRS Ringtone Licence and I've paid the bill before they sent it. £587.88 inc VAT to MCPS as a setup, then £267.88 inc VAT to PRS as the first quarters payment.

As it stands today, I have no content that I could deploy, no payment mechanisms so bearing in mind it will take me time to get things sorted out, content contracts in place, content loaded by FTP the imported onto the new platform, plus I need to get my Bango and Text Anywhere integrations rolling I have requested the licence commence on April 1st 2006.

Now all I need to do is get some content and start selling it to make some money.

Immobilise Phone Crime

2006-01-11T20:20:00.000Z

Having just got a new mobile phone today I want to make sure it's registered with the Police in the same way as you could get your push bike stamped with your postcode by a copper when you were a kid. www.immobilise.com

I met someone from Immobilise some time back at an event in London and I thought the idea was worth something, you register your handset's IMEI number with the Police and if your phone ever goes missing then turns up in a theiving chav bastard's posession you can get it back.

The site sucks in Fire Fox though. Why don't more of the authorities put more effort into their websites and make them better on more browsers.

You need to enter the handsets IMEI number and can get this by tapping *#06# on your phone. That's the hard bit reading something from such a small screen, now I am registered and the website has given me the most wank username and password combination. Still my new phone is listed so job done.

I've gone i-Mode

2006-01-11T20:12:00.000Z

It's big in Japan and it's been here a few weeks now, I was keen to find out what it's like, what it does and what I can do with it. Plus the phone I was using was owned by the old company I was with so I needed to get my own.

O2 have the NEC 343i available on PAYG for £49.99 - you can get one on Amazon for a tenner less but then you can't go and swear at the people in the store if it goes Pete Tong, nor can you go and pick it up today, neiher can you smile and ask what range of numbers are available so you can pick.

Cutting a long story short, I went into Loughborough and got one today. It's charging up right now and I'll not do anything with it till it's fully done but it'll be interesting to see what i-Mode is really like. CHTML on my platform will be output from WALL via the WURFL and at last I have a cellphone to demo it with!

Is i-Mode great or pooh? I dunno yet but will update once I can make a decision on it.

Now, a day later and I've just added a forward on all Mobtex emails to come through to my i-mode email account, this rocks, I like it so far, I don't need to configure any email stuff like I would if I wanted my pop3 account to talk to a Blackberry as it just pushes them to me, for free, well at least till the end of March when the free i-mode offer expires.

The only bug I've found in the i-mode email system so far is that my address is 07999778405@o2imail.co.uk which to Spam Assasin is a black point as it's numbers and no mane, so it's possible that many emails from i-mode devices are labelled wrongly as spam. To counteract this I have added my mobile email address to the Spam Assasin whitelist so it now comes through unflagged.

Tiny MCE Text Editor

2006-01-10T19:20:00.001Z

This is a sweet little thing based on java script and thankfully it's standards compliant so the website will be able to validate as XHTML 1.1 and use this too as a tool to enhance user experience. Plus I need a nice simple well documented interface to the content management platform I'm about to put togeher.

It's really similar to the post screen here at blogger.com and is used on the Mambo / Joomla Open Source project which is where I first came across it.

What is Tiny MCE?

TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as Open Source under LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB. It has the ability to convert HTML TEXTAREA fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is very easy to integrate into other CMS systems.

The Moxicode documentation says the install is easy. I've heard it a million times before and this time it's true!

http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/tinymce/tinymce_2_0_1.tgz

Then into SSH:

cd public_html
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/tinymce/tinymce_2_0_1.tgz

gzip -d tinymce_2_0_1.tgz
tar xvf tinymce_2_0_1.tar

Then call in the browser and it works, wonderful stuff!

http://www.mobtex.net/tinymce/examples/

So simple, thanks Moxicode!

Clicky

Backup MX Records

2006-01-10T14:17:00.000Z

I've used No-IP's desktop client in the past so I could remote desktop into my PC from another PC as long as both were connected to the net and opened up to allow it. It's a free download and at the time I did wonder how they made any money. Today I delved into DNS even deeper and started looking into Backup MX Records, so if my mailserver was to go down the DNS would know to reroute my email to another server to hold for seven days. Then once my mailserver is back online the backup mailserver will post all the emails through to me.

Sounds okay in principle but what's involved?

http://www.no-ip.info/

$29.95 per domain per year.

Signup was simple, payment was painless and an email confirmed the order within seconds, now to get this thing working...

Here we go, back into WHM and under DNS Functions, Edit DNS Zone, mobtex.net

We add this to the zone:

mobtex.net. 14400 in MX mail1.no-ip.info.
mobtex.net. 14400 in MX mail2.no-ip.info.

Then restart Bind. Yesterday's perfect DNS Report came up with a warning today about only having one MX Record, now if I've set this up right we should have three MX Records and I should never miss an email.

E-Commerce Law

2006-01-09T22:09:00.000Z

I needed contracts and found Compact Law who offer legal documents for download and customise for £81.00 - the E-Commerce Pack they offer covers affiliate linking agreements, developer terms, a privacy policy that complies with the Data Protection Act, hosting agreements and a terms of sale which covers Distance Selling Regulations and more.

SmartPhone Emulator

2006-01-09T20:08:00.000Z

This bit of software rocks, it's the nearest thing you'll get to testing your online mobile applications without having a huge collection of cellphones.

After having just installed WALL4PHP which uses the WURFL to empower an abscraction library called WALL I wanted to know it worked.

Yospace have a great SmartPhone Emulator - it costs around 2-300 for the full key but the five minute trial is enough for me to find out if everything is sorted.

It works, I'm chuffed, gotta blank canvas and the tools to really do some stuff funky now!

WURFL and WALL

2006-01-09T18:23:00.000Z

WURFL = Wireless Universal Resource File

I discovered the WURFL a long time back, it was some XML thing that ran on Java and I knew by that point I was lost. It knew a lot of information about mobile phones, screen size, colours used, support for Digital Rights Management and much much more but I didn't have a clue about XML or Java back then so I never took it any further.

A few weeks back I found WURLF again and having moved on a lot as a developer was more game for the challenge of XML and Java, then I learnt about WALL4PHP - not only had I moved on but so had this WURFLthing.

WALL4PHP uses the WURFL to generate WALL templates with PHP, my language of choice. :)

By using the WALL abstraction library I can generate the right output markup language for the mobile device accessing the script. In other words, naff old phones will get WML, better phones will get XHTML - Mobile Profile and i-Mode phones will get CHTML, plus there's tonnes more funky stuff you can do with it to enhance the end user experience.

Let's load this thing!

http://laacz.lv/dev/Wall/Wall4PHP-1.0beta2.tar.gz

Plus we'll need the most up to date version of the WURFL

http://www.nusho.it/wurfl/dl.php?t=d&f=wurfl.zip

Now I've got copies of both the newest WURFL and WALL4PHP I need to backup the original XML file with all the phone data and replace it with the new one I just downloaded.

Quote from the install guide to WALL4PHP:

Unpack downloaded archive. Copy file Wall.php and directory Wall to somewhere in PHP include path. Open file wall_prepend.php in Your favorite code editor. Make appropriate changes. Allow webserver's user to write into DATADIR. See WALL reference Guide, sample files, which are provided with this archive, and You are on!

Since I'd added the latest WURFL to WALL4PHP I needed to repackage it us as a zip and load it on the server. Once there I SSH'd to the right directory I could unzip it:

mobtex@mobtex.net [~/public_html]# unzip wall4php.zip

Wow, I love the unzip utility, you need your box compiling with it though but WHM users can do this easily enough.

mobtex@mobtex.net [~/public_html]# cd wall4php
mobtex@mobtex.net [~/public_html/wall4php]# ls
./ ../ changelog.txt examples/ Wall/ Wall.php wall_prepend.php wurfl/
mobtex@mobtex.net [~/public_html/wall4php]# cd wurfl
mobtex@mobtex.net [~/public_html/wall4php/wurfl]# ls
./ check_wurfl.php readme.txt wurfl_class.php wurfl_parser.php
../ data/ update_cache.php wurfl_config.php

I to apply a CHMOD of 777 to /data and all the files within and we should be on our way?

http://www.mobtex.net/wall4php/examples/

Oh yes! But how would that render on a load of different devices? I need an emulator.

Secondary Nameservers

2006-01-09T14:56:00.000Z

In order to get a clean bill of DNS health I needed secondary nameservers, after a quick Google an AdWord stood out and I found nettica.com who can provide secondary nameservers for me for $10.00 a year.

I needed to log into my Go Daddy account and add two new nameservers to mobtex.net

dns2.nettica.com (64.237.45.34)
dns4.nettica.com (69.41.170.223)

Once those were added I needed to tell our server that dns2 and dns4.nettica.com were acting as remote nameservers for us, this was done in WHM under Zone editing, once they were updated I restarted Bind then added the following to /etc/named.conf under the options ()

// allow transfers to Nettica's DNS servers
              allow-transfer { 64.237.45.34; 69.41.170.223; };

All the info I needed to do this was on the Nettica FAQ's. It was nice to do business with them, all automated, only $10.00 a year most importantly, if works. Next year I'll do the $40.00 option and get a 'for life' deal through them. Stunning. If only everything else on the net was as efficient and cost effective.....

Once named.conf had been saved I restarted Bind again then went for a cuppa and returned to run a DNS Report again, this time there were slight differences in TTL and DNS versions but a quick edit, restart and wait.

Finally everything came together and resulted in the thing that I wanted to get out of all of this.

A perfect DNS Report.

ICSTIS Compliance

2006-01-09T14:37:00.000Z

The aim is to setup and maintain a series of services for mobile phones, such as:

Video Ringtones
Polyphonic Ringtones
Realtone Ringtones
Full Audio Tracks
Karaoke 3gp Videos

Mainly music based content so I will require both PRS and MCPS licenses before I can trade, right now though while things are still in the planning stage I want to make sure that the services I am about to launch are all going to comply with the regulations set out by ICSTIS.

I tried to call and get through to Applications but no joy so I've emailed a quick outline to Nazia Khan there who deals with the setting up of new services, her email does nothing but bounce after 24 hours.........

I know I have to comply with the Code of Practice and Guideline 12 to cover Pay-For-Product Services but asked if there's anything else I need to be aware of before I launch.

After no reply to emails which ultimately bounced on me I took it into my own hands and rang to speak to someone else, I will not legally be classed as a Service Provider as it isn't me who has the connections into networks, nor is it me who runs the billing platform. I'm just an information provider in the eyes of ICSTIS.

I can send over links to the website and any offline advertising I run to the ICSTIS copy clearence department but as it stands right now I have no need to apply for a licence through them to trade.

FTP Configuration

2006-01-07T21:06:00.000Z

I was inspired by the goings on with SSH earlier on and thought I should setup the FTP the way I need it as there are a few things I want to change. How many people can FTP into the server, how many from one IP and the number of files we'll list in a directory.

root@server [/]# vi /etc/pure-ftpd.conf

To change the number of simultanious users and users from the same ip on the box find the lines:

MaxClientsNumber 50
MaxClientsPerIP 8

Change 50 and 8 to whatever you see fit.

Now it bugs me when I'm doing a command line FTP session and need to piss, make a coffee or go for a smoke and by the time I've come back the session has ended and I need to log back in again. Chore, no not if you set find this line:

MaxIdelTime 15

And change 15 to 45. Now you have long enough to make a coffee, run to the toilet and have a smoke without being booted. Bonus.

Another thing with FTP that gets to me, it's basic limit is to show 2000 files in a directory then just hide the rest, this is a pain if you're dealing with thousands and thousands of items as you just can't manage them through FTP, to overcome this just find this line:

LimitRecursion 2000 8

2000 is the limit to the number of files it will list, you might only see 1998 though as . and .. are not shown. 8 is the limit as to how deep down the folder tree it will recurse.

These are the little twaeks that cPanel can't help you with so you need to muck in and get you hands dirty to sort it.

SSH Security

2006-01-07T14:51:00.000Z

I just got the first email from our server telling me that there had been loads and loads and loads of username and password attemps to get access through SSH.

Best thing to do here is change the port it runs on. SSH normally runs on Port 22 so all requests for access would automatically fail if SSH were only to be deployed via another port. Example: 1234

Here's how I did it on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux box:

root@server [/]# cd /etc/ssh/
root@server [/etc/ssh]# vi sshd_config

Scroll down till you find the line that reads:
#Port 22

Then remove the # and change 22 to the port you want to run SSH on.

I also want to make sure that anyone who does log onto our server by SSH gets a standard Welcome message from us, something to say we're watching you kinda thing so while I'm inside sshd_config I might as well kill two birds with one stone......

Scroll down till you find this section:

# no default banner path

Then upload the text file you want to use to show your welcome message, then create a line in your sshd_conf that looks like this but references the location of the file on your server.

Banner /home/mobtex/etc/ssh-welcome.txt

Then save that and restart SSH:

root@server [/etc/ssh]# service sshd restart
Stopping sshd: [ OK ]
Starting sshd: [ OK ]
root@server [/etc/ssh]#

Log out and try to log in again on port 22, you should not be able to. It should come up as "Network error, connection refused."

Change the port you are accessing to the correct port, first of all Putty is likely to mention keys but accept that, the server will then promt you for your login once you enter that you should get the welcome message from the text file!

Mine now reads:

login as: root
Mobtex Limited - SSH
We know you are here
root@67.15.221.30's password:

Next thing, I want an email each time someone logs in as Root, it should only ever be me so I'll most likely get pissed with an email each time I do login but If I can get it to work it's another little tweak I'll be happy with.

root@server [~]# cd /root
root@server [~]# vi .bashrc

Then I added this line:

echo 'ALERT - Root Shell Access (server.mobtex.net) on:' `date` `who` | mail -s "Alert: Root Access from `who | cut -d"(" -f2 | cut -d")" -f1`" info@mobtex.net

Now, each time root logs into the server I will get an email letting me know about it.

While we're on the subject of SSH here's a nice little tool to SSH into your kit. Putty.

DNS Issues

2006-01-06T15:18:00.000Z

The newly setup server was having a few DNS issues. The server had been configured with one IP, I'd requested two more for nameservers and one for HTTP requests.

First was a look at WHM to see if there was anything that stood out, I looked under Basic cPanel WHM Setup and checked the nameservers and the hostname were okay.

I was checking DNS records when I saw a duff nameserver, once that had been removed all the records looked right so I restarted Named and after two minutes all worked.

ns1.mobtex.net
ns2.mobtex.net
server.mobtex.net
ftp.mobtex.net
mail.mobtex.net
www.mobtex.net
and
https://www.mobtex.net

Next thing it's falling over again. www.dnsreport.com told me that the only Warn was on the nameservers not being on seperate class C's, understandable but the only thing that came up with a warning was the SPF records which I added to the zone file for the domain.

www. on 80 and 443 go down so does mail but ns1, ns2 and server are all fine. When it's down www.dnsreport.com comes back with a failure on the mail server, it really does seem to be an intermittant fault . It's setup okay so why?

I submitted a ticket and 14 minutes later the issue had been sorted so it seemed, it was a case of having individual zonefiles for the nameservers when they should have been setup on the mobtex.net zone file. Also, the resolve.conf was updated to use the DNS resolvers of EV1.

Still up and down though.

According to EV1 the .150 and .151 IP addresses aren't mine to take and there's been a conflict. Seems like it's bugger all to do with zonefiles but an IP conflict instead.

Problem fully diagnosed and at last a solution.

Now I'm not playing victim but this was a glitch at EV1 which assigned me IP's that were already in use. EV1's problem and not mine yet it's kick on effect is the loss of time which could have been better spent getting the architecture and development of the company underway.

This is the new total range of IP's we're using:

67.15.221.30 (server.mobtex.net)
67.15.221.149 (ns1.mobtex.net)
67.15.221.188 (www.mobtex.net)
67.15.221.189 (ns2.mobtex.net)
67.15.221.190/1 (not-used)

Go Daddy's Domain Host Summary record has been updated for ns2. and now things are working a lot slicker. I still want to get things tighter as a ship but things are resolving.

; Modified by Web Host Manager
; Zone File for mobtex.net
$TTL 14400
@ 86400 IN SOA ns1.mobtex.net. info.mobtex.net. (
2006010804
7200
7200
1209600
86400
)

mobtex.net. 86400 IN NS ns1.mobtex.net.
mobtex.net. 86400 IN NS ns2.mobtex.net.

mobtex.net. 14400 IN A 67.15.221.188

localhost.mobtex.net. 14400 IN A 127.0.0.1

mobtex.net. 14400 IN MX 0 mobtex.net.

mail 14400 IN CNAME mobtex.net.
www 14400 IN CNAME mobtex.net.
ftp 14400 IN CNAME mobtex.net.
server 14400 IN A 67.15.221.30
ns1 14400 IN A 67.15.221.149
ns2 14400 IN A 67.15.221.189

mobtex.net. 14400 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4: 67.15.221.188 a mx"
localhost 14400 IN A 127.0.0.1
*.mobtex.net. 14400 IN A 67.15.221.188

I just want to get server aliasing sorted now so any browser calls to ns1. ns2. server. localhost. *. all use the /home/mobtex directory to call the page from. No more of those nonky looking cPanel 'no website' pages and instead just a unified Mobtex brand.

Skype Rocks

2006-01-05T20:38:00.000Z

My Skype is mobtex if you want to get in touch. If you don't use Skype you can call me on

UK 0208 123 5543

which is actually a Skype In number so will come through to me on my PC.

I love Skype it's great stuff and I've even got Skype Out for cheaper calls than what normal telecoms companies charge. At long last a 100 year old business model is shattered beyond repair, based on call duration and distance between callers the old phone giants must be reworking business models to compensate for VOIP. Free global telephony. That's spanking.

The image above is is based on Jyve Inc's Skype Web Plugin which integrates with my Skype and shows the results as an image online.

I've developed a modification to this to allow PHP developers to return their Skype status as a standard variable. I wrote this in a little spell of free time last year and in reality it's nothing more than a file_get_contents call to read the image from the Jyve website then run a comparison against a local copy of the image till there is a match.

Anyway, here's the code made nice in function and switch form:

function skype_status($skypename)
{

// first of all make reference to the image on skypepresence.com
$statusfile = "http://www.skypepresence.com/callbutton/$skypename.gif";

// now make reference to the images you have stored locally
$onlinefile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-online.gif";
$offlinefile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-offline.gif";
$awayfile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-away.gif";
$skypemefile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-me.gif";
$nafile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-na.gif";
$dndfile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-dnd.gif";
$oncallfile = "http://www.mobtex.net/gif_icons/skype_icons/skype-call.gif";

// we no initiate the switch to do the match checking
switch (file_get_contents($statusfile)) {

case file_get_contents($onlinefile):
$status = "Online";
break;

case file_get_contents($offlinefile):
$status = "Offline";
break;

case file_get_contents($awayfile):
$status = "Away";
break;

case file_get_contents($skypemefile):
$status = "Skype Me";
break;

case file_get_contents($nafile):
$status = "Unavailable";
break;

case file_get_contents($dndfile):
$status = "Don't Disturb";
break;

case file_get_contents($oncallfile):
$status = "On a call";
break;

}

// and return the status
return "$status";
}

Simple, yet fab. You do need to use the Jyve plugin as mentioned earlier plus you also need to make sure the copies of the images you store to do the checking are from the same Jyve image set, small, large etc so they do tie up.

Other than that enjoy.

SSL Certificate

2006-01-05T20:19:00.000Z

Things be a moving now in the right direction and I need to make sure the website is secure for any forms or pages that I don't want to be parsed via standard Port 80 but rather through Port 443 for SSL Secure HTTPS.

I decided to use Go Daddy again to get the certificate from, I had one from there when I was with the other company a few months ago and the setup went really well. Yet again it was simple enough, setting up an SSL Certificate just requires a little patience and the ability to follow instructions and cut and paste. I'm gobsmacked that the first SSL certificate I ever got cost me £300, I sold it to a client for £500 and it took a week to setup and get running. Today I've setup a dedicated server with custom nameservers and secure certificate for less than that.

Thankfully times change and prices get better so I can't grumble at paying $29.95 a year for a SSL Certificate and having it setup within 20 minutes.

Dedicated Server

2006-01-05T19:49:00.000Z

Now I have the domain names I need somewhere for them to live, there are two options in the US that I could use and one in the UK which seemed viable till I learnt they're control panel sucks so bad it blows. It at least narowed the choice down to The Planet and EV1 Servers I've had servers from both in the past and both seem good. I've admin'd a P2800S at The Planet and a cheap as chips $119 a month box from EV1 Servers.

For this purpose I needed a small yet scalable box with two x 80 gb hard drives, 1 gb RAM, 100 mbps pipe to connect it to the internet and a shed load of data thrown in.

The best box for budget that I could find ended up being a Celeron 2.00 from EV1 Servers running cPanel on Linux Red Hat Enterprise. I know the OS having had three boxes with it in the past. I like what I know and did the business online today. I'm blown away by EV1 Servers the box was sitting in a rack just waiting for me to order so it could go live that moment, the box was running within two minutes of my order going through, ID was requested as I'm in the UK and they needed a scan of my passport to make sure I'm who I say I am, one phone call later (they rang me) and my order had been fully confirmed and sorted.

For anyone in the position of setting up a new RHE box for the first time with custom nameservers here's what I did to get it working.

First time login as root to myip:2086 presented me with a first run form, just go through it and don't set anything really at first as the chances are you'll need to add IP addresses to your box before you can continue to set your nameservers up.

Once the first run had been completed and the server knew the email addresses etc to use I logged into Server Control, the Control Panel software for EV1 Servers' dedicated server clients and requested three IP addresses, I need two for the custom nameservers plus another so that I can run a SSL certificate on the main site and also call it via IP for API purposes in the browser.

Within ten minutes, the order had been confirmed and the IP addresses were provisioned for me to use. I then logged back into Web Host Manager and hit the IP Addresses tab from the X themed front page. Then Add a new IP Address whereby I entered the IP numbers that had been assigned.

Once the box had accepted them I went to the Server Configuration tab and then into Basic cPanel / WHM setup. Once there I entered ns1.mobtex.net and ns2.mobtex.net into the Primary and Secondary nameserver form fields, I then clicked Assign IP address which took the first available IP from the pool and assigned it to each nameserver. Then it was just a case of asking WHM to add the A entry for the NS then save that screen and let BIND do it's restart and the machine was setup to work as a nameserver in the background.

Now the hardware was ready I needed to get the actual DNS side of things sorted through Go Daddy which was done by logging in and selecting the domain name I wanted to first Unlock so I could then set the nameservers up Once the domain was unlocked I went under the Domain Host Summary tab and entered ns1.mobtex.net and ns2.mobtex.net with the IP addresses I wanted and saved the data. Once that was done I locked the domain again to make sure it's safe and can't be tampered with.

While waiting for the DNS to propagate I logged back into WHM and created the hosting account for mobtex.net within a cuppa and a smoke it had done it's stuff and I got the default Apache directory listing page for that account. Now I could get to grips with stuff like the creation of email accounts, MySQL and much funkier stuff that is to come.