WebHostPark Blog updates for either hosting or any other technical information

Mobile Ads Blocker

Mobile ads blocker

Unlike the computer's big screen, it's very limited for mobile devices. That's why most mobile websites are pretty simple. However, many websites don't have mobile version and filled with lots of ads. In order to navigate smoothly, it's necessary to filter those ads. In this article we're going to discuss how to filter mobile ads for Android.

Universal method
Adblock Plus for Android – Developed by adblockplus.org, professional in wifi ads filtering. 3G mode filtering is supported as Root. The rules can be found/edited at "/data/data/org.adblockplus.android/files/patterns.ini"

Root: hosts – The same as windows hosts file. We can block any domain names or IPs by redirecting to 217.0.0.0 or any invalid ip. The default location for Android hosts file: /etc/hosts

Chrome for Android(root)
We can define custom CSS for desktop Chrome. Chrome for Android comes with the same features. You can visit google chrome docs about how to customize the layouts. Custom.css location: /data/data/com.android.chrome/app_chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Firefox for Android
Adblock Plus is almost the standard ads filtering plugin for firefox (both desktop and mobile device). Custom rules can be edited in Root. File location: /data/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/mozilla/xxxxxxx.dafault/adblockplus/patterns.ini

There're several other popular plugins like NoScript, Sylish etc. They are all mobile compatible.

Opera Mobile
Opera Mobile is the same as desktop version. Ads filtering is configured via urlfilter.ini and custom.css. How to configure? Just follow the tips below

opera:config – network- url filter file, select the urlfilter.ini location -> save
opera:config – user prefs – local css file, select the custom.css location -> save

There're also existing rules available on net, for ex http://www.enkoo.net/adblock-in-opera-mobile.html

Best Web Development Tools & Frameworks

Web development has continued it's rapid progress in 2012, HTML5 showed it's advantages for cross-platforms, CSS3 is being applied to more and more real-world projects, responsive design techniques were known and used by more and more people. In this article we collected the most representative fron-end web development tools and frameworks. It's absolutely a great list of favorite tools either from full-featured IDE to small frameworks and tools, they will help reduce the development complexity and save our time greatly.

NO.01 Foundation 3
Foundation 3 is developed by ZURB corporation, known as the world's most advanced front-end frame. By using flexible grid system, developers can design the page layouts in quick time. The grid could be any size we need and easily to adapt to a variety of screen sizes.

foundation 3

NO.02 Proto.io
Proto.io is a new interface design tool, specially designed for mobile applications. The web based online environment let developers create all popular screen prototype projects easily such as iPhone, iPad, Android apps.

The spotlight of Proto.io is it's interactive abilities with pre-designed pages. It supports all touch gestures as well as slides, flips and fade animations etc. It's simple to use and available for free!

Proto.io

NO.03 Fontello
Why is it so difficult to find a group of icons that cover all basic functions? No need to confuse any more, Fontello has all our needed icons and we can choose to compile our own sets. You can download all icon set from Github. This project is opensource and highly recommended to donate if you liked!

Fontello

NO.04 Bugherd
Bugherd provides a clean, well-organized approach to deal with feedback and bug fix etc. We no longer need the complex email feedback method but simply add a JS button on website so visitors be able to submit comments or suggestions efficiently. Bugherd provides us a friendly and intuitive interface to manage all stuff.

Bugherd

NO.05 Sencha Touch 2
There is no doubt that mobile touch-screen devices have brought great impact to Web development. Sencha Touch is an HTML5 based mobile application development framework. It's designed to attrack HTML5 developers to use this platform to develop web apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry such devices. The improved API, complete docs and tutorials as well as reliable local integration let Sencha Touch 2 strong competitor in Mobile frameworks.

Sencha Touch

NO.06 Dreamweaver CS6
Dreamweaver is a classic Web design software, the latest release Dreamweaver CS6 supports HTML5 and CSS3 coding. The JQuery extended support for mobile and Adobe PhoneGap framework can help you establish projects for various screens, mobile phones and tablet computers. CS6 is integrated with lots of functions including Adobe Business Catalyst, FTPS, FTPeS support, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe BrowserLab and many other features.

Dreamweaver CS6

NO.07 Cloud9 IDE
Cloud 9 is NodeJS based online integrated development tool. Syntax highlighting supported for C#, C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, Scala and many common development languages.

The friendly built-in Vim modes support for popular version control system, like Git,Mercurial and SVN. It also has very powerful plugin system to extend its functions, for example with CSSLint and JSBeautify, Cloud9 becomes a very useful code beautifier.

Cloud9 IDE

NO.08 Adobe Edge Inspect
Formerly known as Adobe Shadow, Edge Inspect is a very useful tool for mobile developers. You only need to connect your device (Android and iOS) and your computer, then your site will be displayed on each of these devices. This absolutely let debug more effectively. Developers will see how website being displayed on the different devices.

Adobe Edge Inspect

NO.09 Adobe Brackets
You might feel that all code editors are very similar and no further innovation available. Brackets let us know there're still lots of features to explore. Brackets is open source HTML, CSS and JavaScript development tool from Adobe. The core effort of bracket is to reduce duplication in development process such as browser refresh, element style editing and so on.

Adobe Brackets

NO.10 Modernizr 2.6
Modernizr is an open source JavaScript library. It's used to detect users' browser compatibility over HTML5 and CSS3. By doing that, developers can make full use of the advanced features from HTML5 and CSS3 but not to worry about compatibility issues among different browsers.

Modernizr

NO.11 Sublime Text 2
If you want to enjoy the pleasure by fluent coding, Sublime Text 2 is absolutely something you should try out! Sublime Text comes with nice user interface and powerful functions such as code-thumbnails, multi selections, shortcut command etc. Custom key bindings, menus and toolbars are also available. The Sublime Text's main features include: spelling check, bookmarks, Python API, Goto and instant project switching, multi windows etc.

Sublime Text is a cross-platform editor, while supporting Windows, Linux, Mac OS x and other operating systems, it is commercial software but available with endless trial period.

Sublime Text 2

NO.12 PhoneGap 2.0
PhoneGap is a free and open source development framework, allowing web developers to use our familiared HTML,CSS and JavaScript to build cross-platform mobile applications locally. PhoneGap support iOS, Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Phone and Bada platforms.

PhoneGap 2.0

NO.13 Emmet
Emmet is formerly known as Zen Coding, provides a quick way to write HTML/CSS codes. Emmet uses dynamic CSS expression-like syntax to generate code, it means that you do not need to edit and create your own fixed code fragment. Emmet greatly improves our coding efficiency.

Using Emmet with excellent editor will make your code fly! Supported editors include:

Emmet

NO.14 Yeoman
Yeoman provides a powerful set of tools, libraries and the workflow that can help developers to quickly build a beautiful, compelling Web applications. The Yeoman main features include:

  • Build framework in light speed(Support custom templates including HTML5 Boilerplate, Twitter Bootstrap etc).
  • Auto compile CoffeeScrip & Compass – While editing source codes, Yeoman LiveReload monitoring process will auto compile codes and refresh your browser. Developers don't have to do it manually.
  • Code Auto checking – It will auto run jshint cheker to make sure the codes are following the best language practice.
  • Build-in preview server – Developers don't have to start their own http server, the build in server can be started with a single command.
  • Efficient picture optimization – Yeoman uses OptPNG and JPEGTran to optimize all pictures to reduce load waiting.
  • Generate Appcache list – Yeoman will generate appcache manifest as you build the application.
  • Killer level construction – Yeoman will auto complete most of the work and save us lots of time and efforts.
  • Package management – Developers can easily find new packages or update via command lines without opening explorer.
  • ES6 module syntax support – You can compile modules using the latest ECMAScript 6 syntax.
  • PhantomJS unit testing – Run unit testing easily with PhamtomJS. When creating new applications, it will also automatically create a test framework for you.

Yeoman

NO.15 TypeCast
With TypeCast, developers can choose word fonts from Fonts.com, TypeKit, FontDeck and google. We can easily compare the actual results. Website layouts becomes more and more essential part in development due to the great improvements on fonts. TypeCast is to simplify the process in choosing the perfect font for your website.

Typecast

NO.16 Gridset
Gridset lets us easily add columns, define set etc without knowing the underlying mathematical calculations.

Grid systems are becoming the focus of Web design. Web page grid system needs to be more flexible, more responsive. Gridset allows us to use a grid system pretty simple.

Gridset

NO.17 Microsoft WebMatrix 2
WebMatrix is a new Web development platform, it's featured by one-stop and simplified development process, providing developers a simple, integrated web solution.

WebMatrix provides all the tools required for Web site: Web Server, database, Web frameworks, and development environment including: IIS Developer Express, SQL Server Compact Edition, asp.net "Razor".

Microsoft Webmatrix 2

NO.18 Trello
Trello is a team collaboration platform that was developed by Joel Spolsky, It's officially released at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference 2012. Trello is designed to track everyone's working situation in a team. Trello team work system can be used by anyone in any industry. It can be used as a corporate collaboration tools, or as a list of personal management tool.

Trello

NO.19 Firefox 18
Firefox has many powerful development tools plug-ins and many of them are must-have debugging tools for developers. Starting from Firefox 18, Mozilla will officially open the next-generation JavaScript engine – IonMonkey. It will significantly improve Firefox's JavaScript performance and improve browser security.

Latest version added support for OSX 10.7+ and WebRTC. It introduced the new HTML stretch algorithm to improve the picture quality. Achieved the CSS3 Flexbox and the touch implementation of W3C standards. Startup speed is improved by intelligent processing signatures.

Firefox 18

NO.20 Photon
Photon is a very interesting project. Add lighting effects to DOM element in solid space by JavaScript libraries, and CSS3 transforms.

Author Tom Giannattasio provided three examples, including the effect of a very good paper cranes, you can move the mouse to rotate, the Photon switching button provided below allows us to feel the differences between the two states.

Photon

Bye to 2012 & Welcome to 2013

web hosting 2012 summary and plans for 2013

Only two days to welcome 2013 so far! Since we're all alive and passed 2012 safely, it's necessary to make a summary of the last year and make a better plan for coming year. This would be the last article posting in 2012 so it's time to give it a perfect end! The most important thing I would like to say is I wish all your people and your families a prosperous new year!

In this year, there're several big events that affected many web site owners. The google updates let many of us have to rebuild website ranks and The hosting acquisition let us have to rethink of the service quality. In a word, the 2012 is full of strugglings for online business.

Google updated several times in 2012 and each update will result in a fresh list for SERP. The google more and more telling us not to over-optimize our website or simply don't pay too much attention to it, what google really wants is a user friendly site that gives visitors they want directly. A website with good navigation and quality content is what we need to work on.

In web hosting, there're really too many things to learn about. Before we only knows endurance group for eating up the hosting brands, until it's sold by KKR we know it's just a piece of cake in web hosting (no matter what a big name it is!). Because of this, we have to re-think about our workk style and change the hosting review ways. We might have focused on specific brands too closely but forgot the company overall business structure, this is what we need to improve in coming review articles. In 2012, many hosting brands are actively merged into EIG. Fortunately, the problems are very few comparing to the early years. They don't force to migrate all people to their own platforms but keep everything the same so people won't feel any difference to the service.

Back to WHP itself, there's very limited SEO stuff as I can tell. The rank is not so good though but we're still working hard to offer what's needed from our visitors and provide our actual experience over hosting providers. In order to give out a quality review, we signed up directly with various hosting companies and do test independently. During the procedure, most providers are frindly and co-operate with our requests. There're also several providers trying to persuade us to post good reviews of their service by offering nice commissions, however we didn't respond because they're really bad with too many users' experience.

Anyhow, our WHP will continue to work as it is and grow up with your efforts. We thank you for visiting and communicating with us. We would like to send out the last wish for 2012. See you from 2013!

Merry Xmas 2012 & Happy New Year

xmas 2012 and happy new year

So today is Dec 22th of 2012, The Mayan Prophecy about end of the world collapsed itself. So what now? Means we finally dropped the long term fear from the fake story. Now we can feel safe and share the passions with everybody and celebrate the most important festival — Christmas 2012!

Summary of the year

In 2012, we have been learning and interacting with web hosting. There're many new tech released such as asp.net 4.5 and MVC 4.0, IIS 8.0 and SQL Server 2012 are also deployed on production server popularly. In order to provide up to date hosting reviews about those technologies we have to study everything from scratch and tell people our actual experience. During the process, we communicated more with hosting groups and our website followers and actually fixed lots of problems on WHP. We thank all people who have been helping us to archieve the best. We wish to work with you in further partnership in coming days.

On WHP we have been update with fresh news regularly with useful reviews and industry events, we accepted several guest posting from loyal followers and partnership groups. By doing that, the overal quality of WHP has improved greatly comparing to the single person working as before.

On direct support part, the WHP live chat client served around 30 visitors in 3 months which is reasonable stats. But I have to say sorry to many requests as I'm not online sometimes and always respond via email. From now on I will keep online as more as possible.

On hosting coupon section, we have posted up to date coupons/promo over 10 popular hosting providers. If you check out, most of them are still valid to save your money if you're ready to sign up those companies. We'll keep in contact with them and post their coming promotions in earliest time on WHP so you don't have to search around everywhere.

In a word, we will still work hard and continue to provide quality articles on this review site. It will not only help people choose the right service but also help ourselves build the integrity in long run. Personally, I would like to manage this site as long as possible such as 10 years or 20 years. As long as I'm connected to hosting business, I will keep WHP alive with fresh blood. God bless!

Finally, I would like to say thank you to every visitors to WHP and wish you have a great holiday and prosperous 2013! Merry Christmas!

Phishing Attack World Map

phishing attack trends

Internet research organization Netcraft released its new phishing attack map that shows a real-time visualisation of the phishiest countries in the world. By using IP address delegation information, Netcraft was able to attribute current phishing sites in its Phishing Site Feed to countries. Netcraft use the number of active sites found by their Web Server Survey to calculate and display the ratio of phishing attacks to web sites in each country. Below is the analysis by Netcraft.

A few themes become immediately apparent when studying the map. Countries with poor internet access may host very few phishing attacks, or even none at all, and therefore may appear very safe; however, countries with an extremely small number of websites can prove very volatile: For example, the Falkland Islands appears incredibly phishy by virtue of the fact that out of only 38 active sites hosted in that country, one of them is currently blocked for phishing.

Countries which respond slowly to taking down phishing sites are more likely to have a higher proportion of their sites engaged in phishing at any one time. As the map displays only currently blocked phishing attacks, this characteristic is highlighted particularly well in Morocco, which is the second phishiest country with nearly 200 of its 11,000 sites blocked.

Fraudsters commonly host their phishing sites on compromised servers, as this does not require a purchasing transaction, making it more difficult to correctly identify the perpetrators. Shared hosting services tend to be the least secure, so countries with a large number of sites running on shared hosts are likely to attract the attention of fraudsters.

Countries which host a large number of vulnerable and commonly targeted web applications consequently host a large number of phishing attacks, notwithstanding their responsiveness to takedown requests. This perhaps explains why the US appears phishier than either Russia or China, and some US hosting companies host more phishing attacks than entire European countries, as they provide proportionately more WordPress and hosting control panel administered sites, plus shared IP hosting configurations that allow customer content to be accessed from any domain that resolves to the same IP address. Our datasets show that these are the most favoured platforms for hosting fraudulent content on compromised servers.

From Netcraft report, there's increase in Phishing attacks using attached HTML forms to steal victims' credentials. It's more and more hard for novice to judge such tricks because of it's professional.  But it's good news if you're using firefox or chrome, Netcraft developed a Anti-phishing extension for both explorers. It's highly recommended extension for everyone. It will monitor the web security in real time and their database is being updated every day.

Internet Asymmetric Warfare

internet asymmetric warfare

This article is quoted and translated from a popular Chinese blog. The points in the say are rarely to see from most populary categories, I translate it here and glad to share with my readers if you can pay a minute to read over. Maybe it will give you some ideas if you're in process of creating your internet business or other IT working.

Primers: Why facebook acquired Instagram with such high cost of 1 billion? I heard it's only a ten people team on the photo sharing application. What makes this small team to win the entrepreneurial success? I think it is "asymmetric warfare".

In the history, Microsoft released free IE to blow away the paid browser Netscape. In fact, many sino corperations realised the browser's importance to Internet till today. That's why whenever they do client end Apps they will always refer to browser. Microsoft against Netscape, because it's the whole Internet behind browser. QQ(the most popular IM software provider in China) develop mobile browser, because it's the battle of mobile Internet entrance.

It's wap times when UC do browser, traffic is very expensive. The speed is also slow, this led to a small niche market for UC, but it's indeed hard-demand. However this niche market is a large market for Netscape (we have to admire the Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, the vision of consciousness). Of course, the UC's entrance effect is highlighted now because of the outbreak growing up mobile Internet.

Now let's review the GOOGLE development course. When google came out, there're also lots of search companies. But they did not focus on search, or not even take it as the company's core competitiveness. For Yahoo, search is just part of it's business. Of course, the google algorithms innovation as well as the vision of the search market and insist on doing well in this market, these are core reasons they can conquer Yahoo.

We must see: they all share the same point — make it a big market from which is not optimistically recoginized by others at the beginning.(Of course, the premise is it's really likely to become a big market).

Now let's go back to analyze, why facebook acquire Instagram — a small product from a little team. The instagram traffic, can be analyzed easily by facebook because many instagram users shared photos to facebook. After data analysis, facebook found the surprise traffic growth from this application, maybe some day later will replace facebook to be the main player in mobile social.

What is facebook mostly fearing about? Being the hottest social platform? The fear to be abandoned by Mobile Internet?

Fear not be able to keep up with the Internet development trend, fear … to be no longer cool!

Large companies are fearing of too many things. Like Tencent, everything gets done but only several products did the best. The five-star products are always thousand people involved in research and development from big companies. The input and output rate is far beyond cost-effective comparing to instagram. So facebook acquires instagram product plus a ten people team, the founder might really think: damn good deal!

Fearing, means: asymmetric warfare

Large companies are mostly afraid of the "subversive innovation" products developed by small teams. Such small teams may have less than ten people, even five people, or even a single person? ! Internet competition is too horrible and too cruel. So in fact, Big group is the weak for entrepreneurship and competition on the Internet!

American fears of terrorism, it might be a joke in the eyes of many. It's only a pretext of the war. However, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, they have only 18 months left away from bankrupt. What makes an empire-style company resulting in 18 months bankrupt idea? Is the Internet! So there's story Microsoft against Netscape, Microsoft combat … and more!

This is why we say competition on the Internet is asymmetric. It has nothing to do with about how many people and how much money investment. It's all with the founder, with will, with humanity.

The growing prosperity of the Internet gives creators unlimited possibilities. Ten people a year, created instagram, worth one billion dollars. What else is more suitable for creative products other than Internet? Quotations: product designer is standing at the side of God. Too many philosophers in hisotry, famous few. Perhaps the greatest Confucius in China. Because he is more than a saint but greatest product manager. His "product" is very simple, but deeply rooted!

Creative work on the Internet is undoubtedly soul style. It's the same as theology, religion, philosophy, culture, art. Internet competition is definitely applied to: asymmetric warfare.