PDF file are nowadays the de facto standard when someon wants to share a document safeguarding format and aspect on all systems. The PDF format can be read by nearly every platform available in the world. There are PDF file reader for Microsoft Windows, for Linux and even for the most common mobile or smart phones. Continue reading »
Hosting prices are getting cheaper and cheaper. It is nowadays easy to have a shared hosting with dozens of gigabytes. This large amount of disk space is so big that, unless you are going to upload large quantities of big files (like pictures or movies or iso images) it is quite hard to use it all. If we are not going to use all this space for web pages, we could use it for our backups or as an extension of our hard disk. To do so, we just need to mount the remote web space into a local folder. Continue reading »
Restricting access to specific pages or sections of a website can be a common need. There are several ways you can take to obtain the same result. One of these ways is to use a server side programming language to obtain the result: for this need, PHP is a very good choice. Adopting the solution to implement user authentication via a server side programming language has a pro and a con. The pro is that you have great flexibility in the implementation of your authentication mechanism. You can restrict users access to a set of pages, to a single page or to a part of a single page. PHP can be easily integrated via MySQL, so you can use the database to store users’ accounts. It is really up to you. Obviously the con is that you have to implement this all by yourself. In this breaf article we will see how to password protect a web page using PHP. Continue reading »
In the web, users can be authenticated using a server side scripting language (like PHP for example) or using Apache. The Apache web server can be configured to restrict access to one or more directories. When we let Apache authenticate users we need to use a passwordfile and to put a .htaccess file inside the directory we want to restrict. With this authentication mechanism we can use groups and users accounts too. Continue reading »
