Blogpost has gone haywire!

Today I have noticed that whenever I try to submit a comment I get taken to this link: http://www.blogger.com/comment-iframe.do and it says something like "Temporarily moved". What's up with that?

Hashed Passwords

I did a bit of research to find out what people did to keep the user passwords of their security applications secure. It seems that a lot of people still keep passwords in plain text in the database.  The more security minded ones encrypt the passwords before storing them in the database.  But what happens if someone gains access not only to your database server but also your web server?

The web pages would clearly indicate how you encrypt and decrypt the passwords and so it would only takes seconds to decrypt all the passwords.  Why do the web pages have to mention how to decrypt the passwords, you ask?  Well, what happens when a user tries to log into your site?  Wouldn't you need to match the password entered by the user with the one stored in the database?  You can only do so if the passwords in the database are decrypted first.

It is not uncommon to hear in the news how millions of passwords have been stolen from some big companies who ought to know better than to keep the user passwords in the database. You might wonder how the log in applications would work if you don't even have the user passwords in your database to compare with the passwords entered in the log in form. There is a way and it's been around for a long time.  It's called hashing passwords.

Do you folks hash passwords for your log in applications?  If not, is it because the applications don't need that level of security or is it because the clients are not interested in it?

Has Santa paid you an early visit?

It has been learnt from reliable sources that Santa has come early for some UltraSuite users.  So, folks, look in your mailboxes to see if you are one of the lucky ones.  You might find something special in there.  Just make sure your mail filters don't deprive you of Santa's generous gifts.  Like they say up North, "Always whitelist UltraSuite.com".  Amen, I say!

If you have not received a gift yet, fret not! Just be nice and Santa might well mail you gifts in the future from his abode on the North Pole.

Face -to-face on Facebook

We want to leverage all the resources out there to best help our friendly customers achieve their primary objective:  quick, efficient, and high-quality web development.  It's important to provide our customers various options to interact with us depending on their convenience and so we have created our presence on Facebook Pages.  We hope to be "face-to-face" with you guys (so to speak) at Dreamweaver UltraSuite Extensions on Facebook.  So do join us there folks!

Here is a slight modification of our logo, which is now on our Facebook Page:

UltraSuite GiveAways: Free extensions for Dreamweaver

Even before I launched UltraSuite I created the (free) MagicSuite - the first public server-side extensions for Dreamweaver and the very first server-side extensions approved for the Dreamweaver Exchange  Even after launching the UltraSuite, I continued developing the MagicSuite as a way of giving back to the vibrant Dreamweaver community.  The (free) MagicSuite remained the most popular suite for many years and its various versions were downloaded millions of times from various sites, authorized and unauthorized.  (I'll post some interesting episodes regarding this in a future post).

There are a lot of extensions around, which are exorbitantly priced, and which many developers can't afford.  If there is sufficient interest from the Dreamweaver community, I would like to restart the MagicSuite project but instead of having a separate website, like in the past, I think it would be better just to create a section called UltraSuite GiveAways.  However, I am open to suggestions.

If you are interested in free extensions for Dreamweaver, you may write to:

giveways at ultrasuite dot com

The UltraSuite itself will continue as a creator of efficiency-enhancing tools for web application developers.

UltraSuite Extensions for Dreamweaver live on Twitter

Finally, UltraSuite got coaxed by its friends and well-wishers, many of them long-term UltraSuite users, into joining the "social web".  Frankly, we were on the social web before there was a social web.

Well over a decade back, UltraSuite's popular newsgroups and mailing lists started bringing together top web application developers and key people at companies that developed the best web development products.

In any case, UltraSuite Extensions for Dreamweaver went live on Twitter yesterday with an announcement about the release of the new UltraSuite 11 ASP/VBScript and UltraSuite 11 PHP_MySQL extensions packages for Dreamweaver CS5.