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Here’s a quick article on an error that the blog has been running into over the weekend. While hard at work on our farming RPG tutorials, we ran into an error when trying to save or publish our (very large) accompanying articles for the videos.
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Recently, while working on a project, I ran into a warning telling me that my “data was truncated for” one of my columns when I was importing a CSV file into one of my SQL tables.
Concerned that I had done something wrong, I Googled for a solution. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any answers there, so I ended up having to find the source of this warning myself.
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In the previous part of this tutorial series, we set up a mail server that could accept connections from mail clients like Gmail. This allowed us to send out domain emails using a mail client, instead of having to implement a mailbox on our server.
With our mail server’s basic functionality properly set up, we can now turn our attention to another problem — email deliverability. Spam email is a really big problem online, so many email providers have some kind of system in place to assess whether an incoming email is spam and either flag it, or reject it. Hence, after setting up our mail server, one thing we need to do is to ensure that our mail server conforms to certain email security standards, policies and protocols. This goes a long way to help us communicate to other mail servers that we are trustworthy, so that our emails will be deliverable.
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In the first part of this series, we set up a basic virtual mail server with Postfix that received emails for our domain and forwarded it to a mailbox of our choice. To round off the basic set of features for our mail server, we will be setting up Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) to work with Postfix, so that we can access our mail server with a mailbox client (like Gmail) and send out emails from our domain.
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If you own a domain, and are looking to set up email hosting for it, you have a couple of options. You can either:
The former option is cheap, but can be clunky to use and ineffective with blocking spam. The latter option — being specialised services — are generally much more accessible and effective with spam, but cost more.
There’s actually also a third option, and that is:
This means that you have to set up the server and maintain it, but it also means that you can have a cheap and effective mail server, instead of having to choose between one or the other.
In this series of articles, we are going to explore how we can set up a virtual mail server using a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) called Postfix. This will be a fully-featured mail server, meaning that over the course of these articles, we will be building a mail server that can:
CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, and CSV files are text files that look something like this:
Username,Email,Address,Contact johndoe,john@example.com,"71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore",+65-91234567 janedoe,jane@website.com,"24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore",+65-81234567 marysmith,mary@smith.com,"83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-97654321 bobsmith,bob@smith.com,"84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-87654321
Essentially, the CSV file format is meant to represent tabular data. The above CSV file represents the following table:
| Username | Address | Contact | |
|---|---|---|---|
| johndoe | john@example.com | 71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore | +65-91234567 |
| janedoe | jane@website.com | 24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore | +65-81234567 |
| marysmith | mary@smith.com | 83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore | +65-97654321 |
| bobsmith | bob@smith.com | 84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore | +65-87654321 |
Due to their tabular nature, data in a CSV file can very easily be imported into and stored in an SQL table. The commands to do that, however, are not very well-documented online.
If a CSV file does not open as a text file on your computer, that’s because your computer is opening the file with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. In such a case, to see the file as text, you will want to open these files on a text editing software such as Notepad.
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Are you looking to run Python as a server-side scripting language on your XAMPP installation? Here’s a guide on how to set it up.
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Whenever you are logged in to WordPress, there is a black admin bar that shows up above every page. On front-end pages, you can call show_admin_bar(false) in one of your plugin or theme functions to remove it. Individual users can also hide the admin bar on their account’s profile page.
All of this, however, doesn’t work if you are on a backend page. No matter what you do, the admin bar will always show up in those circumstances, unless you remove the admin bar programmatically — this article is here to show you how, as well as why you would want to do such a thing.
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text-align: center work? A primer on block and inline elements in HTML and CSSIf you’re just starting your foray into web development, you’ll probably find that HTML and CSS have a variety of quirks that can make working with them somewhat frustrating for beginners. One of these quirks involves the text-align CSS attribute, as the attribute only applies its effects to certain kinds of HTML elements.
Recently, I’ve done some work for a client with an odd issue: the contact forms on their website (let’s call it client-website.com) — which delivered completed form enquiries using PHP’s mail() function — could not send emails through to email addresses containing their own domain.
This means that, if we were to set the form to deliver enquiries to an address like hello@client-website.com, the email would be completely dropped — you would neither find it in the junk or spam folders, nor find any trace of the email in their admin and mail logs. If we delivered the email to our own personal email addresses (e.g. personal@gmail.com), or to emails from another domain (e.g. mail@terresquall.com), then the email would go through (and skip right past the spam folder too).
For weeks, this problem confounded me, until now… and it’s actually a really simple fix.
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