This article is a valuable resource for clearly explaining how passwords, and other sensitive "secret" strings, can be stored in a database: A Hashing Primer. It may be useful in explaining non-technical users why we don't store passwords in the clear, that is, in a way that we easily know a user's password./p>

A common task for any authentication system is to store and retrieve passwords. Doing this securely is key to building a system that is not only stable, but relatively safe in the even that it ever becomes unstable and allows potential attackers to view stored account information. Passwords should never (or rarely) be stored as plaintext: this is where one-way cryptographic hashing can save the day—or at least save plenty of difficult work.

Its amazing how simple this task is using PHP5, cURL, and SimpleXML

   1:<?php
   2:$ch = curl_init();
   3:curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://tech.forumone.com/atom.xml');
   4:curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
   5:if ($output = curl_exec($ch))
   6:{
   7:    $xml = new SimpleXmlElement($output);
   8:}
   9:curl_close($ch);
  10:?>

Yahoo!'s Term Extraction Service can be used to extract significant words or phrases from some larger body of text. There are many uses for it, not the least of which is providing keywords, or tags in Web2.0 jargon, to help classify and organize a library of content. The following PHP script uses will use the Term Extraction service to analyze a PDF file. With a little more work, it could be expanded to work with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Extracting keywords automatically would be a helpful feature to build into your blog or CMS. There are modules to extract keywords for Drupal and Wordpress.

   1:<?php
   2:// discover where pdftotext tool is
   3:$catpdf = trim(`which pdftotext`);
   4:
   5:// the PDF file to analyze
   6:$source = 'http://example.com/my_file.pdf';
   7:
   8:// will copy file to a local temporary file
   9:$temp_pdf_file = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), "ek");
  10:
  11:// see below
  12:download_file($source, $temp_pdf_file);
  13:
  14:// save text contents of pdf source to another temp file
  15:$extract_file = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), "ek");
  16:exec($catpdf . ' ' . escapeshellarg($temp_pdf_file) . ' ' . escapeshellarg($extract_file));
  17:
  18:// fetch and output terms
  19:$contents = file_get_contents($extract_file);
  20:if ($terms = get_yahoo_terms($contents))
  21:{
  22:    echo "\nYahoo terms for the file $source";
  23:    foreach ($terms as $term)
  24:    {
  25:        echo "\n$term";
  26:    }
  27:    echo "\n";
  28:}
  29:
  30:// hide our footsteps
  31:unlink($temp_pdf_file);
  32:unlink($extract_file);
  33:
  34:/**
  35: * Uses curl to copy $source to a local file $dest
  36: * @param string
  37: * @param string
  38: */
  39:function download_file($source, $dest)
  40:{
  41:    $out = fopen($dest, 'wb');
  42:
  43:    $ch = curl_init();
  44:
  45:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $out);
  46:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
  47:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $source);
  48:
  49:    curl_exec($ch);
  50:
  51:    curl_close($ch);
  52:}
  53:
  54:/**
  55: * Uses curl to query yahoo term extraction service for meaninful terms
  56: * @param string
  57: * @return mixed, array on success or null on failure
  58: */
  59:function get_yahoo_terms($content)
  60:{
  61:    $SERVICE_URL = 'http://api.search.yahoo.com/ContentAnalysisService/V1/termExtraction';
  62:    $app_id = 'F1_Testing';
  63:
  64:    $ch = curl_init();
  65:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $SERVICE_URL);
  66:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 3);
  67:    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  68:
  69:    curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'appid=' . $app_id . '&context=' . urlencode($content) . '&output=php');
  70:    $raw = curl_exec($ch);
  71:    curl_close($ch);
  72:
  73:    if ($raw = unserialize($raw))
  74:    {
  75:        if (isset($raw['ResultSet']['Result']))
  76:        {
  77:            return $raw['ResultSet']['Result'];
  78:        }
  79:    }
  80:}
  81:?>

As a sample of what to expect, I used the script to look at Calculating CARMA: Global Estimation of CO2 Emissions from the Power Sector - Working Paper 145 and the list of terms returned is below. The list of words is fairly accurate, and even includes the name of one of the authors.

global estimation
geographical scales
carbon emissions
co2 emissions
global citizens
global poverty
david wheeler
rigorous research
power plants
power sector
fossil energy
poverty and inequality
solar wind
energy sources
monitoring system
keystrokes
groundwork
strengths and weaknesses
carbon dioxide
aggregation

Today, 37signals discussed how adding some padding to navigation links improves the user experience.

The end result is a feeling of comfort. It’s just really easy to click the links. It feels like the links are working with you instead of against you.

Its a simple application of Fitt's Law, which commenters were quick to bring up. Fitt's law has been around since 1954, and is used to predict how quickly someone can aim at target and its supported by a lot of experimental data.

The Microsoft Office team used it to analyze the usability of versions of Word and paid special attention to it during the redesign of Office 2007's user interface

First off, most controls in the Ribbon are labeled. This helps discoverability and usability considerably, but it also makes the buttons bigger and easier to target. As your screen resolution increases, the width of the Ribbon also increases, providing room for more labels and larger buttons.

Mezzoblue talks in detail about how it was used when the site went through its fifth redesign. More websites should use this simple technique to increase the clickable area around navigation links and buttons.

A larger clickable area means less precise mouse movement is required to focus on the link. Without impacting the design in any way (the halo is non-visible after all) the usability of the header improves. While the main goal is increased usability in this case, there are positive implications for accessibility as well. Those with motor skill disabilities may have difficulty using a mouse; larger areas to click makes the act easier, which makes a big difference to them.