Archive for April, 2008

Hacking jQuery Thickbox..!

Have you ever wished of doing something more with what you have been doing with jQuery thickbox? Now it has been more then 6 months that I am using jQuery on different projects. I have extended jQuery many a times during this period and to tell you one thing I have used jQuery for heavy-weight form processing for one of my very complicated project and it included processing of more then 1600 html controls with the help of great jQuery.

Now when it comes to Thickbox it gives nice functionality but many a times it leaves us hungry for more. For example here are the few situations where it will be difficult to use Thickbox without further modification.

  • It let's open window in a IFRAME and close that but what if you can't give 'class="Thickbox"' to any of your link?
  • What if you are not loading those links with page load? (If the links from which you are willing to open Thickbox windows is not available at the time of page load then Thickbox won't work. As Thickbox internally works in a way that it will search for all links with class = "Thickbox" at the time of page load and then customize their onclick events.)
  • What if you want to open second Thickbox window as someone close first one and that too without any user interaction?
  • What if you want to call any javascript function from the parent window? (parent window is the window from which parent window is getting opened.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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How to generate Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file with Apache OpenSSL

When it comes to use SSL over apache, OpenSSL is there for us to do everything we want. XAMPP and WAMP both comes with OpenSSL compiled version of Apache, so it becomes quite handy to use it. But how to get SSL certificate for your website?For getting SSL certificate you need to ask your hosting company if you are running on shared server and don't have access to apache installation directory and config files. Most of the hosting companies will do this for you with some amount of fee. Fee/cost depends on the kind of certificate you are requesting and for the period of time. For example www.domain.com certificates will be quite cheaper then *.domain.com.

Now if you are running and managing your own webserver and you have to get certificate(s) for your company/client or your own website then first requirement is to generate "Certificate Signing Request" - CSR file, which you need to send to Certificate Authority to sign and give back to you as CRT file. This tutorial is not meant for Apache expert but for those who have not much experience SSL and Apache stuff.

Generation of CSR files with Apache on OpenSSL is quite simple and it is matter of typing few commands and we are done. You need to follow similar commands on OpenSSL prompt whether you are running Apache over Windows or Linux. Here is the routine which we need to follow to get our .CSR file ready.

If you have your Apache setup ready with OpenSSL then goto BIN directory under your Apache's installation directory. If you are on Windows machine then it could be under D:\Program Files\Apache\bin and if it is Linux you know better where to find it. Open Command Prompt and goto Apache's BIN directory and then type "openssl" over there. You will get OpenSSL prompt immediately. You may need not to goto Apache/Bin directory if that path is set in your system variables, you can just type openssl and you will get the prompt like below. Read the rest of this entry »

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