Brian Rinaldi

When building applications, from content management to product catalogs, your project will typically be impacted by the method you choose for categorization. Designing code that is flexible enough to allow for ease of reuse, but simple enough to allow for ease of implementation, can often tie a developer in knots. The nested set model can help you fulfill both those goals. This article will cover a simple implementation of this model, and draws extensively from two sources, Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties and Benjamin Elmore's Dynamic Publishing with ColdFusion MX. Both are recommended reading for a more in-depth look at the nested set model. What Is the Nested Set Model? In order to better understand the advantages of the nested set model in representing category trees within relational databases, we will first look at an alternate, commonly used method, the adjacency... (more)

Stopping Spam in Its Tracks . . .

Spammers come in many forms - e-mail spammers, search engine spammers, comment spammers, trackback spammers, message board spammers... It seems as if there is no activity that can be done via the Internet that the lowly spammer is unwilling to intrude upon. Since spamming is a basically a numbers game, spammers spend a lot of time and effort automating the process of getting their spam to the widest possible audience. Using a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and humans apart) can go a long way toward preventing these automated spam attacks on yo... (more)