Browsing articles from "June, 2011"
Jun
29
2011

Get Location From User IP Address

IP to Location Function Image

For many of the websites that I work with and manage, IP addresses are collected; primarily as a means to combat spammers, secondarily because it’s always interesting to

Jun
26
2011

301 Redirect Using .htaccess

301 redirect image

A commonly overlooked factor in search engine optimization for websites is the “to www or not to www” question.  Singularly speaking, search engines have no preference for your site to contain the “www” prefix, however failure to specify can negatively impact your search engine rankings. Do note that in order for the .htaccess file modification below to function properly, your webserver must allow mod_rewrite. Consider the following scenario. You submit your xml sitemap to google. […]

Jun
13
2011

Simplified Data Sanitizing

Data Sanitizing

Ever feel as though your copy-paste buttons are going to wear out because your form has 36 fields, and ALL that data has to be scrubbed clean and fully sanitized prior to database entry?  I feel your pain.  Actually, to be fair- I’ve felt your pain, but not anymore! Why do we need to sanitize and clean user input?  Because we can’t trust all users! Thanks to PHP’s handy ability to reference user created functions, […]

Jun
10
2011

The PHP Time Ago Function

It’s often handy to refer to Gmail’s “00:00 (4 minutes ago)” example as an additional feature of usability for web users.  By creating an effective time-ago function using PHP, we can effectively format most MySQL dates, datetime, and timestamp entries into an easier to read and comprehend “Sometime ago” outputs. Besides, who really wants to have to read a date anymore?! Accepted MySQL Dates As MySQL is capable of storing dates and datetimes in a […]

Jun
4
2011

Setting up a localhost PHP development environment

MAMP Logo

Before getting too far into posting tips and tricks for some of the more advanced functions and operations that can be completed using PHP, I thought it may be helpful to provide a bit of instruction on how to set up a simple, quick, easy localhost development environment for testing. Preliminary disclosure: I am a Macintosh user, so instructions provided for setup on Windows are from third parties! Using Macintosh: For this setup, we’ll be using […]

Jun
2
2011

Better date time display using MySQL query

So, you’ve got your database entries entered, optimized, and in the MySQL friendly 0000-00-00 format- but database date formatting just isn’t doing it for you on output? Using a quick trick within a MySQL query, we can easily convert that boring date into something a little more friendly and readable. Adding the “DATE_FORMAT” parameter to your query allows you to specify the conversion, leaving nothing for you to do except use your php to output. […]

Jun
2
2011

Welcome to PHP Dev Tips!

Hello, and welcome to PHP Dev Tips!  As you can see, this is the first of many many many posts about PHP, MySQL, HTML, XHTML, Javascript, Ajax, SEO, usability, and anything else related to the web that I found useful, and you may. I encourage YOU to tell us what you want!  What do I want?  I want you to join the PHP Dev Tips community- write some handy articles, interact, and keep up the […]