Quite a while ago, I grew tired of trying to come up with new and creative ways to display simple, one-time messages to users without crazy amounts of code for something that was frequently as trivial as “Saved!”. Sessions are the obvious solution, however, without a single function that could both generate, AND display the messages, it still wasn’t any better.  And as usual, where there’s a will, and some code- there’s a way! Before […]

Updated class files (documentation remains the same) with better error handling and full OOP class structure can be found here. Since the depreciation of the mysql functions in PHP (archive here), I thought it may be handy to more effectively future-proof my web applications by wrapping my database interactivity functions in a class (and oh how it is!), and as I was building a new web framework anyway- I figured why not! Unrelated: featured image […]

And yet another ‘bangin’ update!  Don’t use this (I’m going to leave it here for reference), use the magicmin javascript and css minification/caching class instead for performance, better javascript minification, caching, gzip, base64_encoded images, and more! One MAJOR factor in the usability of your website is site load time.  This is affected by a number of factors: the number of images, database queries, and the number of server requests to fetch your stylesheets and javascript […]

After having just completed an extensive text file parsing script, I discovered something very very very annoying.  A small army of Microsoft Word inspired characters had invaded the imported plain text files (courtesy a number of citation management softwares and websites), causing text to have all sorts of ‘fun’ symbols sprucing things up. For example “Tâ��ms” => “Teams”, but with that extra something added in for visual highlight (or something). So what was a programmer […]

Having databases contain information on subscribers, customers, clients, and the like is similar to playing russian roulette.  You’re never certain as to when the bullet comes!  Same principles apply to having your customer’s sensitive information yanked from your precious databases!  We all watch the news to see which company will have their customer details compromised next. Most recently, Sony has now had approximately 100 million accounts compromised, costing them upwards of $171 million dollars.  And […]

On a recent project, I was asked to record the pages that each user was navigating to in a secured special-purpose website.  Initially it seemed daunting, however I recalled a script I’d written to track email open rates using PHP. I am generally disinterested in maintaining a database table of pages, along with a second table of clicked links as I find it to be very inefficient, so I opted to create a simple pass-through […]

Updated February 12th, 2013 to reflect Dave’s comment function below- A++ for simplicity! function explodeX( $delimiters, $string ) { return explode( chr( 1 ), str_replace( $delimiters, chr( 1 ), $string ) ); } $list = ‘Thing 1&Thing 2,Thing 3|Thing 4’; $exploded = explodeX( array(‘&’, ‘,’, ‘|’ ), $list ); echo ‘<pre>’; print_r($exploded); echo ‘</pre>’; Earlier today, I was looking for a simple function to explode text that was contained in string format to be output […]

In case you’re wondering, I don’t just spend a couple hours a week throwing random bits of code onto this blog- I spend anywhere between 60- 100 hours per week making code my bitch. But thousands of hours and millions of lines of code later, I’m still occasionally stuck trying to remember a query (but then again when you’ve got most of the MySQL manual embedded in your brain, the info becomes hard to sort […]

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