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 […]

Working with code can often be tedious, and frequently requires programmers to continually reference functions or other sets of code that exists on different pages.  For example: As a relative newbie to wordpress, when creating or modifying files I spend ~70% of my development time looking through files for correct/applicable function usage.  If I wish to display an option to edit a post in a template, I must use “edit_post_link(‘edit’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’);”, however, the chance […]

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 […]

I’m sure by now that most of you have seen my post on how I feel about ExpressionEngine (here), so this post is a natural follower!  Today, we’re going to talk about migrating your content from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. I spent quite a bit of time working through EE’s poorly detailed instructions on how to export entries before I decided to just get my hands dirty.  Mind you, this post is only applicable to you […]

Earlier today I was working with complex PHP function to update values in a database, within a popout window.  The function worked flawlessly (naturally 😉 ), however I was looking for a way to have immediate display feedback on the parent page. Enter the JavaScript close window refresh parent script… <a id="actions" href="#" onClick="window.close();window.opener.location.reload();">Close Window</a> Looking for more?  Sorry!  That’s it for this crafty little function.

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 […]