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 […]

It’s often unnecessary to select EVERYTHING from the beginning of your database table when performing queries, and depending on how much information your database contains- you’re likely displaying more results than anyone cares about! But alas, there is a better way! The following queries are very straighforward, specifying that the query should scan your database table date field (‘date_field’) for results that are greater than, or equal to the current date and time (‘NOW()’), and […]

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

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. […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]