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 […]

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 […]

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

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, […]