Tag: PHP

For the last couple of years I've heard a lot of talk about VirtualBox and VMWare -- but until six months ago, when it took me five minutes to install Ubuntu 'in a window' on my Windows 7 machine, I had no idea just how awesome virtual machines are. No longer must I have a bunch of headless Linux boxes under my desk -- I can just run them in windows on my uber desktop PC! But... what if you ...

Flogr is a free PHP script which lets you easily deploy a full-featured gallery on your own site, which pulls all of its data from your Flickr profile. As you can see on the demo site, it pulls all information on any given photo. EXIF details, comments, tags, license information -- everything. You can think of it as an alternative Flickr interface, on your own site. The photo information is ...

I have strong feelings about text editors for programmers. I'm not talking about Vim or Emacs here; I'm talking about stuff for mere mortals -- PSPad, jEdit, Notepad++. Those are all editors I have used extensively over the years, and each time I become convinced that "this is it -- this is the last text editor I will ever need," only to then find out it wasn't quite as great as I thought. ...

In an exalted, excited and exclamation-rife blog post, Joomla's development coordinator Sam Moffatt has just announced Microsoft's official status as a Joomla Contributor. He makes it sound like Microsoft has never been involved with GNU GPL work before, but, while nothing could be further from the truth -- have you ever seen CodePlex? Nevertheless, Microsoft's involvement with the second ...

It seems the world's largest user of PHP -- itself the Internet's most popular programming language -- has decided to build and compile its own version to speed up its operation. Facebook, which has over 350 million users, is due to announce its changes this week, but speculative rumors are bouncing all over the place! The SD Times suggests that a new in-house runtime was built -- the bit of ...

It's a good idea to back up your website's databases periodically, in case of unforeseen server catastrophes, but it can be hard to remember to do it manually. One automated backup process you might consider is Backup2Mail, which sends backups of your MySQL databases to an email address on a schedule you specify using cron jobs. As long as you can run PHP apps, you're set to go. A lot of free ...

Fever is a new feed reader that calculates the "temperature" of your feeds by asking you to group them into essential and occasional categories, and looking at how they relate to one another to create a "hot" category. It's like your own personalized, automated Digg. It's the brainchild of Shaun Inman, one of the most respected designers around, and the UI looks great and seems intuitive. ...

There was a toss up this week about whether it would be better to dig right in to the Linux HTML editors, or to wax poetic about setting up LAMP so that those choosing to go the content management system (CMS) route could test any changes they made with such editors on their local machines. We ultimately decided to tackle setting up a LAMP testing ground. This will certainly not be necessary for ...

Yesterday a Reddit user posted a link that supposedly runs a time-consuming SQL query on the RIAA'a website. Of course the Reddit community began trying to stick it to the RIAA, and eventually someone may have deleted all of the site's content by exploiting a poorly configured web/database server with an SQL injection attack. The site appears to be operating fine now, but we noticed it ...

Mint is a powerful, extensible web statistics package from Shaun Inman, web designer extraordinaire. With a wide array of plug-ins that can even incorporate stats from other services like FeedBurner, Mint is a one stop, self-installable shop for virtually any and all stats you will ever have to view for your site. In fact, one of Mint's strengths is that it can be customized to scale down ...

EasyPHP is a great little web server package, as you might expect, it has the usual LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack, with phpMyAdmin, and a few other things. The only issue you might have with the EasyPHP 1.8 release is that it uses PHP 4. This may not be a problem unless you really need some of those sweet new features from PHP5. No word yet on when the folks at EasyPHP will be ...

Panic, the fine folks that bring us Transmit, finally revealed the top secret app they've been developing over the past year with the release of the web development application Coda V1.0. This is not a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop, do-all application. Coda has a specific target audience that consists of people who edit raw code using multiple tools such as a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor and ...

We're big fans of web stats packages, and Shaun Inman's powerful and flexible Mint is definitely near the top of our list. While Mint and its various plugins can watch all manner of web stats and there are even widgets to check some stats from the comforts of your desktop, Tyler Hall decided to go one step further and has built a pepper (i.e. - a plugin for Mint) simply titled php-Growl that can ...

With the craziness continuing to skyrocket, Twitter is getting more and more popular as the days go on. One terrific addition that can be added to this craze is something called microblogging, where you give your twitter account a short update about what was just posted to your blog, and Paul Stamatiou has managed to find a way to make this cake for anyone. With the 2 PHP scripts available at ...

There are all sorts of tricks that web developers have for decreasing page load times and optimizing their content, here's another quick and easy one using gzip and PHP. If your web server's PHP installation supports zlib (most do), you could squeeze a few KB worth of precious seconds out of this trick. Paul Stamatiou, the author of this handy tip, gives an example of Digg's stylesheet, which ...