Monday, July 24. 2006
File compaction
Over the past few days I have been thinking about how to squeeze the most out of our bandwidth. Whether you use a shared hosting account or you have a dedicated server you'll be paying for the bandwidth you use so keeping your usage to a minimum seems like a no-brainer as long as it doesn't affect the service you offer. I've come up with a few ways of doing just this.
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Writing secure PHP
PHP makes it very easy to add functionality to static websites, especially for the new developer who may not have any prior experience or formal instruction in programming. Sadly this often means that developers are not aware of potential security vulnerabilities in their applications. This article is intended as a short overview of some of the common pitfalls encountered and how to avoid them. In later articles I’ll be expanding on some of the areas to provide more detail.
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Friday, July 21. 2006
Updating MySQL libs
I do most of my development on a Windows XP machine and then move my projects to my web host running PHP 4 when they are ready for deployment. Recently I'm been experimenting with a small project including a forum. I wasn't going to create a forum from scratch with so many good forums already freely available but I was running into problems authenicating with MySQL on my windows box while using PHP 4 despite everything working fine when I switched to PHP 5.
Anyway, I've just come across one solution to the problem posted by Edin Kadribašić here. He is offering updated MySQL libs on his site which should just be a case of dropping them into the PHP 4 install directory. Visit his blog post for the files and a more complete explanation.
Anyway, I've just come across one solution to the problem posted by Edin Kadribašić here. He is offering updated MySQL libs on his site which should just be a case of dropping them into the PHP 4 install directory. Visit his blog post for the files and a more complete explanation.
Wednesday, July 19. 2006
Using cron with php
PHP is liked by many developers for the ease with which code can be written and applications developed but a question that many people have is, "How to run scripts with cron?" This article addresses this problem as well as serving as a brief introduction to using cron for those new to this capability.
Occasionally you may find that you want to run a script at a specific time, every minute, every hour or every day for example to achieve any number of objectives. You may want to update a website, send out an email or process some other event. To achieve this you have several options.
Continue reading "Using cron with php"
Occasionally you may find that you want to run a script at a specific time, every minute, every hour or every day for example to achieve any number of objectives. You may want to update a website, send out an email or process some other event. To achieve this you have several options.
Continue reading "Using cron with php"
Friday, July 14. 2006
Spying on the competition
Whether your website exists to inform, amuse or sell to people it will be competing with other websites attempting to do the same. In such an environment it is vital to know what the competition is doing if you are to build your website and busniess.
Mention spying to someone and they are likely to think of James Bond movies and unrestrained violence. This is not what I'm suggesting, when I talk about spying I'm talking about market research and protecting your copyright and reputation.
Continue reading "Spying on the competition"
Mention spying to someone and they are likely to think of James Bond movies and unrestrained violence. This is not what I'm suggesting, when I talk about spying I'm talking about market research and protecting your copyright and reputation.
Continue reading "Spying on the competition"
Building a community
A forum can be a valuable addition to any website but time and again I have seen forums fail a few short months after being established. By following a few simple steps outlined below a forum can be established which endures and brings real value to a website.
Starting a forum is not easy mainly because they rely so extensively on inertia, nobody will post in an empty forum and a forum is going to remain empty until someone posts in it. Because of this before you start thinking about a forum you need to be relatively sure you'll have at least a handful of posters. At this point I have to point out the obvious; not all your visitors will be posters. In fact the majority of them are likely not to be. The only way to figure out how many posters you are likely to have for your forum is to give them the opportunity to post and the best way I have found to do this is with a blog.
Continue reading "Building a community"
Starting a forum is not easy mainly because they rely so extensively on inertia, nobody will post in an empty forum and a forum is going to remain empty until someone posts in it. Because of this before you start thinking about a forum you need to be relatively sure you'll have at least a handful of posters. At this point I have to point out the obvious; not all your visitors will be posters. In fact the majority of them are likely not to be. The only way to figure out how many posters you are likely to have for your forum is to give them the opportunity to post and the best way I have found to do this is with a blog.
Continue reading "Building a community"
Thursday, July 13. 2006
Tips for getting the most from regex.
Developing regular expressions isn't easy so there is nothing to be gained by making it harder still. Here are seven tips to make it as easy as possible.
Continue reading "Tips for getting the most from regex."
Continue reading "Tips for getting the most from regex."
