Is Microsoft Evolving?
There has been a lot of publicity surrounding Microsoft in the last few weeks. Between some major layoffs, the surprise success of Windows 7, and Bill Gates speaking at TED, Microsoft has made headlines in nearly every technology publication in the last month. In many of these articles I have noticed an ongoing theme, increasing [...]
PHP Remove Non ASCII Characters from a String
I hate the stupid odd characters that sometimes seem to magically appear from nowhere in text. Some call the odd characters, some call them special characters, I call them non ASCII characters but whatever you call them they are inconvenient. Often they come along with text pasted into a content management system from Microsoft Word. [...]
SPAW Editor Fixes for Safari and CodeIgniter
I don’t know how many of you web developers use WYSIWYG editors in your coding. I personally use them quite often to allow customers to manage their online content. I have tried just about every one available both paid and free. So far my favorite is SPAW Editor. (Note I always use the SPAW lite [...]
Extend and Enhance your WordPress
WordPress is a fantastic blogging engine and many of my visitors are WordPress users and fans. Today I thought I would spend a little time cataloging some of my favorite posts on using and extending WordPress. Below are 7 posts you can use to help get the most out of your WordPress installation. 10 Killer [...]
How to do a Local Site Search Using Google Ajax Search API
It has been awhile since I have put up a tutorial. Today I am going to give a quick overview of using the Google Ajax Search API to do a local site search (It is much easier than it looks). I hadn’t really played with the Google Search API until yesterday but it is pretty [...]
Creating Symbolic/Softlinks Using PHP
PHP is a fantastic language and it has some very useful capabilities. I am currently developing a website that has a unique structure. Basically, I am using symbolic links to act as subdomains that all point to a single program. I am then using PHP’s built in $_SERVER array to find the HTTP host. From [...]
Create an Array of The Last X Days using PHP
Today I needed to generate a graph that showed activity over the last 30 days. Realizing I was going to have to create multiple customizable graphs in the future, I wrote a simple function that takes an argument for number of days and then returns an array of the last X number of days from [...]
Free Animated AJAX Loading Graphics Generator
When loading AJAX requests on website you frequently see a variety of animated loading graphics. Some are spinning circles, some are progress bars, and some are random but all are a pain in the butt to make. Awhile back, Sheldon tipped me off to a great site called ajaxload.info which automatically generates a number of [...]
How to Easily Parse a RSS Feed with PHP 4 or PHP 5
Today I had to parse a WordPress RSS feed for display on a customers website. The basic goal was to show the latest blog postings on the customer’s homepage without them having to manually feed in the data. I have done this before using some of the great XML tools in PHP 5 that make [...]
Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools
There are a number of helpful in-brwoser web development tools out there. I have used Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar for quite some time. Recently, I have added some additional features like YSlow and Live HTTP Headers which have proved to be helpful. I know there are a number of other tools out there [...]