Category Archives: PHP

Automatically updating a WordPress blogroll

Years ago, I signed up to a social bookmarking system called Spurl. I’m really not interested in social bookmarking, but it had a handy feature: by inserting a bit of Javascript in a web page, you could pull all or … Continue reading

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Book review: PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, 4th Edition by Larry Ullman

I bought PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (4th Edition) to use as a set book for an online intermediate PHP class that I teach. I previously used Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL by … Continue reading

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ADODB database abstraction library for PHP

I’ve been using this library for years to make my database interface code database-independent, but I am still discovering new useful functions. Case in point: today I was using the handy rs2csv function, which outputs a recordset to a CSV … Continue reading

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Preventing hotlinking of images

Using an .htaccess file to prevent people stealing bandwidth by linking directly to your images from another website is a popular and well-known technique. I needed to do this, but decided to take it a step further with a little … Continue reading

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PHP: is it a leap year?

I’ve written about date manipulation in PHP before. There are some truly horrible hacks out there. Today I needed to detect whether a given year was a leap year, in order to write future-proof code for a calendar. PHP has … Continue reading

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Chocs To Go is here!

The goal for students on the intermediate PHP and MySQL course that I’m running for IWA/HWG is to create a working shopping cart. The course starts in only three days, and I decided I’d better walk the walk and prove … Continue reading

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Intermediate PHP and MySQL course

Since 1999 I’ve been teaching online for the Open University. It may not pay brilliantly, but it’s regular income and I really enjoy doing it; OU students often overcome major barriers to achieve a qualification they missed out on earlier … Continue reading

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Date handling in PHP and MySQL

It’s always a real headache manipulating dates between PHP and MySQL, because PHP’s date functions assume Unix timestamps, while MySQL has its own internal date format. They both have excellent built-in functions for handling dates, but they are fundamentally incompatible. … Continue reading

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Downright Slippery Time

Want to add one (or more) days to a date in PHP? Timestamps are simply numbers of seconds, so it seems so easy and obvious to do this: $mydate = (60*60*24)+$mydate; or even just $mydate = 86400+$mydate; Don’t be tempted! … Continue reading

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Scriptaculous without Javascript

Scriptaculous is one of the better-known Javascript/AJAX libraries, with useful built-in objects for adding Web 2.0 functionality to your pages. I’ve tinkered with it but hadn’t found a real-life application for it until I needed to allow a client to … Continue reading

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