Category Archives: Web development

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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Neat tricks with Oracle

The task: provide a neat hierarchical tree as a web interface to a project management system where any project might have a variable number of sub-projects. A tree structure in other words. So I ended up with this: ID Project … Continue reading

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Bound to succeed

I’ve been developing websites with PHP for about 5 years now and I blush to confess that I have only just discovered I can use bind parameters with SQL, instead of painstakingly building up my SQL statements by concatenating strings, … Continue reading

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Saying no to spammers

These days practically every website has a “contact us” form allowing visitors to send email to the site owner without exposing the recipient’s email address to the world. Lately I’ve been investigating ways that spammers can hijack these forms to … Continue reading

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Website planning: a blueprint for success

Once you’ve established the purpose of your website, and who will be using it, you can start to plan the basic structure of the site, which will determine the all-important site navigation system. Too many sites reflect the internal politics … Continue reading

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Three questions to ask before you call your web designer

So you’ve decided to create a new Web site, or renovate your existing one. We all know that in Internet time, the best time to launch a new project is always last week, so it’s very tempting to plunge straight … Continue reading

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