PHP Tutorials
Last July I wrote an epic dominant unbelievable fantastic outstanding awesome NetTuts post called Create a Twitter-Like "Load More" Widget Using CSS, HTML, JSON, and jQuery or MooTools where I used a MooTools/AJAX/JSON system for loading additional items when the user clicks a "Load More" link. The functionality is sweet but I see room for improvement. If a user scrolls down toward the end of the container, why not load more items for them automatically? Armed with the premier MooTools scrolling plugin, ScrollSpy, we can do so.
ID Your Body Using PHP
It seems like every part of a website needs to be dynamic. Dynamic, database-driven pages, dynamic JavaScript, dynamic CSS, etc. All this dynamism can make it difficult to style or script a page easily. One way I've learned to combat the rigidness of using CMS' is to give the BODY element a unique ID based on the URL. Doing so allows me to add special styling to any page.
Replace Content in PRE Tags with HTML Entities
If you have a website that relies heavily on PRE tags, you know the important of converting PRE tag content to their HTML entities. Doing so prevents worlds of possible rendering issues. The following PHP snippet HTML-Entitizes (?) any code within PRE tags:
PHP Function: Remove a Query String Key=>Value
I was recently coding a website which relied heavily on query string variables. It was absolutely imperative that I keep the query string clean and not duplicate keys. I needed to find a PHP function that would allow me to remove keys (and their values) easily and reliably. Enter a PHP function I found at Added Bytes:
Using the GitHub API and PHP to Get Repository Information
GitHub is an awesome place to host your open source project code. MooTools, Prototype, and jQuery all use GitHub. As you probably know, the MooTools Forge requires your plugins be hosted on GitHub. The only problem with hosting all my MooTools plugins is that I lose traffic when I want people to see my code. Problem solved: use PHP, the GitHub API, and PHP Markdown to display files of my choice on my website.
Add Events to the PHP Calendar
In a previous blog post I detailed how to create a basic calendar using PHP and then showed you how to add controls to that calendar. This post will detail how you may efficiently pull events from a MySQL table and display those events within the calendar.
Simple PHP Caching and Content Retrieval Function
One way to make your website exponentially faster is by caching both remote and internal requests. Why request your RSS subscriber count from FeedBurner more than once a day if that count is calculated once per day? Why hit your database on each page load if that content rarely changes? I've created a primitive request-and-cache function for PHP that checks for fresh content in the cache and retrieves content from a source if fresh content isn't available.
Create PHP Classes with Dynamic Functions
As you have probably found out, when I see something interesting I don't know how to do, my only goal is to figure out how to do it. Thus is the case with PHP classes featuring dynamic methods based on database records (or arrays). I took some time to figure out how it was done.
Fix WordPress CRONs on Media Temple (dv) Servers
When I switched from Dreamhost shared hosting to Media Temple (dv) server hosting, I had a hell of a time trying to figure out why CRONs weren't working correctly on the website. I had database backups being sent via CRON jobs so making sure CRONs were working was imperative. What's great is that the way to make these Wordpress CRONs work was by...setting up a CRON.
Get a URL’s Reddit Score Using PHP and JSON
Since we can see Digg turning more into a funny-pic-and-vid site each day, I've turned my attention to Reddit. Reddit just seems more controlled and programmer-friendly. Since I have respect for Reddit I thought I'd put together a quick tutorial on how you can retrieve a URL's Reddit score using PHP.