PHP Tutorials
Retrieve, Cache, and Display Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count
One way of significantly speeding up your website is by caching information you retrieve remotely from other websites or databases. Caching information is extremely simple and can save your users seconds of unnecessary waiting. Here's how I cache my FeedBurner follower count on my site.
Format Code Inside PRE Tags within TextMate Using PHP
Creating blog posts has been greatly sped up by the use of TextMate. I've created a bunch of blog formatting commands to do various operations on posts including adding paragraph tags, formatting headings, and generating content based on string templates. One of my favorites is a PHP function that html-entitizes (your word of the day) code with PRE tags.
Create WordPress Page Templates with Custom Queries
One of my main goals with the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find the information that was most popular on my site. Not to my surprise, posts about MooTools, jQuery, and CSS were at the top of the list. What do those three topics have in common? The fact that I provide a sweet demo for each of them. Thus I set out to create an easy way to check out all of my demos — the Demos & Downloads page.
Run PHP Files From the Command Line
I've been brushing up on my shell scripting lately. I just got a MacBook and never felt compelled to spend too much time with Cygwin. I'm learning quite a bit now but there are still some tasks that I'd need to accomplish sooner rather than later. I know how to accomplish the task using PHP so I've got that to my advantage. What's awesome is that I can quickly and easily run my PHP files from the command line.
Remotely Download Google AJAX Libraries Using PHP
I don't know how to use all of the JavaScript libraries but perusing their code is interesting. If I'm looking to code something I'll look at how each of the other libraries accomplishes the task. The problem is that you need to go out and download each one. And of course they're all on different development schedules so you'd also need to make sure to grab the latest version of the library. Instead of manually accomplishing that task, I've chosen create a script that does all of that for me.
Retrieve Google Analytics Visits and PageViews with PHP
Google Analytics is an outstanding website analytics tool that gives you way more information about your website than you probably need. Better to get more than you want than not enough, right? Anyways I check my website statistics more often than I should and it ends up taking a few minutes to get logged in, select the right site, select the current day, etc. I found a great Google Analytics PHP API that allows me to get just the statistics I'm looking for.
Quick Tip: PHP & Possessive Punctuation
Automation is great — it means less work for the developer, the user, and the server. Everyone's happy, right? Unfortunately computers don't pay attention to detail unless they're told to. One detail we need to program computers to pay attention to is proper apostrophe usage when it comes to possession. For example, "Chris's" is not correct — when a name ends in "s", no "s" should follow the apostrophe. Coding proper English is simple.
Create Commands in TextMate Using PHP
TextMate is the best thing to enter my programming life since MooTools. TextMate is extremely flexible and contains a host of functions that make my programming time much more efficient. Snippets, commands, macros — TextMate has it all. And when a command or snippet doesn't exist, write it yourself! In what language? Any language installed on your system! TextMate's so flexible that you can write commands in the language you feel most comfortable in.
Image Manipulation with PHP and the GD Library
Yeah, I'm a Photoshop wizard. I rock the selection tool. I crop like a farmer. I dominate the bucket tool. Hell, I even went as far as wielding the wizard wand selection tool once.
Pretty Word Wrapper with MooTools or PHP
Details, details, details. Details are what take a good site to the next level. Small details like link nudging (jQuery, MooTools), simple but stylish CSS enhancements, and opacity effects are the cheeky effects that give your website the edge over similar websites. The detail we'll be addressing today is "widowed" text. A "widow" occurs when only one word of a long string wraps to the next line. An example would be: