Author: Josh Sherman
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Staying motivated with streaks
I’m having one of those weeks where I zero motivation to sit down and write a blog post. Spent part of the week in Austin with the work fam. Haven’t even unpacked yet. Still getting back into the swing of being at home. In the middle of a major redesign…
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Get date for Easter in PHP
All the good things about Easter aside, it’s one of those holidays that’s a pain to get the date for. This is because the date of Easter is based on the lunar cycle and Spring Equinox (March 21st). The date of Easter on a given year could fall between March…
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Chat Personas
Going to make this brief since it’s Easter and I forgot to blog ahead of time this week. So I’ve recently been hanging out on a few Slack teams. One with the work crew, one with my small group of tech friends and a couple of “public” teams with local…
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Serializing and unserializing variables in PHP
Serialization in PHP is the act of converting a variable into a storable value. When I say storable, I mean being able to store the result in say, a database or a flat file. This is commonly applied to arrays and objects as they are not simply text strings. Under…
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Decouple your code from your web server
I used to be quite adamant about running nearly the same exact software stack locally as I did on my servers. Running Linux made it easy to pull this off and being able to do the same on OS X was a contingency for switching. I have never been a…
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Calculate the length of a string with PHP
Calculating the length of a string is a useful feature of any language, in fact it’s one of the few pieces of functionality that has a consistently simple syntax across modern languages. You can calculate the length of a string as part of some server side user input validation or…
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Start your day with a list
I’ve been seeing these “how productive people start their day” posts on my social feeds a lot more recently. It got me thinking, “hey, I consider myself successful, how do I start my day?” A while back I started to make mental notes about how I started my day, or…
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How to get a server’s hostname in PHP
The hostname of your server or local system is an easy way to determine which environment you are working with, either local or production. Prior to PHP 5.3 you would need to utilize the php_uname() function and with 5.3+ there is a built-in function for getting the hostname: pre-5.3 $hostname…
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Non-binary genders are complicated
No, this post is not some rant about non-binary genders. I’m actually referring to the trials and tribulations that I went through to implement a third gender option on my social network. The title is an homage to the CSS-Tricks post titled Features Are Complicated. This isn’t some dramatization, it’s…
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How to save a remote file to disk with PHP
You may already be familiar with file_get_contents() for reading the contents of a local file but did you know that you can use it to read the contents of a remote file or site? You can then use file_put_contents() to write the file’s contents back to disk: file_put_contents(‘./some/local/file’, file_get_contents(‘http://phpave.com’)); Both…