Blog

Wonder what's next?

I have been running this blog since 2013 as a way to improve my PHP as well as my writing. It has been a labor of love and I made it my goal to post at least once a week [...]

Outline numbering for an object tree

Last week I had talked about a layout dilemma that my buddy Justin was having. This reminded me of an issue that programming challenge he hit me with a few months prior. The challenge was to take an object tree [...]

Layout with fixed header and independently scrolling columns

Update April 4th, 2019 Seems at some point between May of 2015 and now, the code in this post went terribly stale. It wasn't working in either Firefox or Chrome and I've since updated the code with a working example [...]

Working with Dynamic variable names a/k/a Variable variables in PHP

Variable variables are one of my favorite things about PHP. PHP allows you to use a variable to reference another variable. This comes in exceptionally handy when you need to create variable names dynamically: $variable = 'This is my variable' [...]

Open Challenge: Learn Lisp with Me

Starting on May 1st, 2015, I am setting out to learn Lisp because I feel like I'm missing out by not knowing it. I see it come up pretty regularly, it's stood the test of time and there are a [...]

Get all defined variables in PHP

I've never actually used this function, but could definitely see using it to help profile a system and/or to help identify defined but unused variables. To obtain an array of all of the defined variables you would: $defined = get_defined_vars() [...]

Working with JSON in PHP

JSON is one of my favorite human readable formats. It's widely used and has great support in PHP as well as other languages. PHP allows you to easily convert variables into JSON and JSON into objects or arrays. First, let's [...]

Handling click and touch events on the same element

I'm starting to feel behind the curve. I started receiving feedback that some clickable elements on my social networks were not working on touch devices. Without much thought, I went ahead and added touchstart along side of click to bind [...]

Truncate string with ellipses with PHP

We previously discussed how to calculate the length of a string in PHP and I made mention that using that function is how you would go about truncating a string if it's over a specific length. I also said that [...]

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 [...]