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Simple PHP i18n internationalization and localization class

As sites and system grow and scale, the need for internationalization and localization (i18n and L10n respectively) of content becomes a necessary task. There's not much to it on the surface, you need to be able to serve up the [...]

Stop making it so hard for us to share your content

Hey you! Yes, you. You with that blog over there. The one without any sharing widgets whatsoever. Do you really think your content is so fucking special that people are going to go out of their way to copy and [...]

Debugging Invalid XML in PHP

SimpleXML with all of it's faults is still a great way to interact with XML. Most of it's shortcomings are related to debugging and how it handles invalid XML is no exception. Let's take a look at what happens when [...]

Writing unit tests for legacy code

I think one of my biggest gripes with adopting that TDD life is that I feel I'm in the minority with my friends even though the concept appears to be quite mainstream these days. One of the common pushbacks I [...]

Upgrade from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Last week I posted a call to action to help sway Ondřej Surý into continuing to support Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with his amazing PPA for the latest and greatest PHP versions. Ondřej was kind enough to take the time to [...]

My top 10 tips for new bloggers

I've been blogging every single week for over a year and a half and have been constantly egging my peers into jumping on the wagon. Within the last month both my friend Justin Davis and Francis Suarez started up blogs [...]

Call to Action: PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I'm going to take a break from posting code snippets and how-tos to draw attention to the fact that PHP 5.6 may not be coming to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS by way of Ondřej Surý's amazing PPA. Yes, you can still [...]

Upgrade to PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

PHP 5.6 is finally here and if you're on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS you're stuck with an older version of PHP. If you want to take advantage of the new awesomeness, you can do so very easily thanks to a PPA [...]

jQuery plugin to calculate read time

I love hosting my blog on GitHub by way of Jekyll but the Liquid templating system is far from a robust scripting language in my opinion. With the rise of Medium, I've been seeing the read time on more and [...]

Fizz Buzz in PHP

Fizz buzz is a fairly common screening question to help sniff out non-programmers during the interview process. The task is to print out numbers 1 through 100 but for multiples of 3 print out "Fizz" instead of the number and [...]