Blog
Migrating from WP Engine to GitHub Pages
After giving it nearly a full calendar year, I have decided to migrate my PHP blog (PHP Avenue) off of WordPress via WP Engine and on to GitHub Pages. The decision ultimately boiled down to WordPress having way more available [...]
Transactions with PHP Data Objects (PDO)
PHP Data Objects (PDO) is arguably the best database abstraction layer available in PHP. It provides a consistent interface across multiple datasources (MySQL, PostgreSQL, et cetera) and helps boost your site's security by way of prepared statements. It even supports [...]
The dirtiest thing you wear
Not only is it the dirtiest thing you wear, it's quite possibly the dirtiest thing you own and it's fucking disgusting. What is it, you ask? It's your belt, your dirty disgusting belt. Why is your belt so disgusting? Because [...]
The importance of code editor proficiency
Hi, my name is Josh and I am a Vim addict. I have been for quite a while now, nearly 15 years by my estimates. I love everything about it but in all honesty, I have only really started to [...]
How to zero fill a number with PHP
Zero filling (or zero padding) is when you pad a value on the left side to a specific length. This is something you will commonly see in database schemas for integer columns. But what if we're not working with data [...]
How to get keys from an associative array in PHP
One of PHP's most powerful features are arrays and the multitude of functions available to interact with and manipulate them. Arrays can be indexed by integers as well as string, known as an associative array. Instead of looping through the [...]
Dynamic page titles with GitHub Pages
Ran into a bit of an issue today when deploying some changes to my blog. The home page, which was working just fine locally, was being treated as if it were a blog post page. What keyed me off to [...]
Passing variables to anonymous PHP functions
The other day I ran into a situation (first time, it seems) where I needed to access a variable inside of an anonymous function inside of preg_replace_callback(). My first thought, even though it went against my better judgement was to [...]
Opt-out responsive design using LESS
I liked Chris Coyier's post Opt-Out Responsive Design? but really didn't like the idea of having to qualify all of my selectors with a parent class to indicate that we should be using the responsive version of the site. I [...]
Using list() with foreach() in PHP
Continuing my showcasing of all of the awesomeness in PHP 5.5 that I am discovering since my upgrade from 5.3, let's discuss using the the list() function inside of a foreach() block. Have you ever had a situation where you [...]