Blog

Sending Email from PHP

I remember one of my first paid programming gigs, it was to build a contact form for a friend's website. Not one of those janky mailto: hacks that attempted to open the local email client. I'm talking about a form [...]

HitTail Review

One of the hardest things for me now that I have been blogging consistently for a few months is coming up with new topics to blog about. After I got pretty caught up on my queue I decided that it [...]

Password Hashing Techniques in PHP

This post started as part of yesterday's post on encrypting passwords as a subsection labeled "Salt? Pepper? When did this become a cooking blog?" The fact is, I felt that the section was a bit long-winded and warranted a dedicated [...]

Encrypting Passwords in PHP

Not all hashing functions are created equally, some are considered more secure than others and yet all of them are more secure than storing plaintext passwords. In this post I'm going to discuss some of the common PHP hashing functions [...]

Specifying a User Agent when using file_get_contents() in PHP

I recently encountered a scenario where one of my site's login system stopped working. The piece of code that stopped working was the third-party login that leveraged GitHub for the authentication. It was one of those "it worked yesterday" moments [...]

LESS Icons for easy styling and customization

Got a new project I wanted to share with everyone, it's called icons.less (or LESS Icons) and it's available for immediate forking and use over at GitHub. The project itself stemmed from my own desire to have a set of [...]

How to Setup a LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a good ol' LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but in my experience, Apache doesn't necessarily scale all that well with PHP. It's really not Apache's fault, the fact is that [...]

Command-Line PHP

PHP is a powerful scripting language but did you know it can be used from the command-line as well? Using PHP from the CLI has many applications from checking what version of PHP is installed to being able to execute [...]

Browser redirect with PHP

Within nearly every web site or application there is a need to redirect a user to another page. Perhaps you want to route them to a login page when they aren't authenticated or maybe because a page moved and you [...]

How to Setup a LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

It seemed fitting that the first post on PHP Avenue should be about setting up a new server with PHP. This particular post will focus on a traditional LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I also [...]