Blog

Installing PHP Redis - A PHP Extension for Redis

Redis is one of my favorite new data stores of the NoSQL movement. It has the power and speed to act as a caching server like Memcached and it has more advanced data types to make it more like an [...]

Calculate Age from Date with PHP

Calculating the age based on a date is a pretty simple task that can be accomplished many different ways (Google yield's quite a few different approaches). The caveat that usually arises is that you need to factor in which side [...]

Apple iOS 7 Beta Review

Like many people, I went ahead and upgraded my phone to the Developer Preview of Apple's latest iOS, version 7. Days later, I'm wondering if I will be downgrading next week because of a handful of issues that I would [...]

Configuring PHP Sessions

Now that we know how to use sessions and have built a simple login system, let's take a look at some options for configuring PHP sessions. Out of the box, PHP is configured to file-based sessions with a max lifetime [...]

PHP Login System

Following up on yesterday's introduction to PHP Sessions, let's talk about building a simple login system in PHP. To start, you will need to make sure that pages on your site that are behind the login page will have sessions [...]

PHP Session Handling

Sessions, one of those necessary evils when building websites. They come into play whenever you need to have data available between pages on a site. These scenarios typically arise when you have login restricted areas on a site. Why do [...]

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 [...]