Articles
-
Going to make this brief since it’s Easter and I forgot to blog ahead of time this week. So I’ve recently been hanging out on a few Slack teams. One with the work crew, one with my small group of…
-
Serializing and unserializing variables in PHP
Serialization in PHP is the act of converting a variable into a storable value. When I say storable, I mean being able to store the result in say, a database or a flat file. This is commonly applied to arrays…
-
Decouple your code from your web server
I used to be quite adamant about running nearly the same exact software stack locally as I did on my servers. Running Linux made it easy to pull this off and being able to do the same on OS X…
-
Calculate the length of a string with PHP
Calculating the length of a string is a useful feature of any language, in fact it’s one of the few pieces of functionality that has a consistently simple syntax across modern languages. You can calculate the length of a string…
-
Start your day with a list
I’ve been seeing these “how productive people start their day” posts on my social feeds a lot more recently. It got me thinking, “hey, I consider myself successful, how do I start my day?” A while back I started to…
-
How to get a server’s hostname in PHP
The hostname of your server or local system is an easy way to determine which environment you are working with, either local or production. Prior to PHP 5.3 you would need to utilize the php_uname() function and with 5.3+ there…
-
Non-binary genders are complicated
No, this post is not some rant about non-binary genders. I’m actually referring to the trials and tribulations that I went through to implement a third gender option on my social network. The title is an homage to the CSS-Tricks…
-
How to save a remote file to disk with PHP
You may already be familiar with file_get_contents() for reading the contents of a local file but did you know that you can use it to read the contents of a remote file or site? You can then use file_put_contents() to…
-
Never stop learning
As cliché as this post’s title is, I tend to forget this simple truth from time to time. This week was one of those weeks where I learned a ton of shit. Worked with some new to me libraries. Learned…
-
Basic HTTP Authentication with PHP
Basic HTTP Authentication is easily accomplished at the web server level (by way of .htaccess with Apache or inside your nginx configuration file) but did you know you could pull it off inside of a PHP script? You bet your…