Articles
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It’s happened to everyone, you just started a brand new job, probably event left a decent job for it, only to realize that the new job sucks and you absolutely hate it. It happened to me recently, I was starting…
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How to calculate Independence Day observances with PHP
On this 238th anniversary of the United States of America, I felt it appropriate to post an article on how to determine what day the July 4th National Holiday is observed on. There are two rules to the observances. First,…
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How to parse XML with PHP’s SimpleXML
Parsing XML in PHP couldn’t be easier thanks to the SimpleXML extension. SimpleXML allows you to read in an XML string, verify that it is in fact XML and can create an object that you can interact with by way…
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The importance of a staging environment
Full disclosure, I don’t actually have a staging server for my personal projects. I develop locally in a very similar environment as my production server and any time I have to do something major, like upgrading the OS or upgrading…
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Checking your IMAP email using PHP
I have an upcoming freelance project coming up that includes checking an IMAP email account as well as working with XML in PHP. Let’s talk about connecting to an IMAP account in PHP, don’t worry, I’ll discuss parsing XML next…
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$10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean
Every time I think that I’m done with this topic for a while, someone (usually Linode) drops something new on us. The latest from Linode is the addition of a 10$ a month plan which nearly puts it in line…
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How to calculate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day with PHP
A little late on the Mother’s Day part, but since today is Father’s Day, I figured it would be fun to discuss how to obtain the dates for these moving holidays. To do so, all we need to use is…
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Android Pros and Cons after 2 years with an iPhone
I recently discussed migrating to cross-platform apps in an attempt to break away from the Apple Ecosystem which was a precursor to me swapping my iPhone 4S for a Nexus 5. Now it’s time to talk about the pros and…
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How to pipeline with phpredis
Have you ever run into a scenario where you have to loop through a set of data and perform database queries for each iteration? Obviously we shouldn’t run them one by one, so we end up using a TRANSACTION or…
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The receiving end of a DDoS Attack
This post was supposed to be a discussion of my migration back to Android from iOS but direction changed yesterday morning. At 9:30 am I found myself in the middle of a DDoS attack that was affecting the rack my…