Articles
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If you’re not already aware, Gravatar is a free service that allows you to couple an image to your email address which can then be carried around the Internet with you. It’s great for site owners because then you don’t…
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How to use switch/case statements in PHP
switch/case statements are one of my favorite anti-patterns not because I prefer to write spaghetti code but because they can make if/elseif blocks look a ton cleaner. Why would it be considered an anti-pattern? Because it could easily be abused…
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Your stack is outdated
I’ve been noticing a pattern with most of my peers (yes I said most), they expect their users to be running the latest and greatest version of their favorite “modern” browser and all the while their server stack is collecting…
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Improve performance by reusing PHP objects
I’ve been doing a ton of optimizations on one of my main sites and one thing that I’ve been doing more and more is trying to reuse objects whenever possible. What’s this entail? All it takes is creating a static…
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How I saw the test-driven light
Aside from dealing with financial transactions, I’ve generally avoided test-driven development as part of my day to day workflow. Why? The usual reasons, but mostly because I didn’t want to incur the overhead of additional development. As a single founder…
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PHP 5.5 syntax highlighting for Vim
Now that I’m using PHP 5.5 I’m finding that my Vim syntax highlighting is a bit off. After some digging around I found a syntax file that was updated to PHP 5.5 RC1 but hasn’t been updated since. In true…
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Upgrade from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Recently I made the decision to stop living in the past and start living in the present by using the latest stable release of PHP, version 5.5.8. Unfortunately on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I always run LTS releases on my servers)…
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Domains are worthless without traffic
If you know anything about my growth strategy for my social network, it’s that I’m expanding my platform horizontally across multiple domains and allowing each site to grow organically. This has led me down the road of being one of…
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PHP segmentation faulting from logging too much
At least I think that’s what was happening. Today I made the somewhat calculated risk of upgrading my production server from PHP 5.3.10 to PHP 5.5.7. Scary stuff, jumping 2 point revisions like that but I was feeling cocky after…
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Getting PHP’s version from the command-line
As you may already know, obtaining the version number of PHP is a simple php –version away. This is great if you just want to see the version number, but what if you wanted just the version number? First option…