Articles
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Blogging from the French Quarter in New Orleans today. A recent bout of termite infestation has left us with a circus tent full noxious gas enclosing our house and no place to call home for a few days. We were…
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Simple Probability Distribution with PHP
We’ve all been there, trying to juggle two or more things for either split testing or just because you want some variety. This came up recently for me with juggling advertising networks and I wrote some simply code to handle…
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The Pitfalls of Using BuySellAds
BuySellAds (BSA) is a platform for selling advertisements on your website. They take a mere 25% cut of sales and offer you a marketplace listing to help you gain exposure to potential advertisers. I love the idea and have attempted…
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Incrementing / Decrementing a Number by a Number with PHP
We’ve previously discussed how to simply increment and decrement a variable but that only covered incrementing by a value of 1. What about when you want to increment a variable by 5s? There’s a few different ways this can be…
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LinkedIn Endorsements are Nonsense
Recently a former coworker of mine sent out an email to her LinkedIn network pleading with us to leave her a thoughtful recommendation instead of just endorsing her for skills. Unfortunately, I never worked directly with her at the job…
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Sorting an associative array by a specific key with PHP
One of PHP’s most powerful data types is the array. It can hold numbers, it can hold letters, it can be sorted, sliced and chunked. Speaking of sorting, when sorting an array the straight forward sorting functions are only for…
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The Complexity of Permalinks and Slugs with User Generated Content
I’m not referring to the complexity of the permalink or slug itself, but the complexity to your code that can be introduced with certain formats, specifcally anything that the user can modify. When I was originally building SceneKids.com I wanted…
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How to convert a CSV file into an array with PHP
Loading CSV files into an array is something that comes up more times than I’d like to admit. Scrubbing mailing lists, loading flat files to a database and various other use cases are out there and fortunately, PHP makes it…
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Company culture is what you make of it
Been hearing from some of my friends that have recently taken new jobs about how shitty the company culture is at the company they work at. We’ve all been there, working in a development shop with the single goal to…
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How to Determine if it is Friday the 13th with PHP
It seemed fitting that my post on Friday the 13th would be about Friday the 13th. There are 52 Fridays in 2013, but only 2 of them are the 13th day of the month (September and December). To determine if…