I do a lot of coding in Python and one thing that I really love is the mindset of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. What’s this mean? It means that instead of sanity checking every little thing, just handling the exceptions that are thrown instead. In PHP this can
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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 have to build out image uploading and storage and it’s
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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 to the point that you are munging up your control
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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 function to return an instance of the object instead of
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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 / developer you’re always looking for ways to lighten the
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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 hacker fashion I went ahead and forked the project and
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In my defense, I’m a grown ass man and I knew exactly what I was doing. I was really intrigued by all of the “automated websites” that Flippa is overrun with and figured I’d set myself a very modest budget of 250$ and see what trouble I could get myself
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Perhaps you have a class and you absolutely don’t want anyone tacking new properties onto it once it’s been instantiated. To do so, you can use PHP’s overloading to catch the setting of a variable and raise an error accordingly. Here is the default behavior where an object can have
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And even then, everything has to be so fucking abysmal that there’s no way to avoid it. The only time I’d ever condone a full rewrite is when you are completely abandoning an existing user base else you’re probably going to disappoint at least a good chunk of your users
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The topic of this post ended up turning into quite the programming exercise for me. In true PHP fashion, I was able to come up with 3 distinct methods to determine what date Thanksgiving falls on (and have another in mind but it’s just a crappier version of what I’m
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For those that aren’t familiar, Wizpert is a platform for chatting with people (Skype, Gtalk and their site) that are experts (referred to as “wizperts”) of specific topics. Earlier in the year I was sent a beta invite to become a wizpert in the category of PHP. I’m not a
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Converting a number from negative to positive is a pretty simple process using the absolute function abs(): $positive = abs(-123); // = 123 $positive = abs(123); // also = 123 Absolute returns a positive integer or float based on what you feed it. Because it only ever returns a positive
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We’ve previously discussed how to assign variables and add in variables and all of that good stuff, but what about if you are dealing with a large block of text? There’s many approaches, most that require you to be mindful of escaping characters like simply using quotes to wrap a
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If you’ve ever dealt with time in PHP you’ve probably been burnt by daylight savings time before (quite possibly yesterday ;). I’ve been there, waking up on the Sunday of the time change with an email about timestamps being an hour off or some other anomaly that ends up being
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This post was originally planned to be a social commentary on the potential for riots this coming Novemeber (a/k/a The 2013 Food Stamp Riots a/k/a The Backlash of the Entitlement Society) but that seemed like such a fucking downer. Then the post was supposed to be about a Python script
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Array chunking is a great way to paginate large arrays and as I found out recently, makes it very easy to map a large array from Redis (by way of mget and/or pipelining) back to the original data. Chunking an array is the process of taking an array and splitting
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PHP makes it really easy to randomize the order of an array with the shuffle() function. If you’ve ever used this function on an associative array you know that the array will be randomized, but the keys will be dropped. It takes a bit more work, but you can randomize
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In the past, we’ve discussed incrementing and decrementing a variable and incrementing and decrementing a number by another number but did you know that we can also increment and decrement a string? You can use the shorthand operators ++ or -- to accomplish this. Please note that you can’t increment
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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 to use them on a few occasions. As of this
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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 it. The premise is simple, you assign weights to the
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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 accomplished. First, the obvious (albeit far from ideal) using ++
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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 to ensure that the user’s username was always in the
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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 sorting by the keys or by the values. What about
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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 easy to to do. There are a few ways to
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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 a Friday is a Friday the 13th, we will need
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