Category: Software Development
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Sending Email from PHP
I remember one of my first paid programming gigs, it was to build a contact form for a friend’s website. Not one of those janky mailto: hacks that attempted to open the local email client. I’m talking about a form that would send mail from the server, you know, in…
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Password Hashing Techniques in PHP
This post started as part of yesterday’s post on encrypting passwords as a subsection labeled “Salt? Pepper? When did this become a cooking blog?” The fact is, I felt that the section was a bit long-winded and warranted a dedicated post. Without further ado let’s talk about some techniques for…
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Encrypting Passwords in PHP
Not all hashing functions are created equally, some are considered more secure than others and yet all of them are more secure than storing plaintext passwords. In this post I’m going to discuss some of the common PHP hashing functions that can be used as an alternative to storing plaintext…
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Specifying a User Agent when using file_get_contents() in PHP
I recently encountered a scenario where one of my site’s login system stopped working. The piece of code that stopped working was the third-party login that leveraged GitHub for the authentication. It was one of those “it worked yesterday” moments for sure. After some research, I discovered that GitHub had…
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LESS Icons for easy styling and customization
Got a new project I wanted to share with everyone, it’s called icons.less (or LESS Icons) and it’s available for immediate forking and use over at GitHub. The project itself stemmed from my own desire to have a set of social icons that were easy to customize for different websites…
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Browser redirect with PHP
Within nearly every web site or application there is a need to redirect a user to another page. Perhaps you want to route them to a login page when they aren’t authenticated or maybe because a page moved and you want to take them to the new location. To accomplish…
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Advice on Freelancing
A friend of mine recently asked me for some advice in regard to a freelancing project he was in the quoting phase of. I figured, what a great topic for a blog post! Keep in mind though, I haven’t freelanced in years, mainly because I am not a fan of…
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How I use Redis
If you know me you know that I’m a huge proponent of Redis. I started using it in mid-2011 as the storage engine for a chat system I was building for SceneKids. Over the last year and a half or so I’ve utilized Redis more and more for many other…
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PHP: Built for the web
If you know me, you know I’m a pretty devout PHP coder when it comes to my own adventures in web development. I’ve been using it since version 3 (started with it in Y2K) and in using it that long, I’d be the last person to say that it’s a…
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Blocking Proxy Sites with JavaScript
Social websites don’t always attract the most desireable patrons and often times those users opt to hide their identity (as well as blocking banner ads) behind a proxy server. There are quite a few free web-based proxies out there (generally ad funded, some have premium tiers) and they typically have…