Category Archives: PHP

How to know that your PHP is borked before your clients kill you

Maybe it’s just me, but every now and then I make a quick change to a PHP script, don’t bother checking it, then a few hours/days/months later either realise that I missed a vital semicolon, or mismatched a bracket. This started to get on my nerves, as now this has happened a couple of times [...]
Posted in PHP | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

How to use Twitter as an error log

Sure this has been done before, but I had a brainwave today – why not use Twitter as an error log for web apps? I already have error handling on my functions, so surely this shouldn’t be a difficult addition… turns out it’s not. First, you’ll need a twitter account. I’d recommend setting one up, then protecting [...]
Also posted in tips | 19 Comments

Using Texter to speed up web design/development

Lifehacker’s Texter let’s you define short macros that allow you type a little, and get a lot back. I’ve not used this before, but am constantly finding myself typing the same bits over and over and over, so this is a very neat and helpful little tool. Basically, you just define a command, then specify what [...]
Also posted in software | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Enable better caching on your website using PHP

Just a quick snippet to help you tell useragents accessing your site that the content hasn’t changed. ?View Code PHPfunction caching_headers ($file, $timestamp) { $gmt_mtime = gmdate('r', $timestamp); header('ETag: "'.md5($timestamp.$file).'"');   if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) || isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])) { if ($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'] == $gmt_mtime || str_replace('"', '', stripslashes($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])) == md5($timestamp.$file)) { header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified'); exit(); } }   header('Last-Modified: '.$gmt_mtime); header('Cache-Control: public'); return 1; } Then call this in the top of your code like [...]
Posted in PHP | Tagged | 2 Comments

Friendfeedifying your feeds

Although these tips are designed for feeds used with Friendfeed, the first two aren’t just for that – it’s just that Friendfeed exposes the extra functions in it’s interface. The third tip regarding SUP currently is only really relevant for Friendfeed.
Posted in PHP | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Writing dynamic XML sitemaps using PHP

Since Google introduced sitemaps in 2005, they have grown to be accepted by the 4 main search engines: Google, Live Search, Yahoo and Ask. As the offical sitemaps page describes: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap [...]
Posted in PHP | 20 Comments