Interesting Things

Richard Bradshaw's idea of what is interesting

Category: PHP

Dynamically drawing gradients with PHP

Just a little script to create a PNG image of a simple linear gradient using PHP. You could adapt this to make it better in many ways! Insipired (by which I mean 99% ripped of!) by http://www.cutcodedown.com/ No demo to avoid load on the server, but it just makes a simple gradient. I use it [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

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.

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, [...]