PHP Developer / Blog

It’s inevitable that all startups won’t be successful. In fact it’s a very small percentage which do. This begs the question of what you do with the intellectual property that has been accumulated. Let’s assume that your startup didn’t amass a substantial enough user base to be considered a valuable asset. Let’s also assume that all you have left is some sort of technology which for whatever reason didn’t fulfill the goals of the creators. What can be done with the intellectual property assets? Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I suggested using PHP’s memory stream to pass data along with PUT calls in curl. After doing some benchmarking it turns out that it’s faster to use PHP’s CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST option. This way you can treat PUT and POST calls in the same manner. Read the rest of this entry »

I will scream if one more person tells me that I’ve wasted my time by writing a web framework because there are already so many available. The truth of the matter is that they’re right. The part that they’re missing out on is that writing a framework is one of the best exercises you can do as a web developer. So regardless if you plan on using the framework you write is irrelevant though I suggest you do because ironing out the fine details will make you a better programmer. Read the rest of this entry »

Hosting remote git repositories using GitHub is completely painless. Assuming you’ve already signed up for an account at GitHub and that you have Git installed on your computer. For OSX you can use macports to easily get Git’s command line tools installed. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: There’s a faster way to do this over here.

Curl quickly becomes your best friend when working with web services. Unfortunately making PUT calls with PHP isn’t completely straight forward. Sure there’s CURLOPT_PUT but how do you attach a file that’s not really a file but a string in memory? Fortunately, PHP 5.2 introduces memory streams which can be treated as file handles. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve set up all your rewrite rules and then sometime noticed that some of your urls aren’t working like you’d hoped. Maybe it’s throwing a 404 error or going to a different page that you’re expecting. It’s nearly impossible to track down unless you know about Apache’s RewriteLogLevel and RewriteLog directives. These gems can tell you precisely what Apache is doing when applying rewrite rules to a given request. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we’ve seen the death of javascript rollovers. But rollovers aren’t such a bad thing. However, they generally required the use of multiple images and Javascript which would handle mouseover and mouseout events. I think this is why they lost their appeal. There’s got to be a better way, right? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a personal website which has included my resume since the late 90s. It’s always had periodic traffic from recruiters who stumbled upon it via search engines. Over the past few years I have had a lot of interest in organic traffic. I decided to implement some of what we learned at Photagious to my personal site so I could continue to get a better understanding of how my site fits into the rest of the web. Proof is in the pudding and these tips landed me a job at Yahoo!. Read the rest of this entry »

By now we should all know the benefits of including your JavaScript as external files. But does that mean we should always include them that way? The primary benefit of external JavaScript files is that the browser should cache them. So when someone comes to your home page and downloads yourfile.js it’s stored locally on the user’s computer. As they click through other pages on your site which include the same yourfile.js file then it’s pulled from cache. Subsequent page requests are sped up for two reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Godin recently posted in his blog about reasons for having (or more precisely not having) a resume. He says “I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.” I don’t completely disagree Seth. If all you have is a resume then his point is well stated. You’ll end up getting contacted by companies “for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine.” Read the rest of this entry »