Chris Rossi

Installing htop on a CentOS WHM/Cpanel Server

bbcentral — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:16:28 +0000

Mostly just posting this for my own reference, but you may find it handy.

If you want to install ‘htop’ (a very good Linux process viewer) onto a server running CentOS (in my case also running WHM and cPanel), you may run into some errors.

Updating Large Datasets in MySQL

bbcentral — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:40:38 +0000

I’ve been building a PHP script to import an XML file every 24 hours into a MySQL database using a CRON job.
The table contains almost 150,000 rows of data, each with a unique ID (primary key).

Goodbye Stargate

bbcentral — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:09:00 +0000

I’m dreading tomorrow night…it could be the last time I ever get to watch a new episode of Stargate. It’s the final SGU episode, and it looks like there may not be any new series or any more SG-1 or Atlantis movies. And so ends a chapter of my life that started 14 years ago. We may never get to find out what happens to the crew of the Destiny. It’s Firefly all over again.

The new “Press Enter to Submit” Facebook Comments System

bbcentral — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:12:23 +0000

Today Facebook rolled out a change to their comments system.

The “Submit” button is now missing, and pressing the “Enter” key no longer adds a new line, it submits the comment.

How to Add Up/Down Swipe Functionality to Sencha Touch

bbcentral — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:41:54 +0000

Whilst working with the Sencha Touch mobile JS framework, I was disappointed to find that it only handles left/right swiping.

The application I’m working on requires swiping up/down/left/right to navigate, so I needed to add this functionality to the code. It was simple enough to hack the Sencha Touch JS file, but this would have prevented me from upgrading as future versions are released.

How to send mail from a Google Apps Group/List

bbcentral — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:55:22 +0000

If you use Google Apps for your domain, sometimes you have a “group” setup, such as info@yourdomain.com.

Mail sent to info@yourdomain.com is then forwarded to the members of the group, such as chris@yourdomain.com.

How to Remove Font Styles in TinyMCE

bbcentral — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 02:32:46 +0000

I use TinyMCE Editor on several of my projects, and I regularly have a problem with my users pasting content from Microsoft Word etc.

This means that I usually end up with multiple ugly font styles on the page that don’t match.

How to add an “Invite” tab to a Facebook Page

bbcentral — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:03:19 +0000

I was asked today how to add a tab to a Facebook Page to allow your fans to suggest the page to their friends.

Here’s the code:

<fb:request-form method="GET" type="YOUR PAGE" invite="true" content="DESCRIBE YOUR PAGE">
<fb:req-choice url="http://www.facebook.com/YOURPAGE" label="Check out!" />
<fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Tell your friends about YOUR PAGE" rows="5" cols="3" showborder="false" />
</fb:request-form>

Obviously you’ll need to add the new Static FBML tab to your page first, I won’t explain how to do this.

Why I’m ditching vBulletin for IP.Board

bbcentral — Sun, 16 May 2010 10:06:13 +0000

My website Blues Brothers Central has had a forum since early 2004. Initially I wrote my own basic forum, but it became clearly soon afterwards that it needed something more powerful.

PHP Variable Preparation Function for MySQL

bbcentral — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:06:17 +0000

This is a handy PHP function I wrote to prepare values for insertion into a MySQL database.

For example, if you prefer to use arrays of data and have a function automatically join them together:

$data = array();
$data['field1'] = 'value1';
$data['field2'] = 'value2';
$sql = build_sql_insert('table',$data);
// Returns INSERT INTO `table` (`field1`, `field2`) VALUES ('value1', 'value2');
$sql = build_sql_update('table',27,$data);
// Returns UPDATE `table` SET `field1`='value1', `field2`='value2' WHERE `id` = 27 LIMIT 1;