Interesting Things

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

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:12:50 +0000

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

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:47:17 +0000

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 [...]

Using Texter to speed up web design/development

Richard Bradshaw — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:21:17 +0000

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 [...]

Enable better caching on your website using PHP

Richard Bradshaw — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:34:12 +0000

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 [...]

7 differences between Linux and Windows

Richard Bradshaw — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:04:54 +0000

Background Having mainly used various linuxes over the last few years, I’ve returned to using Windows 7 on my main desktop (out of curiosity) and XP on my work laptop (out of the fact it’s not mine!). Thought I’d share somethings I’ve noticed now I’m moving between them daily. 1. Windows doesn’t have a proper command line The [...]

Friendfeedifying your feeds

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:17:24 +0000

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. To check how your feed renders in Friendfeed, check out their feed tester. This gives [...]

5 terrible SEO ideas

Richard Bradshaw — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:43:44 +0000

Having looked at many small businesses websites, I’ve compiled a list here of 5 things that many of them are doing wrong with regards to SEO. I’m not saying that SEO isn’t important, but some techniques just don’t work. So, here goes… 1. Keyword Stuffing What’s it mean? It’s tempting to think that search engines love keywords, especially [...]

5 ways to make using bash more productive

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:33:02 +0000

If you are using Linux or a Mac these days, then you likely have bash as your default shell. It generally comes with a few nice features (tab-completion, history etc.), but there are a few tips and tricks which will make it much nicer to use. Here’s a run down of my favourite 5. These tips [...]

Writing dynamic XML sitemaps using PHP

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:41:44 +0000

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 [...]

3 Ways Google Applications can enhance teaching

Richard Bradshaw — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:17:56 +0000

Having recently started working at a school where email, calendars, documents etc are hosted by Google Applications, I felt that it would be worth while incorporating these into my teaching and planning. This post describes the benefits I have found from this in the first few weeks, and will outline some plans that I have [...]