TheDrunkenEpic

MyTopix is still out there ...

Yeah, yeah, I know it's been a while, but I've been working on a super-secret project for the past few months. After which, I'll find the time to finish Great British Walks. Speaking of which, I should probably shoot myself in the face because it's been in development in some form or another for the past few years. Not sure what my problem is as I usually finish my contracted projects post haste. Honestly, Pete is the most patient guy in the universe... and I suck.

All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy. All work and no play makes Wil a dull boy.

MySQL: Sorting records by order they were requested ...

Ok, probably not the best title for this article, but it's Monday, so you'll just have to make due. Hopefully, it will make sense by the end of this entry and you will have walked away with a neat trick to hide up your sleeve.

When working with insert language here and MySQL, have you ever had a collected list of record ids that needed the rest of their corresponding record data? Probably. If you've been doing insert language here and MySQL development for more than a few months, it's likely you've done something like the following:

DomQuery Alpha Released!

Well, I did some cleaning up of the code and appropriately commented everything. I'll be adding this to a Google Code repository very soon and get a wiki going. The documentation is pretty poor, but there are inline comments to help you for the interim; this project is only a few days old, mind you.

Introducing DomQuery!!!

I'v been doing a great deal of work on the latest version of my XML/XSL-based framework, Sauc'd, and came to the conclusion that the DOMDocument class, and others related to the PHP library, while VERY useful, are fucking terrible to work with. By themselves, it takes a serious amount of code to iterate across an xml document just to find a node, or group of nodes, that you're looking for. And when you finally find what you need, you have to implement migraine-inducing logic just to manipulate the resulting nodes.

There's gotta be an easier way and, guess what, THERE IS! It's called XPath. XPath allows you to traverse over a DOM with ease and select only the data you want with a simple querying language. Think of XPath as the CSS selectors you use with popular javascript frameworks like jQuery, Mootools or Prototype. PHP 5.x comes with another library that you can use along side DOMDocument that makes applying XPath to your DOM possible.