Matt Williams

My webserver chronicles – Part 1: Mail server

Matt — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:27:57 +0000

Recently I decided to have a go at setting up my own Mail Server on my Ubuntu dedicated box. I assumed this would be a simple task as there are so many tutorials out there. But the most challenging task turned out to be filtering through the articles that will more than likely leave your

Delving into Images with PHP, Exif and ImageSize – the not so secret art

Matt — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:39:24 +0000

Recently I have been tasked with automatically compiling, tagging and indexing images added to an application via FTP. The images had been tagged using Adobe Bridge or Photoshop, anyone with knowledge of Adobe products will be familiar with tagging images. For those who aren’t, you can add descriptions, titles, ratings, keywords and copyrights (to name

Cropping images with CodeIgniter and jQuery

Matt — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:51:55 +0000

The art to having a website with decent imagery is to allow the user/administrator to crop the images. Despite advancing web technologies, I still cannot trust a computer to scale, resize or crop an image without the resulting image being of someones foot. There are certain ‘off-the-shelf’ products, mainly for ASP.net, with very little introduced

Implementing oAuth Twitter with Code Igniter

Matt — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:23:35 +0000

On August 31st Twitter will be axing basic auth GET requests, which is being overtaken by the more secure oAuth, there are a few tutorials out there on how to use oAuth and how to get started creating an app with CodeIgniter, but not many with actually helpful advice so here is my 2 penneth.

Detecting Mobile devices with WURFL and PHP

Matt — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:33:18 +0000

The Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL) is an open source device library which describes itself as follows: The WURFL is an “ambitious” configuration file that contains info about all known Wireless devices on earth. Of course, new devices are created and released at all times. While this configuration file is bound to be out of

Codeigniter Database session fix

Matt — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:07:18 +0000

For weeks I tolerated the annoyance of CodeIgniter’s Session library logging my out continuously, saying to myself “I works…kind of… ill fix it later”. Eventually the problem started affecting AJAX method calls, large file uploads and simple CRUD operation forms so I began trawling the internet for a fix. After hours and hours, I found

Integrating PayPal with PHP and IPN

Matt — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:21:04 +0000

PayPal has a huge API reference to integrate it’s services into any website. But from personal experience I found that the theory is far more simple than the practice. There are various methods to implement PayPal’s services including Soap webservices with ‘Express Checkout’ and ‘Website Payment Pro’. This tutorial will focus on ‘Website Payment Pro’

Top 5 must have WordPress plugins

Matt — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:54:08 +0000

I thought it was high time I released a list of the best plugins that I use with my WordPress installation. So here goes… 1. All in one webmaster This plugin thanks to ArpitShah is a bundle of all the best tracking and analytics solutions available to the web and I would highly recommend it.

Ajax callback validation routines with CodeIgniter

Matt — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:09:52 +0000

The CodeIgniter Form_Validation library is an extremely useful tool especially the ability to extend all core routines. Some validation requires real time PHP & MySQL processing, for example checking an email against those already registered with your site. To use a PHP function to return values to the jQuery validate function, the only important theory

Client side searching with jQuery

Matt — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:27:00 +0000

In my previous post about sorting data I explained the brilliance of client side sorting using jQuery. When researching various other jQuery plugins I discovered tablesearch which can be invaluable when searching smaller data sets. As in my previous jQuery post we will start with a standard HTML table, giving it an id of “myTable”