HTTP authentication is the easiest way to make a page or area of a website secure. It’s very easy to accomplish with pure PHP, so no web server configuration is required making it a lot more portable. Read more
Twitter sends notifications of new followers and direct messages by email. While you can use the API to keep track of those things it wastes hits and it’s incredibly inefficient especially for accounts with minimal activity. Read more
When I get bored while working I choose something from a list of things I want to have a go at someday. Some things are “read this blog post”, or “learn about this technology”, but most are along the lines of “make this”. Today I picked a “make this” item… to implement the game Fortune’s Tower. Read more
A common logic pattern that’s seen when dealing with GET and POST parameters in PHP is to check whether the array element exists, then set another variable to that or a default. It usually looks something like this… Read more
One of the pillars of a scalable website is ensuring that only activity which is required to build a page should be performed during the processing of a page request. Activities that fall under this category commonly include sending emails, recording statistics and general housekeeping such as removing temporary files. Read more
Several templating systems exist for PHP, but since PHP was originally created as a templating language I’ve never understood why more developers don’t use pure PHP in their view layer. The following snippet is a small function that facilitates precisely that. Read more
Really short snippet today – a password generator. Not much to say about this one since it’s pretty simple. Pass it the length of password you want and optionally a string of valid characters it can use and it’ll give you a random string back. Read more
Today’s snippet describes the singleton pattern. The singleton pattern is a method of creating a class that statically maintains an instance of itself and ensures that no other instances can be created. This is useful for classes that implement app-wide services such as logging, DB access and other shared resources. Read more
Pretty boring snippet today, but I find it immensely useful. My time class provides representations of periods from OneMinute to OneYear. It only has one method which will calculate an absolute time by adding a given time period to the current time. You can optionally provide a format intended for use by the date function to return a formatted string rather than a timestamp. Read more
Today’s snippet is a complete class for normalising cookie usage. In addition to providing methods to set and get cookies you can also check to see if a cookie exists, is empty and delete them without needing to concern yourself with more detail than necessary. Features include… Read more
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts showing snippets of code from my personal library. My intention is to highlight useful techniques I’ve developed or picked up over the years. Comments, questions, suggestions and requests are welcomed. Read more
Ok, so the title is a little misleading, but hopefully only until I explain what I mean. The first session refers to PHP sessions, and the second refers to the concept of sessions. Maybe it needs a little more explanation than that. Read more
TLDR: If you’re using PHP you want PHPMailer. If you’re using something else there’s probably an equivalent library (Google is your friend). However, regardless of how you do it you should always consider the impact of your email activities on your users. Read more
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