http://www.jellyandcustard.com Web Development Blog Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:15:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've recently been involved in a project whereby we'll convert a long URL into a short URL. This is by no means a new service - some sites have been doing this for ages. What we did this time round is get a really, really short url - something memorable too... ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2007/09/28/creating-short-urls/ Just a heads up to those of you who are interested in monitoring your site uptime. Pingdom are celebrating the release of their firefox extension by giving away free one year subscriptions to their service (normally $120/year). All you need to do is visit their site within the next 22 ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2007/08/24/pingdom-website-monitoring/ I needed a quick and easy to produce a human readable difference between two dates, and came up with the follwing: [php] [/php] Usage: Just ensure that you pass it two timestamps, the first one being the date FROM when you want to calculate, the second one being where you want it calculated TO. ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2007/08/07/finding-the-difference-between-dates/ I've often been asked how to not just send emails from PHP, but how to send an attachment within the email as well. To send an attachment, you need to add extra headers, base64 encode the file and so on. In fact, it's not very easy to do. However, there is ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2007/04/28/email-attachments-in-php/ Ilia, one of the PHP developers, has included a patch by Scott MacVicar into CVS for PHP 5.2 that allows you to set a httpOnly cookie instead of a normal cookie. A httpOnly cookie allows you to set a cookie that isn't accessible via Javascript, and so removes the possibility ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/08/11/httponly-cookies-in-php/ At the heart of every dynamic website is some form of data source, whether it's a simple flat text file, XML schema, or full blown database. In this article, I'll be addressing database table joins with SQL (specifically MySQL). Good database design should adhere to the third normal form, or "3NF". ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/08/10/sql-join-syntax-theta-vs-ansi/ Sometimes its necessary to find out whether a number is odd or even. When I initially hit upon the problem, my immediate thought was to use the modulus function % and inspect the result. However, a quick look at the PHP Manual showed a much easier way of determining whether a ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/07/13/odd-and-even-numbers/ Regular Expressions (regex for short) appear to a lot of people as the 'black art' of coding. Most languages, be it PHP, Java, C, .NET, VB etc have a way of using regular expressions - and they can certainly make your job easier. So lets start on our journey into ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/06/13/regular-expressions-in-php/ Its quite common for people to enter in their URL when signing up - but what if you want to verify that this is a real page? You can validate the URL using a regular expression up to a point, but all that tells us is that the URL is ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/05/31/determining-if-a-url-exists-with-curl/ A common practice at the moment is to shorten affiliate links into a more useable format. For example, I have an affiliate link for 123-reg.co.uk which is http://www.123-reg.co.uk/affiliate.cgi?id=AF106554. However, if I want to share that link with someone, I have to login to my control panel, and get the link. ... http://www.jellyandcustard.com/2006/05/24/subdomain-link-cloaking/