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It took me a few years to write, but I finally completed and published my 3 Part introduction to web development on phpFreaks.com. Eric of phpFreaks wrote a new publishing engine, which includes a print feature, and my recollection is that if you use that to print out the series, it ends up being 60 pages or so printed out on 8.5x11. I've received numerous emails from readers over the couple of years between Part I and Parts 2 & 3, asking when Part 2 was coming. At a certain point, I'm sure it looked as though this might be the Remo Williams of the PHP tutorial world. When I wrote Part I, I promised a sequel, but after a year had passed, I doubt anyone would have been willing to bet on Part 2, or even for that matter, would still care to read it.

While I'm not in a position to answer any questions about the importance of the series, I felt I bore a responsibility wholly of my own making, to deliver on the implicit promise of an article I had the hubris to entitle Part I. I'd written a portion of Part II wll over a year ago, where it sat on my hard drive, even as the emails continuted to dribble in, always with the question of "when or where was Part 2?" I finally sat down and finished it during a recent visit by Tracy's mom, Betty, who graciously occupied Niamh and allowed me several days of uninterrupted time at my desk. Because this was a programming article, it entailed writing and testing the code to be included, and generating the screen shots as illustration. In summary, it turned out to be a lot more time an effort than I had bargained for.

What really drove me to expend the effort, was the opportunity to dedicate the series to my Dad, Frank Rolston III who passed away unexpectedly, earlier this year. Dad was an advocate of "finish what you start."

Continue reading "3 Part PHP Development Tutorial at phpfreaks.com" »

When someone creates a link to a webpage you have, and someone clicks on that link, the standard browsers include code that carries over information that tells you what server "referred" you. This information shows up in your standard webserver log, and can also be grabbed by cgi and serverside scripts. For example in PHP that information can be gotten using the $_SERVER superglobal array:



As an aside, yes they did spell that REFERER, and I assume that the history of that misspelling goes back to the folks who created the CGI-BIN API.

The referrer comes in as part of the http header sent by the browser with its request, and it has always been possible to suppress or change the referer information, so most folks consider "referer" information as a useful indication of sites that have linked to you, but nothing you can depend on.

Lately, there seem to be more and more unscrupolous people marketing software to others which does nothing but waste bandwidth hitting long lists of sites and generating referrer entries in your web logs. Their reasoning is that you will check your logs (and every website reporting package includes information about the refers you get) and very possibly click on them to see how you're being linked, or what their site is about.

Continue reading "Referer spammers: New scourge of the web" »

Sometimes I see people attempting to use VARCHARS or CHARS to store dates in their MySQL database application. This is really fighting against MySQL, which has a variety of interchangeable date types. Internally MySQL is storing dates as numbers, which allows it to do all sorts of nice arithmetic and comparisons with very little effort on your part. For example, when you use a mysql DATE column to store a date, you don't have to worry about sortation, or comparing that date to another DATE, because MySQL already understands how to do those things internally. A lot of people also don't realize that they can output a DATE column in just about any way they choose using the DATE_FORMAT function. This causes people to shy away from using DATE, DATETIME, TIME, or TIMESTAMP columns, when they really should.

Continue reading "Exploring Mysql CURDATE and NOW. The same but different." »

I have been spending some of my free time as a moderator of the PHP forums at Phpfreaks.com, one of the most visited websites on the PHP language. The Tutorial is titled: LAMP, MySQL/PHP Database driven website design and development, and the List-Detail-Post paradigm. Part I. It's been read over 700 times already, which is a good start.

I released version 1.10 of IVWeather.class.php tonight. This release fixed a few bugs, and added localization support. Details available here.

I wanted to do a Laurel Canyon Cam for a while, and finally got one positioned in a location of the house that provides a decent if not perfect view of the inner canyon through a window. The cam faces north and takes a 640x480 image once every minute, transfering it to one of the gizmola webservers. I then overlay this information with the local temperature which I pull from an xml weather feed via a php class library (ivweather.class.php) that I've recently released. The included ivweather test page is live here.

The cam allows for positioning, and I'm experimenting with this, and hope to allow visitors to be able to move the cam into one of a series of presets via the web.

In addition I added a forum to support the various scripts and opensource projects I've released, as well as providing a place for folks to guest book, or leave questions or comments about any of the articles or blog type entries I've provided on the site over the last few years. Drop by and say hello.