Making your website work with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)
OK probly well known by now. But if you're site is 'broken' in IE8, you could try the following which tells IE8 to work liek IE7. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />…
Review: Michael McIntyre on his 2009 Tour @ Nottingham’s Trent FM Arena on the 26/09/2009.
Well, we went and seen Michael McIntyre on his 2009 Tour @ Nottingham’s Trent FM Arena on the 26/09/2009.
It was part of my wifes birthday present as she has always quite liked him I thought it would be a good surprise. I bought the tickets and booked hotel 2 weeks before it, and managed to not tell her untill the night before – I said ‘pack a bag’, still not telling her what for though – infact she never knew right up untill we walked into the Trent FM arena!
Review: Tom Jones at the LG Arena, Birmingham
Tom Jones… not my usual taste, but thought it would be a good night so booked tickets to see him on 18/10/2009.
I also learnt that it was the ‘opening’ gig of the new LG Arena.
Cuba! – 27th August 2009 to 11th September 2009
When: 27th Aug 2009 to 11th Sept 2009
Where: Cuba
Resort: Cayo Coco & Havana
Hotel: NH Krystal Laguna & NH Parque Central
Where We Went…
This was our second visit to Cuba; we previously had a holiday here at the same time in 2007.
In 2007 our holiday was purely to Cayo Coco and the NH Krystal Laguna, one of the excursions we took was an overnight trip to see the Tropicana Nightclub – which is still one of the most memorable night I can recall. It included a very rushed but great introduction to Havana and from that we decided that if we ever went back we would spend more time in Havana.
And so we come to 2009! And we found ourselves searching for a good value holiday and all avenues lead to Cuba! – Again! After that was decided – prices coming up for Sharm el Sheikh and so on were about £1000 more than Cuba – we quickly decided we would like to do a 2-center so we could spend time in Havana (there is so much that could be written about Havana but shall try to keep it limited to what we done!).
Irish Vasectomy
After having their 11th child, an Irish couple decided that enough was enough, as they couldn't afford a larger house. So the husband went to his doctor and told him…
Need help with scrabble/anagrams?
My wife and I regularly play Scrabble like many thousands (millions) of people do... And if like me you hate getting beat all the time... I have recently created a…
Session Handling in PHP
Traditionally HTTP is a stateless protocol. That is it is made up of requests and responses and there is no notion of a ‘persistent connection’. This means that there is no way to have consistency or personalisation on the web since there is no way of knowing whom the request came from.
There are 2 primary methods – regardless of platform – that are used as a work-around for this.
First is a cookie. A cookie is a text file that lives on the client’s computer that store values set by your application. In general the file can only be access by the website/domain that issued it. The main problem with cookies is that they are un-trusted. A malicious user could modify the data and cause you problems!
The second – and better – solution is sessions. Similar to cookies, but they reside on the server, and cannot be directly modified by the client. When sessions are used, a cookie is still issued, but this simply holds the ‘session id’. This session id is generally sent by any request after it is created by the app including actions such as form submission. This ‘session id’ is a link to either a file or record on the server – depending how they are stored.
Need to make PHP ‘stop’… PHP wait timer
AJAX is great... but sometimes it's too quick if you're updating... So... How can I make the page wait for a few seconds, then proceed? Well there are 2 functions…
The Old Golfer
A circus owner runs an ad for a lion tamer and two people show up. One is a good looking, older retired golfer in his late sixties and the other…
Panda in bar….
A panda walks into a bar and orders some food, after he's done eating he shoots the bartender and starts leaving. "Hey, you can't do that!" said someone else in…
Search Engine Ranking via Title Tags
”How do I get my website page to rank well in search engines for a certain search term?”. While there are many techniques and tactics that can contribute to how your website ranks, one of the most fundamental is through the use of title tags. Title tags let search engines know what the main thrust of each web page is, and which categories or search terms to file the site under. By the way a title tag is what falls between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in your html code for each page.
Read and parse text files with PHP
Read and parse text files with PHP
Quite often, the need pops up to read and parse text files, typically these are plain text or CSV (exports from Excel, MS Access or some other source).
This guide will show you the pest practice for doing so.
Forum is here…
I have recently added a forum to my site. If you have any specific requests for some development (PHP,.NET ... anything), project management, search engine optimisation... or just want to…
PHP – Generate/Create strong passwords, uuid, random string
Very often the need to create passwords or some other ‘unique’ string be it a captcha or for use as unique identifier (UUID).
Here are a few functions I’ve used and refined over the years, 2 types, for password/random string generation and UUID generation.
Generating random strings is pretty simple as it’ll be a password.
However for a UUID there is always the slim chance it’s not unique.
(more…)
Signs of poor PHP ‘products’
If you are a professional developer (or aspiring) you will inevitably get asked to customise or even better “extend” existing wares.
If it’s a product you are familiar with great! If not I heartilly reccomend spending a little time investigating prior to accepting a job ( ultimatley if they are happy to give
access to their code, if not atleast tell you what’s been used so you cam repliocate it to play with briefly). I know this sounds like a lot of work wich ultimatley – if you
don’t accept the job – you have done for free, but it will save you masses of grief, tears and late nights if you do.
So, I have a few pointers to ‘be aware of’ while evaluating the job and to (generally) identify crappy PHP products/solutions quickly…