Latest Edited: 06/02/12

9 Useful PHP functions – Including string compression and functions with an arbitrary number of arguments.

PHP Security Guide – A really nice security guide for sites built in PHP.

Latest Edited: 06/02/12

Differences Between jQuery .bind() vs .live() vs .delegate() vs .on() – Exactly as the title suggests!

jQuery Fundementals Course – An excellent free course in jQuery by Rebecca Murphy, hosted on Github.

Basically I was hitting issues that when I was viewing the variables available to a view (using the CakePHP Debug Toolbar) were I was noticing that I was bringing back far more information than I needed (and occasionally, not enough)

Bringing back too much information is never a good thing, it is inefficient and a possible security leak.

The reason for this is that in CakePHP the Read, Find or FindAll takes in a value called Recursive.

To set the level of recursion you do something similar to the following;

$this->Model->recursive = 1

There are 4 settings, which can be read about in detail in the CakePHP Book, but basically you can use this to make Read, Find or FindAll not perform JOINS (or perform more of them!).

Be sure that your selections only ever return the data they need to and no more.

Vendor prefixes in CSS serve the purpose of allowing browsers to play about with their own implementations of new CSS rules or adding stuff totally unique to them.

There have been arguments back and forward about how useful these are in production systems and there have been some great tools made to try and reduce how much time we spend in vendor prefix hell, personally I think anything that drives the web forward is a good thing and I think prefixes do that.  But anyway, enough pre-able.

What I would like to propose is that since we have vendor prefixes anyway, could we use them to target specific browsers with already known rules.

I have an edge case where it would be really nice to be able to do something like;

margin-bottom: 59px;
-webkit-margin-bottom: 39px;

What this would allow me to do is set the standard margin-bottom to 59px (if it not being 60px makes you twitch, join the club!) but in webkit browsers I would like the margin to be slightly smaller.

I know this could be misused and end in really sloppy, massive CSS files – but if used with care (which I promise I would do) it would be a neat way to achieve these odd little hacks that occasionally we need to do.

According to Wikipedia the word canonical in a Computer Science sense means “the usual or standard state or manner of something”, in terms of web development canonical URLs are the preferred URLs as picked by the web developer. So when a website has multiple URLs for the same content specifying a canonical URL tells search engines which link they should display to the public.

To use canonical URLs you should place something like the following in the head of your document;

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category/my_page.html">

Unfortunately this is only a signal, not a directive – so search engines don’t need to follow this, but from what I can see it appears to be a pretty strong signal.

What is cool is that the canonical link can point to another domain alltogther – this could be useful if you don’t have access to do other forms of redirection.

Base URLs

Base URLs let the web developer specify a documents base URI explicity, this ties in nicely with canonical links which can be relative if you wish and can help with duplicate content issues for linked content coming from your site.

To use base URLs you should place something like the following in the head of your document;

<base href="http://www.example.com/category/my_page.html">

At the first pass you are probably thinking that this is the exact same as the canonical URL we wanted to include, the difference with this is that then we do something like;

<img src="../img/myimg.png" alt="my test image" />

And this would relate to http://example.com/img/myimg.png – pretty cool eh?

This will basically mean that your canonical URL can be replicated throughout relative links in your site, which improves the chances that search engines will index the URL you want them to index.

I don’t care about SEO – why should I do this?

Some people just don’t care about ranking well in search engines, and that is fine, but I still think you should look into implementing these tags were appropriate on your website – here is why.

I am currently working on a legacy project that is a site that accepts multiple domain names, it then uses some database magic to display different sites depending on the domain. Simple enough. The only issue is that the original developers didn’t think about the need to provide a canonical URL, so b.com/a/b/c and x.com/a/b/c show the same content across different domains and unfortunately somewhere along the line Google has indexed ‘b’ as sitting under x.com instead of b.com – which just looks wrong (even if you don’t care about rank)

Granted this is just an edge base, but it is one of many that can be solved by the correct application of both canonical and base urls.

Further Reading:

Canonical Links

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Base Links

• http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.4

It isn’t that I have anything particularly against the protocol, over the years it has served me well and it still continues to do so when I have the need to use it, but FTP (especially the type tied into most IDEs) can lead you down some pretty scary alleyways on the way to FFFFFUUUUUUU-ville. Here are a couple of things that can happen, I am sure you can think of more;

• You can overwrite a file you didn’t mean to overwrite.
• You can upload information you don’t really need to upload (an entire directory, for instance)
• You can delete a file locally that will never be deleted on the server.

Overwriting a file you didn’t mean to can cause a lot of headaches – I am sure I am not the only one who has uploaded an incorrect config file in their time and then crapped themselves when the database suddenly won’t connect. With something like version control the headache is mitigated by always being able to roll back, FTP however, not so much.

Uploading something you don’t want to upload could be if you have a directory of thumbnails but you also have the originals images in them (bad practice, but I am sure it happens!). You upload the entire directory and you inadvertently upload extra information. To a lesser extent this can happen with things like the .svn folders that SVN leaves at its arse.

My final point is that deleting a file locally (in your IDE) does not then attempt to delete the linked file, or at least it doesn’t in most of the IDEs I have used, this means that over the course of a project your webserver could become bloated with unnecessary files that could cause potential security risks and if nothing else will increase the size of any backup you take – potentially confusing people who need to access the files live on the server for whatever reason.

It is this last point that really has me worried, files being left on a server that people are maybe assuming are gone.

The old way of developing websites normally involved working on your files in some text editor, maybe testing them locally and then opening up your FTP client to transfer the files onto a dev or test server, then once you were happy you would transfer them from your local machine again onto a live environment.

This way of doing things just sucks, far too much human interaction, far too much scope for error and it is just boring.

The next step was for development environments to include FTP modules to allow you to automatically push code from your local machine to your development or live environment, this takes some of the human interaction out of the equation, but I think this is broken and dangerous.

IDEs have made us feel like there is less scope for error and have taken the monotony out of pushing data using FTP but I think with this relaxed process of uploading comes a relaxed process to how you handle your files and as I have already mentioned FTP is not brilliant at letting you recover from making sloppy mistakes.

Without firing up an FTP client and seeing on the one hand your local files and on the other your server’s files you are less likely to notice when you are upload a load of images that maybe shouldn’t be uploaded, or that certain server directories are full of files long since deleted on your local machine.

As I said at the start of this article, I do think FTP has served us well, and I think that FTP inside IDEs is a good idea for a couple of use cases, but it has made things too easy without giving us the safety net of something like a good version control system.

Of course the current best practice tends to be to use some form of version control coupled with some type of deployment solution and this is what I think people and companies should be doing (but that is an entirely different blog post for another night!)

If you are using FTP for the vast majority of your web project needs, I would urge you to research and consider other methods, I think it will lead to safer development and a happier you!

For those that don’t know, Fizz Buzz is a children’s game where you count upwards from 1, each time the number is divisible by 3 they have to shout Fizz, each time it is divisible by 5 they have to shout Buzz and each time it is divisible by both 3 and 5 they have to shout ‘FizzBuzz’.

Obviously this is a trivial task for a seasoned programmer, but it is a nice example to get used to the syntax of a new language.

This was my first attempt – pretty boring and self-explanatory;

for i in (1..20)
    x = ''
    x += "Fizz" if (i % 3 == 0)
    x += "Buzz" if (i % 5 == 0)
    puts(x.empty? ? i : x)
end

My thinking was that I wanted to keep my puts to a minimum and maintain readability, I think this does just that.

Once I completed the task I started looking around for more creative solutions and stumbled on this code;

Some of the solutions are just awesome – fizzbuzz_sequence7_reverse especially wins it for me and I think if ever I need to show anyone Fizz Buzz I will think up more of the ‘exotic’ ways of doing it like these guys did.

Here will be a growing list of bookmarklets that I use regularly.

Getting coordinates from Google Maps

Code:

javascript:javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

Use Case:

When you are attempting to get the coordinates of a location, you can use Google Maps to find the location and click on this bookmarklet, it will alert the coordinates onto the screen.

Originally From:

https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/maps/base-map-data/Vp90rs-mZCE

Creating Wireframes from websites

Code:

The code is all on the official website.

Use Case:

When you like the look of a design but want to almost reverse engineer it into its basic parts.

Originally From:

http://www.wirify.com/

Here is what I have done to update PHP5.2 to PHP5.3 using apt-get;

You will need to execute the following commands as root or sudo them.

1. Back everything up.
2. Make sure everything is backed up (seriously).
3. Add some lines to your sources list
   vi /etc/apt/sources.list

   # php5.3
   deb http://php53.dotdeb.org oldstable all
   deb-src http://php53.dotdeb.org oldstable all

4. Request some public keys;
    gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv-key 89DF5277 
   gpg -a –export 89DF5277 | sudo apt-key add -
5. Update your system
   apt-get update
   apt-get dist-upgrade 
6. (optional, I had to do this for my GD library) update php5-gd
   apt-get -f install php5-gd
7. Test your sites.
8. Take a new backup with your new setup.
   


var term = $('.twitter-anywhere-tweet-box-editor').val();
$(".stream-item:contains('" + term + "')").css('display','none');


If you save it as a bookmarklet you can use this by typing the term you want to disappear from your timeline in the search box and then clicking the bookmarklet.

javascript:var term = $('.twitter-anywhere-tweet-box-editor').val();$(".stream-item:contains('" + term + "')").css('display','none');

That has no practical application really as it doesn’t persist over page reloads and only lets you do one phrase at a time, but it helped me vent some frustration at dumb tweets!