Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Over a year ago I made the decision to publish the custom framework behind my personal website. There were a few reasons why I wanted to share the code, though the main driver was that I wanted to actively modernize my code base. And it worked. Since pushing my custom framework I've updated huge…
So Twitter stores and returns timezones in a relatively non-standard format. Well, non-standard from what PHP (and most languages) can understand. IANA is a fairly universal format and includes 548 zones, covering most, if not all, regional and political handling of UTC offsets and daylight saving…
A few weeks ago at work one of the managers asked me an interesting question. They were preparing an end-of-year presentation and needed to some stats for a few slides. Paraphrased, 'How many commits did the team deploy in 2014 and is there anything else interesting in those numbers?'.
Please note:…
It's pretty easy to shuffle a list/array in PHP. There's a function, shuffle(), that will simply randomize the order of elements. It also assigns new keys to the array, possibly a side effect of the internal algorithm that it uses. However, if you want to partially shuffle an array, there is no…
Last week I wrote a little post and script to archive a directory. This can be really helpful if you're looking to backup some legacy code, especially a deeply nested old website, but what if the files only live online? How do you reach out to the internets and archive (scrape) a front-end?
There…
Recursively tracing out a full directory and saving the files in an archive seemed like a fairly easy thing to do. After all, I knew how to glob() and was reasonably sure that the environment I was working in had the ZIP extension built into the PHP. But wait... Recursion? glob() does not handle…
Sending plain emails with PHP can be pretty easy. On a basic level you can just call mail(), which triggers the server-side sendmail command. Pass in three parameters (a recipient email address, subject, and message) and you're done. When you start looking into file attachments and HTML messages,…
Over the last few months I've been having a lot of fun with the Twitters. It all started simply enough, just upgrading my lifestream to pull from an authenticated feed. Now I'm playing with a few Twitter bots, looking into the streaming API, and even working on a PHP library with David Kryzaniak.…