Mike Boone, in the comments section of yesterday’s entry on searching (“Updated Search“), correctly points out that searching my site for a word that is less than four characters in length (like “php” or “cow”) does not work—no results are returned. Obviously, since I write about PHP on occasion, this is untenable. The problem is… Continue reading Searching and Minimum Word Length
Category: Computers
Updated Search
I’ve been vastly updating the search functionality on my site. I’m still using MySQL‘s built-in FULLTEXT indexing to perform searches, but I’ve made the results page look a lot more (okay, almost exactly like) Google‘s. The main differences are that I’m not paginating search results (yet)—all searches limit to 10 results—and that I’m showing a… Continue reading Updated Search
PHP Development Hint
Here’s a general hint for PHP development: A quick and easy way to check for syntax or compile errors without uploading the PHP script to the Web server and testing online through a browser is via the command line. It’s obvious, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but I’ve been… Continue reading PHP Development Hint
Computer Languages History Timeline
From the Computer Languages History site comes an impressive computer languages timeline chart. It’s as much a language family tree as it is a timeline. Very nice, though a little hard to read.
Disposable Paperboard Computer
Routed via Slashdot comes the story of the disposable paperboard computer, which can “can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data.” It even has a generous 32KB of memory. After reading about this, I couldn’t help but thinking that we’ve already had disposable, paper-based computers around since, well, forever. It’s called pen and… Continue reading Disposable Paperboard Computer
Rasmus is the Man
… Rasmus Lerdorf, that is, the creator and godfather of PHP. He’s got an article on the Oracle Technology Network titled “Do You PHP?” that’s definitely worth a read. Here’s a sample: What it all boils down to is that PHP was never meant to win any beauty contests. It wasn’t designed to introduce any… Continue reading Rasmus is the Man
CMS Ranting
Gadgetopia has a good rant on content management that I’m just getting around to posting about. (CMS’s Should Manage Content, Not Display It) My solution was to write a function library to make raw database calls to get everything out in a nice, big, nested PHP array. I essentially built an API for the CMS… Continue reading CMS Ranting
Formatting changes
I love templates. I was able to make some changes to the site formatting in mere minutes thanks to templates. Change two files, and it all propagates throughout the site. Lovely. I use a modified version of the Template class from the PHP Base Library for just about any PHP programming project I work on… Continue reading Formatting changes
PHP: Best of Breed
I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while now, mainly to point to some really good PHP applications and spread some kudos. There are many good applications and classes out there, but I’m limiting to those that I’ve had hands-on experience with. Even so, this is hardly a comprehensive list; I may do… Continue reading PHP: Best of Breed
Content Management: Spokane Database Schema
As promised, here’s my proposed database schema (using MySQL) for my Spokane Personal Publishing System. It’s long and technical, read on at your own risk.