Over on php.net, they announced a full implementation of a search field suggestion box: The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages. Whenever you type something… Continue reading PHP Suggest
Tag: Programming
PHP code rant
This is a mini-rant on PHP that can be safely avoided by non geek types. This post over on PHP Everywhere caught my attention, vis-a-vis programming semantics and practice. Basically, inside a switch statement, someone placed the default block before the case blocks and was surprised when that default condition executed, and the “expected” case… Continue reading PHP code rant
COBOL
From Tim Bray tonight comes this amazing fact: There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there are (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them).
overLIB
Pointer to a totally excellent JavaScript library for creating popups: overLIB. I’ve been using it the last few days to put together a dynamic drop-down menu for a Web project at work. And I’ve used it before to create popup context menus and tooltips. It’s simply one of the best JavaScript tools out there that… Continue reading overLIB
Search Patch
While waiting to find out if my hosting provider will change the minimum fulltext word length for MySQL, here’s what I’ve done in the meantime to deal with viable three-character search terms. First, I split the search string into the component words (an array). I subtract any stopwords (I’ve got a big list) and for… Continue reading Search Patch
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.
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
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
Thoughts on Content Management
I’ve been thinking a long time about content management systems (which isn’t surprising considering developing various types of website CMSes is what I do for a living), how they pertain to weblogs and similar types of content, how to implement them in PHP and MySQL, and what type of system I would really like to… Continue reading Thoughts on Content Management