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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Spreedly reviewed; New PHP API released
Ever hear of Spreedly? It’s a fantastic service I’ve been using to manage the subscriptions for NeoBudget. Spreedly specializes in one thing: recurring transaction processing, and they do it extremely well A brief review of Spreedly In case you’ve never … Continue reading
Posted in PHP, Spreedly
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Secure username and password authentication with PHP
With PHP-based websites that I create, I use a very simple but secure method for handling authentication. This basic method is secure, protects the privacy of the user, and works with any browser that supports cookies. 1. The database The … Continue reading
Posted in PHP, Security
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Two types of websites
Something I have noticed over the years is that there are fundamentally two uses of the Web: web pages, and web applications. Each are created, developed, and maintained very differently. It is useful to understand which you are creating before … Continue reading
Posted in Observations, Usability
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Handling PHP form posts
It is very common to handle form posts at the top of a PHP script that prints HTML. This happens most frequently on CRUD screens where a form will post back to itself to handle the updates. There are several … Continue reading
Posted in PHP
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JavaScript performance
There is an exciting trend in the browser market today. A war is being fought over JavaScript performance. The browsers each seem to be trying to outdo each other with optimizing their JavaScript engines. Firefox has drastically improved their engine … Continue reading
Posted in JavaScript, MooTools, Performance
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Structure of a PHP website
PHP is free-form and has no imposed structure. It is just a scripting language. Those familiar with Rails will feel lost with this lack of structure. It’s easy to just throw another file in the document root to handle a … Continue reading
Posted in PHP
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MooZoom extension for MooTools
Apple.com at one point had a nifty effect on their website that would zoom a thumbnail image to a full image. Many people have created JavaScript solutions to imitate this feature. The problem with existing solutions (see FancyZoom and ReMooz) is that … Continue reading
Posted in JavaScript, MooTools, Performance
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Amazon S3 cloud storage and content delivery networks
Recently, I discovered the joy of cloud storage. Cloud storage is simply an outsourced facility used to host static content on the web. Since storage is cheap, and bandwidth is getting cheaper, these hosted services are starting to become very … Continue reading
Posted in Performance
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Is PHP a viable option?
PHP has gotten a bad rap in the past few years, especially from the Rails community. It’s often seen as the poor-man’s scripting language that should never be used for anything serious. In many ways, I think this is an … Continue reading
Posted in PHP
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