For the past few months I’ve been using TSW Web Coder for web development. It is an outstanding program. Unfortunately, my computer is too slow for it. The biggest problem was random crashes. Re-installs would help, but I got tired of it. So, out I went looking for a replacement. I found PHP Designer 2005.
PHP is an interpreted language; and as such, the computer needs to process the script each time it is run. Honestly, I don’t know much about the internal workings of PHP; so I don’t know how it handles comments in the code. More specifically, I don’t know how well it handles comments.
I have seen sites over the web going back and forth on whether it’s possible to have too many comments. Most I found said that it didn’t really matter; a few said it slowed execution. As I tend to be the type to over comment my code, I decided to test it for myself with some over the top commented code.
One of my web projects, like so many others, has a series of pages where data is displayed in a table. Often this data becomes too large for a single page, and it has to be broken down into separate pages. The 5 dollar word for this is pagination, and you’ve seen it; you just may not have known what it was called. When a page shows links to the next and previous pages and shows you on page x of y, this is what is being done.
Do you ever find yourself needing to shorten a string in PHP? Maybe return the first 25 words of a long story? Give this routine a try. It will return the first n words from a string, or the entire string if it is less than n words long.
Looking at the PHP documentation, it is not clear how to add multiple values for the same case in a switch construct. It seems that you should be able to do
case ("whatever" || "something"):
//Do something;
break;
But, you can’t. I tried, and it didn’t work. Fortunately, after much searching, I found a way to do it; and it’s not near as difficult as I was making it.
Open-source FireFox is putting pressure on Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market with over 13 million downloads since November. A companion email program, Thunderbird, was released earlier this month.
It should be pretty easy to get $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, or $_COOKIE variables in PHP code. The problem is that just entering $_GET[‘variable’] causes an error if the variable does not exist. What’s needed is a way to open the variable, and get a blank string if the variable is not defined.
If you have a online presence, whether it’s personal or business, you most likely are looking for input back from your visitors. But, be careful if you put your email address in a simple mailto: link. You will get spam, accept it.
But, there are a few tricks you can use to limit the spam you get.
Since several of my posts have source code in them, I needed a way to syntax highlight. I found a pretty good one for PHP code, but it didn’t do anything else.
While working on an article for a JavaScript function, I needed a highlighter. So, out searching I went.
While working on a web application, I found myself with the need for a Javascript function that would format dates to a consistent state. Several different functions exist out on the internet to perform this task, but none were exactly what I was looking for. Most of them did a fairly decent job of taking a time like ‘6:45′ and plugging the am or pm onto the end. Some even allowed military time so ’20:30’ would convert to ‘8:30 pm’. What I really needed was one that could format a time entered in a normal fashion, but also format if I enter a time like ‘0645’ or ‘2315’. So, I wrote my own.