jQuery 1.4 released

Posted by Frank - January 20, 2010 - For techies

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The latest and greatest version of jQuery, version 1.4, was released on January 14, the birthday of jQuery’s original launch. Bugfixes and improvements abound! The jQuery team has put together a site devoted to the new version, called the 14 days of jQuery, covering the major version changes as well as infrastructure updates coinciding with [...]

Get domain out of any URL string (yes, really)

Posted by Frank - October 27, 2009 - For techies

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It’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, [...]

Find the second (or third, or fourth) occurence in a string

Posted by Frank - March 30, 2009 - For techies

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PHP includes some handy functions to find the first or last occurrence of a given string token in a string: strpos and strrpos. However these functions are limited to just the first occurrence; what if I want to know the location of the second token’s position, or the third? These problems usually result in some [...]

Extract email addresses from tags

Posted by Frank - January 15, 2009 - For techies

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Ran into another cool hurdle today for my Fwd:Vault development. When I grab the message content to archive it in the system, first thing I do is scrub it out to ensure that (a) it displays properly, and (b) there are no misbehaving characters. I grab both plain text and HTML email formats (if present), [...]

Versatile random string generator

Posted by Frank - December 18, 2008 - For techies

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A cursory glance around the web will reveal a ton of PHP-based random string generators. With enough looking you’ll find generators that do any of the following: Strings with letters Strings with numbers Strings with letters and numbers Uppercase, lowercase Fixed, variable length strings Option to include symbols Problem is, none of them ever incorporated [...]

Easily calculate dates and times in different timezones

Posted by Frank - November 25, 2008 - For techies

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Building off my last post, where I showed you how to easily display any public Twitter feed on your site, I ran into another problem: the dates that are delivered by the Twitter API all reflect Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Now I thought about going the old route and doing some convoluted math using date(), [...]

Format a RFC2822 date for mysql datetime fields

Posted by Frank - September 30, 2008 - For techies

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I was crash-coursing myself on PHP’s IMAP functionality recently, one of the first questions I came across was how I might store the date from an e-mail header in a MySQL DATETIME field. I was afraid I was going to have to parse out the string using a bunch of calls to substr(), but then [...]

Automating SSH or SFTP in scripts

Posted by Frank - September 29, 2008 - For techies

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Recently I needed to automate copying a MySQL database to a backup server. We keep a copy of our site and DB on this box in the event that our main systems go down, or there’s a problem with our internet connection. It’s kind of like a poor man’s colocation setup. I actually prefer the [...]

Using SQL computations in WHERE clause

Posted by Frank - August 8, 2008 - For techies

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When writing SQL statements, sometimes I want to filter the result set based on a value that must be computed out of the stored data. Here’s an example: I want to see which widgets have been sold more than once, and how many times each of those remaining widgets have sold. Obviously we could pass [...]