Building a complex system? Take easy steps.

Posted by Frank - March 21, 2010 - For techies

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After launching Fwd:Vault last month, it’s been a race to add the necessary features and functions to take the service broader. First on the list was more subscription tiers. I launched with just two: free and “unlimited everything.” I did this because, well, it was easy. Your instinct may be to dismiss my decision as [...]

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 [...]

Run your servers without timezone offsets

Posted by Frank - November 24, 2009 - For techies

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I recently made the decision to store times on Fwd:Vault systems in Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. I decided to do this because I have time-sensitive events happening along several dimensions. Email coming into the system has several timestamps associated with it: the user’s initial delivery, relay from their mail server, and receipt by the [...]

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(), [...]

Why include_once and require_once may make you a crappy coder

Posted by Frank - November 8, 2008 - For techies

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Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that the PHP community has, in general, started to favor include_once() and require_once() over the more standard include() and require(). For the uninitiated, the “_once” version of each function will check to see if a file has already been loaded. If it has, it will safely bypass loading [...]

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 [...]

Writing Modular Code – Make it Legible!

Posted by Frank - April 21, 2008 - For techies

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In the first post of my modular code series, we talked about overrides and how they are an important, and often overlooked, feature to consider in any code project. Today we will discuss an equally even more important concept: Ensure that others can quickly and easily read and understand your code. What? Seriously? Yes. Writing [...]