Uncover Your Browser’s Secret Back Button Functionality
While developing PHP applications, I occasionally find myself pressing the browser's back button over and over during the testing phase. Using keyboard shortcuts can speed up the process, but it turns out that there's another, possibly faster, way. [Continue reading]
Check for Broken Links with PHP Part 3: Targeted Search
Over the past few weeks we discussed a broken-link checker which leverages PHP's cURL library and DOMDocument. As the code stands, the script checks every link within a given page. That's great if we want to check every link, but what if we want to target a specific section of a page? Let's take a look at how this can be accomplished. [Continue reading]
Check for Broken Links with PHP Part 2: Capture Redirected Links
The link checker discussed previously was designed to report obviously broken links. There is, however, another type of broken link that isn't reported. When a web page is renamed or moved, a redirect may be created so visitors of the old page are automatically sent to the new location. To detect these types of broken links, we'll need to make a few minor modifications. [Continue reading]
Check for Broken Links with PHP Part 1
One aspect of managing a website that I want to streamline is the process of checking for broken links. Clicking on all of those links manually can be tedious. Especially if you have a page dedicated to posting external links. Now I know there are link-checking services available, but I've been looking for an excuse to experiment with cURL which is available through PHP. For those interested, I wanted to share what I have so far. [Continue reading]
Year-End Review and Goals for 2014
With the year almost over, it's time to review my goals for 2013. And since announcing those goals publicly seemed to be good motivation, let's try again for 2014. If you have any thoughts about the review or the goals for next year, please let me know in the comments section. [Continue reading]
Incorporate Recent RSS Entries into MailChimp as a Bulleted List
MailChimp's RSS-to-email feature provides a special tag for automatically linking to the recent articles of a blog. However, the tag doesn't add bullets before each article title, making it difficult to distinguish which article is which. I've tried a number of things to add the bullets, some suggested by MailChimp support, with no luck. It turns out that there is a way—just not using the standard tag. [Continue reading]
Quickly Enter Today’s Date in phpMyAdmin
With the date-field types, phpMyAdmin provides a pop-up calendar for quickly selecting a time frame. However, I commonly create new entries by editing an old row and choosing the "Insert as new row" option. Using older entries causes the calendar to show dates based on the original entry. Since phpMyAdmin doesn't have an option for jumping to today's date, I end up clicking through the calendar options or typing the date manually. Well there's another, sometimes faster, way. [Continue reading]
Pre-Populate Forms that Are Hosted on Other Websites
Lately, I've been more involved with submitting content to other organizations' websites. Getting indexed on those websites helps make the content more widely available. Since the information being submitted is already in a database or doesn't change from submission to submission, it would be nice if I didn't need to re-type or copy/paste everything. Luckily, there is a quicker way. [Continue reading]
Avoid Overly Complicated Code by Stopping Scripts Early
The if construct is commonly used within PHP. It lets us execute blocks of code based on certain condition(s) being met. We can even layer if constructs within if constructs to perform operations that are very specific to the task at hand. While this gives us greater control over how the overall script executes, there may be cases where piling on the if constructs can lead to unnecessary complications. [Continue reading]
Compose Email Faster with Outlook’s AutoText Feature
When composing emails, I find myself typing certain phrases over and over. Some phrases are used so often that the words come naturally without much thought. Other times, I need to dig through my sent mail searching for how it was written previously. To save time, I've been looking to Microsoft Outlook for help. That's when I stumbled across the AutoText feature. [Continue reading]
