PHP/MySQL blog posts
Internationalisation test
Stuart has posted a reminder of a useful trick for confirm that your application properly handles international characters.
I blame Tonga
You may have noticed that Clagnut was down for most of last week. The culprits were referrer spam robots maxing out my database connections, resulting in my ISP putting my account on hold.
Easy alpha transparent pngs
The BritPack logo on these pages is an alpha-transparent PNG and I use a little PHP script to deliver browser-specific code to IE6 and IE5.5 and a normal image to other browsers.
Enabling .htaccess in OS X
Out of the box, the Apache Web server that comes with OS X does not take any notice of .htaccess files. It took me a while to figure out how to get them working, so I thought I’d share.
New MySQL.com
Anyone care to deconstruct the redesign of MySQL.com? Here?s a few starters.
Full-text searching
Recently I’ve been playing around with MySQL full-text searching, including integrating it as Clagnut’s search engine. It’s good, but there’s a few limitations I had to get around.
Preview and pain
I’ve built a preview feature for blog comments, to make life easier since incorporating Textile into the commenting system. And talking of Textile, I’m struggling to fix a bug with its @ notation.
Normal service resumes
Friday Biscuit: Out of curiosity
I dug up Logie Baird
And I asked him what petrified forests see<
To make them all so scared. from Albert Hammond Bootleg on Back In The D.H.S.S. The website for this year’s Brighton Festival has got some thoughtful bits of…Good stuff
Good stuff on design, usability and elegant coding from Adrian Holovaty and Tantek Çelik. And Dean has introduced a great Google highlighting tool which highlights your Google search terms. See it in action here (click the top link to clagnut). Update: Cal Henderson…
Handy pointers
This month in DigitalWeb mag, Jeff Lash talks about using Information Architecture to promote business goals as well as user needs: Using information architecture to meet business goals by focusing on user needs not only proves your professional worth, but makes users happy…
Get geeked
For those budding (and indeed established) geeks out there, a few resources from O’Reilly to get you off on the right foot: Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands. All the way from agetty to znew – a very handy command-line companion with all options…
Easier searching
Well, having implemented my own search engine for clagnut, I’ve just discovered (via Dean) that MySQL now has its own search engine built in: As of Version 3.23.23, MySQL has support for full-text indexing and searching. I suppose I should be pleased and excited that…
Search soon
A handy little article illustrating a simple search engine in PHP (guess what I’ll be doing with it). Weather feed added courtesy of Multimap, of course. Finally, navigation added too (needs fixing in Opera)!
spam and stuff
A List Apart has a geeky double issue which has partly pissed me off. On the good side there’s a pretty good attempt to prevent spam bots reading email addresses which uses JavaScript and character encoding. On the disappointing side is an article explaining how to…