ImageMagick installing and exploring it, a good alternative for the GD library
Although PHP GD library handles basic image operations quite good, you have probably run into the limitations of GD library as well, it is often slow, memory intensive and a bit complicated to use for advanced image effects. ImageMagick however is a very good alternative. It is an opensource software suite licensed under a BSD style license from IM itself. ImageMagick provides in all functionality that can be accomplished with the GD library but even goes a step further with support for more advanced image edit techniques. An example of such a technique is the recently added “liquid scaling” feature, this is a content aware scaling option. Read the rest of this entry »
Git tutorial, getting started with Git
Below is a short comprehensive description of getting Git up and running in just a few minutes. I personally use OSX as a development machine and so the installation part of Git will cover an installation on OSX. If you like to install Git on another platform please take a look at the Git installation documentation. There are a lot of other ways to install Git, but the one described below seems to bring the least hassle on OSX.
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Input validation with filter functions
Introduction
Although PHP has a lot of filter functions available, I found that still to many people are using (often incorrect) regular expressions to validate user input. The filter extension is simple, standard available and will fulfill the common validations. Below some pratical examples and things to consider when working with PHP filter functions.
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Tips that prevent your mailing being marked as ‘spam’
Introduction
The last couple of weeks I was working on writing a mailing/newsletter system myself. One of the first questions that came up was “how do I prevent that my newsletter will be marked as spam”. Although this article has nothing to do with PHP I still like to put it in the spotlight. I will give some tips on how to avoid your mail being marked as spam, some you will know, others you won’t.
How is determined if my email is spam?
Mostly this is done by so called spam filters (server side or client side), some well known examples:
Some of them work with the Bayesian filter. This filter is one of the Read the rest of this entry »
PHP alternative, lazy syntax
Alternative, lazy what?
Consider the next example:
We could write the above like this: Read the rest of this entry »
Passing the Joel test – step 1 setting up a versioning system for Windows
Until the last PHP conference I attended (the PHP benelux conference 2010) I used an normal Windows XP installation with a Zend Server CE installation on it at home, and yeah it worked. At the office we already used versioning, bug tracking and some other Joel points. I could see the advantages clearly, even if I was developing on my own at home but I just couldn’t find time and motivation to start converting my home server to something more serious. That is until I attended a track on the Joel test of lornajane. (Slides are available here). I thought it would be a nice idea to keep my Windows installation on the server during this adventure to pass the Joel test. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction into SOAP, setting up a simple webservice with PHP SOAP
I was asked to create a simple webservice that would allow us to transfer a intranet post to an external CMS. In this post I will explain the steps you must take to set-up a simple webservice with the PHP SOAP extension.
The first step, create a simple class that we will use to request data from
We will create a class with one method that returns a string with the parameter we called it. The method will accept one parameter and will check if the value is correct.
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Limit the number of newlines in a string
A very short blog post this time. I often use the following short function to limit the number of breaks/newlines in comments that people can submit on a news article or other user input. You can easily limit the number of characters in a comment by using the PHP strlen function, but the comment can still use a lot of vertical space on your website if the user uses 5 breaks in his comment. See the function below to prevent this type of comments:
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Using the Google currency converter
For a project I’m working, I needed to get shipping rates from the UPS API (a blog post about this will follow soon).
The problem I ran into was that the UPS API returns the shipping rates with the currency of the country where the rates for are asked, so you can’t force it to always return the rates in EUR.
One solution to convert the prices is to make a very big array with all currency rates in it. I then would maintain the array every day at 9′o clock to check if the rates weren’t changed. Right, that’s not an option.
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8 Netbeans tips to speed up development
Netbeans is a great editor, below some tips to get the best out of it.
Use the shortkey for “Last Edit Location” default: CTRL+Q
Often I’m editing file and browse to another location inside the file. To go back to where I was Last Edit Location is a nice feature, it replaces the use of ctrl-z + ctrl-y to go to the previous location without changing anything. By htting the key multiple times all edit locations will be traveled.
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