PHP blogs

There's nothing worse than those long, ugly URLs with twenty variables in the query string. In recent years there have been a number of websites offering a free service where users can create shorter links to these complex URLs. While a short URL is great, the links provided by most of these sites are computer generated and impossible to remember. This weekend I programmed a simple tool to allow users to create their own links and normalize ugly URLs called normalurl.com. Just like other URL rewriting services, this website is completely free and allows anonymous users to easily create new URL redirects. However this ... (more...)

While doing some WordPress customization recently, I ran into a problem forcing lower case output for the month headers in my blog archives. It seems like a simple task but it turns out the WordPress templating engine prevents you from returning any strings from functions while within a template. You can use all the PHP you want, and call any function you want, but the functions in the end work by echo'ing out a result, rather than returning it. This seems like a pretty good security move, but it turns out to be pretty annoying when you're used to object oriented code and you want to do something simple like make an outputted date string into lower ... (more...)

I've been working on integrating an online shopping cart with in-house Quickbooks. I'm using SOAP (nuSOAP) and cURL / SSL to pass QBXML (Quickbooks XML) data through a port. Muchas gracias to Ryan Szrama of the open source project Ubercart for his extensive notes on Quickbooks / SOAP integration.I developed a pretty nice php class to pass data to the Quickbooks RDS server but the cURL requests kept failing, even though I opened the ports through the router and I had the computer they were passing data to on an FQDN DNS IP. It turns out I had to pass the IP through the server as well (SSH tunnel to: etc/hosts). It's all good though, ... (more...)

AJAX isn't typically thought of as being very search engine friendly. This is because search engines don't process any JavaScript, which AJAX is built upon. I'm using a ton of AJAX on this one search engine site. In fact, the search engine itself is done in AJAX since it makes for quick page loads and overall a great user experience. This is a big problem because we also, of course, want all the pages that our search engine indexes to be spidered by Google and the other search engines. Besides the AJAX search, the only other way users reach the bottom level pages is through an advanced search form, which of course Google can't ... (more...)