New del.icio.us built with symfony

October 02 0 Comments Category: Development, Stumbling

What better endorsement can PHP as a language and symfony as an enterprise framework for that language get than Yahoo! building the new delicious service with them. That’s the news from the official symfony blog, where they also note Yahoo! will be contributing their bug fixes and extensions back to the symfony community.

Multiple local websites with Apache in Windows

August 25 8 Comments Category: Development, Projects

Recently I’ve been working on 3 or 4 projects at the same time on my desktop. While my primary IDE has changed to Visual Studio (even for PHP with VS.PHP), the rest of my development environment is mostly the same as it’s been since December. My projects are growing in code size, and the amount [...]

Reduce Load By Storing Sessions in Memory

June 01 0 Comments Category: Development

Another quick tip for reducing server load: keep your sessions in memory instead of on disk. For a dynamic, high traffic site, like a very active message board, your disk is already busy handling all the database work. Take some load off it by moving session storage to memory.

Handling UTF-8 in JavaScript, PHP, and Non-UTF8 Databases

May 25 19 Comments Category: Development

Dealing with characters outside the ASCII range on the web is tough. It’s tough in other environments too, but particularly for web applications since text needs to move through so many places without being mangled — from user input, through JavaScript, into and out of PHP and string manipulation functions, into and out of databases. [...]

Dedicated Server Setup Checklist

March 18 11 Comments Category: Development, Personal

You’ve outgrown shared hosting and decided to start renting a server of your own. Since you’re still on a tight budget, you want an unmanaged server, where full responsibility for configuring and managing the server is yours. These are the steps I go through every time I set up a new server for web and [...]

My Software Failures

March 08 1 Comment Category: Development, Opinion, Personal

“The Daily WTF” has been on my daily reading list for a long time, and I do read it every day. Last week the site changed its name to “Worse Than Failure” and kicked off with an interesting post by Alex on the new name and how it applies to all the programmers that read [...]

Microsoft Interviews: I Won an Xbox 360!

January 16 6 Comments Category: Personal

I finally had the last of this round of interviews — my first attempt to find a coop job for April through September to finish the work experience requirement of my degree at Drexel. I met with two really nice people from Microsoft in the morning. First, a recruiter for the IT department that just [...]

Stumbling Across the Web #2

January 14 5 Comments Category: Stumbling

Where the Hell is Matt? Another YouTube viral marketing video. Did you notice the Stride gum logo appear several times? Would you have noticed it if I didn’t mention it?

Stumbling Across the Web #1

January 07 4 Comments Category: Stumbling

I often run across websites that provide something useful or interesting; a small tutorial, some inspiration, a useful tool. Not everything warrants a permanent listing in my links, nor do I want to clutter my already unorganized browser bookmarks, so I’ll share them here each week. Maybe you’ll find some of these sites useful as [...]

Simple File-Based PHP Caching

January 03 1 Comment Category: Development

Sometimes dynamic elements of a page can slow down page loading or use too many resources for re-running the code every page load to be practical. The sidebar of this site touches four databases to pull up the stats it shows, and the counter I just added to the header gets its count from a [...]