There are a bunch of PHP frameworks, too many if you ask me. I’ve tinkered around with CakePHP, Zend Framework, and Code Igniter. I’m curious to know what you guys have been using and what you find quick and easy.

What do you look for in a PHP Framework?

 Loading …

Popularity: 4%

Share This

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Full RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve finally received my cell phone from T-Mobile. It’s the Samsung t509, or as I like to call it, the silver plum. My contract was up and I was in search of a new phone. T-Mobile usually doesn’t have a very good selection of phones, so my choices were the Samsung and the every stylish BlackBerry Pearl (the black one of course). Although I am deeply in love with this phone, my budget dictated the former choice.

But back on to perfection. I’m not usually a fan of smartphones. In the increasing era of small, slick, thin phones it seems that smartphones are going in the opposite direction. They are big, fat, and clunky. They make perfect PDAs I guess, but I hate nothing more that to see someone lifting a fat BlackBerry up to their ears and making a phone call. And the way it sits on that belt clip reminds me of those huge Texas style belt buckles that everyone seems to fancy these days. The BlackBerry is fat, the SDA is huge and the MDA is morbidly obese in my opinion.

Share This

No, I’m not moving, not yet anyway. But Lava is. She scored a domain name which describes her blog so perfectly, that she couldn’t help but nab it up: HowISaveMoney.net. Now what are the odds that this domain would still be lying around?

Lava finally made the big step and “moved into her own place“. Moving domains is always such a hassle, but there are a few things that make the process a little bit easier. I was the Administrator during this move and I must say it was a little bit involved, but I think I got it done.

The Domain

The domain was purchase at 1and1.com. Why not NetSolutions, Yahoo, GoDaddy? Because they all have great promotional deals but then it’s upward of $8 to renew every year. 1and1 has a nice flat rate of $5.99 every year.

The host remained the same, since this particular hosts allows up to 10 domains pointing to it. All the files are simply dumped in a different sub folder. I both love and hate the idea of one consolidated host. It’s easier to manage: one login one set of administration and maintenance, cheaper than several different hosts. But if one sight goes down, they all go down. If a hacker gets into one, he damn well gets into all of them. The load on all of the sites is still very small and way under the allotted bandwidth limit. Most of them are blogs using Wordpress and we all know what a small physical footprint Wordpress leaves behind. If any one site seems to out grow things little family what it turns 18 or something, it will definitely be kicked out of the nest onto it’s on hosting package.

Copy Files

Now this should be the simple part. You copy everything into the folder that is going to house your new blog. There are a few minor changes that you might need to make. Depending on your previous setup you may need to edit the .htaccess file and change the RewriteBase option. But I do think that Wordpress will configure it for you when you set up your permalink stuff.

One change that is necessary is editing your wp_config.php file. If you’re changing databases, you need to make the changes here. If you’re not changing databases you still need to make the changes to the table prefix. I forgot to mention that we still need to keep the old database active (details to come later).

Popularity: 21%

Share This

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a beautiful tool. It let’s you administer a MySQL Database without all the messy commands. Also, some host don’t even allow you access to those messy commands. So, once again, it’s a beautiful tool. You can pull up a window and run individual SQL commands on the database or you can run an entire SQL script. It’s really great. There is a wonderful export tool that allows you to back up your Database as plain text SQL file or a file in GZip format. I have seen exported files get up to 10 MB compressed, which is over 100 MB decompressed, given that it’s just a plain text file.

Importing MySQL Database

But one thing that is lacking is a proper import procedure. Currently, you can import a database by pasting the SQL statements in a form and clicking submit, or by uploading an SQL file through your browser. Now that’s all well and good, but there are some problems with this method. The main problem is with timeouts. Of these there are two kinds, there are browser timeouts and server timeouts. The second problem is file size. Another limit, which you don’t often read about, is the phpMyAdmin configuration limit.

Browser TimeOuts

Browsers have a limited time that they can be busy waiting for response from the server and when doing a database import this is exactly what is happening. Your browser does a little work of uploading the file. After that it’s up to the server. So while your browser says it’s busy it really isn’t. It’s just waiting for the PHP script (phpMyAdmin) to get back to it and say it’s done. With large databases, this can take a time.

There are a couple ways to get around this. In Firefox you can go to about:config and look for the setting that deals with the browser timeouts. Honestly, I even forget what the exact property is. If you use Internet Explorer (well maybe you need to be punished) you’re out of luck, because as far as I know (which is not much about IE) I think you need to go into registry to do this. If you’re browser times out, it simply stops and kills the connection. With no active connection there script on the server comes to a halt.

Server PHP Script TimeOuts

Now let’s say you’ve gotten over the problem of the browser timeout. Good for you. Now you’re hit with something you may not have control over. A lot of shared hosts don’t allow you to modify their PHP configuration settings, for good reason. And a lot of servers have very fixed limits on the length of time that a script can run for. If this is less than what you’re file needs to run, then you’re once again out of luck. There is no work around for this though, sorry.

File Size Limit

Servers have a fixed limit with respect of the size of file that can be uploaded through the browser. Back in the day, it was stuck at 2 MB. Right now, I’ve seen them maxing out at about 8 MB on average. So what do you do if your export file is 10.5 MB? You’re out of luck, that’s what. Now why don’t they modify their export utility to break files up into multiple sizes that can be handled through import? well, it’s too much work. It’s not their problem, get a better server I guess. Once again, you’re out of luck.

phpMyAdmin Limit

phpMyAdmin has a limit in their configuration file that limits the actual number of SQL commands that can be executed. It’s that simply. If your database goes beyond this, then once again, you’re out of luck.

Well not really. You could install your own version of phpMyAdmin on the server and configure it as you like. If this works for you, great. But if your problem is also one of those mentioned above, then again, you’re out of luck.

What Are Your Options?

Popularity: 16%

Share This

Saw this and I was amazed:

All done with CSS And JavaScript. The implementation is also brilliantly simple. And it all fits in 1.5KB. What’s to lose?

By the way, you can’t tell by the image, but the image under that travel menu; it moves with the mouse hover. Check it out: Facny Menu.

Popularity: 5%

Share This

Why We Might Need (Want) JavaScript Links

Recently I stumbled upon a site that I haven’t been to for a while: CSOWeb.org. The design is nice and clean: a header image, with some gradients and colors that work together. But wait, where are all the links? 95% of the links on the sites are http://csoweb.org/#. What the hell? Everything is done behind the scenes in JavaScript in OnClick() scripts.

Sometime later I read a post on the Future of the Web about JavaScript only links. The first comment on the page is usually everyone’ argument for these links.”But…but…what about GMail, and Google Web Toolkit?!?!?”. Good argument, I guess. Everyone loves Google and everyone tries to emulate them. There’s no problem in that as long as we understand what’s going on. Magic word: AJAX. AJAX makes heavy use of JavaScript for obvious reasons. If we’re populating a page from a database using AJAX, then JavaScript is the only option. This leads us into the discussion of appropriate uses of Ajax. Don’t take me back there man.

Share This

Back last year I posted about Fixed vs. Fluid Layouts and Screen Resolutions. I made reference to a friend of mine that I went to and saw how my site looks on his LCD Monitor. That was just a couple few hours, one experience. Everywhere else I go I encounter only 17″ monitors, CRT or LCD. So that 800 pixel limit for sites seems to work out just fine.

Now I finally got the parts for my new computer last week. One of the new things I’ve gotten is a 19″ wide screen LCD monitor. Now, one thing learned about LCDs is that LCD monitors don’t look good in any other resolution except the one they are designed for. Mine is 1440 x 900. Now I’m not complaining. I love this monitor. Everything is so beautiful and crisp. The only thing that could make this better is if I had two of them side by side.

Share This

Today is one of the happiest days of my life. I finally got my new computer. Here is a quick break down of the specifications:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600
• 256M Radeon X1300PRO GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card
• KWORLD PCI Interface TV Tuner Card
• 1 GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Memory
• LITE-ON 18X DVD±R DVD Burner
• Hanns·G Black 19? 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
• 250 GB SATA Hard Drive + Plus one of my old 120 GB IDE Hard Drives
• Some cheap Creative Labs Speakers (In a noise free apartment complex)

Now I would love to tell you guys to look forward to a lot of new posts, but honestly I’m going to be wrapped up in this for a while. I got a lot of new games to play and a lot of movies to watch on my wide screen monitor :). So, I’ll be with you guys in a couple days, lol.

Just kidding. I haven’t been able to post lately because I sold my old computer and I didn’t want to risk blogging at work. But it’s all good now. I’m back.

Popularity: 3%

Share This