Author Archives: rglover

Media Temple’s Usability Faux Pas

Clearly, I’m a fan of Media Temple, but today I was shocked by a piece of bad usability on their site when I was looking into signing up a new client for some DV hosting. The client for this new … Continue reading

Posted in Usability | Tagged , | 463 Comments

An Upload Progress Bar with Media Temple DV and APC

I had a client that wanted to allow users to upload files up to 100 Megs in size but didn’t want to have any Flash on the page. A 100 Meg upload can take 10 minutes for some users and … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , | 397 Comments

Exploring Data Encryption with MySQL

This post is about securely storing data in a MySQL table. And by secure I mean storing encrypted data. To keep it simple I’m going to use symmetric encryption (i.e. secret key encryption) rather than asymmetric encryption (i.e. public key … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , | 449 Comments

MySQL Security on Media Temple DV, Part 2

This is a serious ‘Playing With Fire’ blog post. Don’t do this on a server you can’t afford to restore to factory defaults. I was doing some reading today about securing MySQL and I learned about about a MySQL function … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , | 309 Comments

MySQL SQL for Generating Canada and USA Province/State Tables

I often need Canadian and American provinces and states as a table in my databases. Here’s the MySQL SQL that I use to create them. I just copy and paste it into phpMyAdmin. Note that it first creates a countries … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged | 427 Comments

Securing MySQL on a Media Temple DV Server

I’m no pro at securing MySQL databases but I know that you shouldn’t use the full access user from within PHP. The following is a description of how I create a second, limited MySQL user for PHP applications hosted on … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , | 488 Comments

ImageMagick, Imagick, and Opticrop on Dreamhost’s Shared Hosting

This is a long one. We were developing a site for a client that required that thumbnails be generated from user uploaded images. We started using vanilla GD to do it but the thumbs were pretty lousy since they seldom … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , | 405 Comments

Parsing YouTube Video IDs from Submitted URLs

The following PHP function takes any of several common YouTube URL formats and returns the YouTube video ID. The following URL formats are supported: The Traditional Format: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3JodBR-vs. The Embedded Format: http://www.youtube.com/embed/Hm3JodBR-vs And the oft-forgotten User Channel Format: http://www.youtube.com/user/vicscrappyvideos#p/a/u/2/Hm3JodBR-vs As … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , | 523 Comments

Storing Files Above the Web Root on Media Temple DV

Updated: I have written an update for this post for Media Temple’s DV 4 offering. We developed a web app recently that allowed users to upload JPEG images to the server. Best practise for uploads says that uploaded files should … Continue reading

Posted in Server Stuff | Tagged , , , | 453 Comments

A Dollar Counter Made in PHP and Javascript

Prion Interactive recently completed a site for a client that required a counter that showed a progressive dollar increase from $0 to one billion dollars over a period of six weeks. The solution involved a combination of PHP and Javascript. Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , | 429 Comments