Category Archives: Web Development

You Really Don’t Want a Content Management System

You really don’t. You think you do because you’re excited about the potential for your new website. You’re raring to go and you imagine yourself becoming some sort of content management ninja, swapping out images, changing body copy, making weekly … Continue reading

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French Translations for Common Web Words

Being a Canadian web developer means that I often make websites in both official languages, English and French. A sad fact of bilingual development is that clients usually spend 90% of their time (and money) on the English version of … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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