Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: PHP

  • phpAdsNew

    I’ve recently been playing with phpAdsNew, a PHP ad server system, for a work-related project, and I have to say, it’s a pretty solid piece of software. I’m very impressed.

    It installs quick and painlessly, and you can add advertisers and build ad campaigns in no time. It comes with very nice PDF documentation—user, administrator, and developer guides. It has a good admin interface and rolls out a ton of stats and reports that blew me away. It’s definitely a “best of breed” PHP application (and those are rare).

  • More PHP Errata

    Again reading Larry Ullman’s PHP Advanced and finding it okay, but I came across another glaring error.

    On page 169, in the discussion about variable order, Ullman’s got the variable order entirely backwards. The out-of-the-box order for PHP variables is EGPCS (which refer to Environment, Get, Post, Cookie, and Server variables), meaning that PHP processes input into variables from those sources in that order. The book incorrectly lists these in reverse while claiming it’s the proper order.

    The funniest part is there’s a graphic of a screen shot from the php.ini file, which clearly shows the EGPCS ordering, contrary to the text.

    Hello? Editors? Anyone?

  • PHP Cruise Clarification

    Back on the 11th I blogged about the PHP Cruise and quoted the price for 2 as $1199.99 plus $819.99. I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the Full Suite pricing, which is the most expensive (and would also be the nicest for traveling with my wife). Marco from php|architect commented to point out the better deal price of $799.99, for the Inside Cabin fare. Details here. He’s absolutely right; re-reading my entry made it sound like it was more expensive that it is. So get on it! $800 is a pretty good price for a cruise in the Bahamas.

  • PHP Cruise

    Here’s a first: php|architect is organizing a PHP cruise. I’d heard of the geek cruises before, but I certainly never expected to see one exclusively for PHP. Interesting and slightly off-kilter at the same time.

    Prices put it out of my reach, however. $1199.99 plus $819.99 is just more than I could afford. It might be fun, though…

  • On Blogs

    This is a bit about the blog software I wrote for this site. If you’re into the technical aspects of blogs, or PHP and MySQL, you’ll be interested in this. If not, you can safely skip it and not really miss out on anything.

    I’ve taken to calling my home-grown blog software blognutt (“blog + chuggnutt,” very clever, ha-ha), and I’ve noticed recently that at least one person found this out by viewing the HTML source of the site and searching for “blognutt” to see what they could find out. They didn’t find out much. Not for any reason of secrecy or anything like that; I just haven’t talked about it, no real mystery. It’s written in PHP 4 with MySQL on the backend, and that’s about it.

    I use the Template and DB classes from the immensely helpful PHP Base Library, though I’ve modified them extensively for my own purposes. The reasons I use phplib instead of another package like PEAR, for instance, are simple: I’ve been using phplib forever so I’m very quick and comfortable with it, it’s easier to use with a much lower-overhead code base, and I’ve already hacked the code to do things I want to do. PEAR is a fine project and I hope to contribute some classes (like my Stemmer class) there someday, but for coding purposes I haven’t used it much. Yet.

    Why did I write my own blog software, rather that using one of the many available blogging tools already available? I looked at several PHP blog packages, and looked at what other systems like Movable Type offer, but it boils down to the same approach I take to a lot of programming projects: I wanted to hack it out myself, because that’s the best way to learn. So I did. (Plus, I wanted to have absolute control of the software. I’m anal that way.) I started with what I determined were the core elements of a weblog, and made it work.

    When you get down to it, a weblog is misleadingly simple: it’s a data retrieval and presentation system. Retrieve the top X most recent items and display them; offer the ability to browse and search past entries, and there you are. The trick is in the execution.

    MySQL was the logical choice for the data store. I wanted to be able to sort and group by date, search entries, and make changes to the data structure on the fly. For me, the additional overhead introduced by adding a relational database like MySQL is worth it for the benefits I get, and since I’m doing all the programming I can make it do things that might not be available to users using other packages that they can’t control.

    I can do anything any of the other blog software packages can do. (I think. I may be missing something somewhere.) Here’s a list of some common weblog features, and some commentary:

    • Entries: Full HTML, since I control the format and storage. Each entry is tied back to the user (just me so far), date- and time-stamped, and can be flagged as a draft (and therefore not displayed to the public).
    • names: I just re-implemented these in a bot-friendly and more human-intuition-friendly manner. Now they look like /2003/07/27/name.html rather than the (less friendly but just as workable/legal) /blog_entry.php?content_id=27 style of links.
    • Comments: I’ve got the code in place to handle comments, but I haven’t turned it on yet.
    • Archive: I’ve got archive links, sorted by year and month. I can control the sort and display of archive links by changing a single line of code. You can view the archive by year, month, day, or entry.
    • Search: Another advantage of using MySQL: its fulltext indexing capability, which allows you to do natural language queries against text and returns results by relevance.
    • Categories: Easy. I’ve been thinking about categorizing my entries, but it’ll be a pain in the ass to go back through 90+ entries.
    • Calendar: Just recently implemented the calendar, showing which days have entries.
    • Last X entries: I haven’t implemented this because it seems redundant as I keep the last 10 entries on the front page anyway. It’d be easy to do, though.
    • Blogroll: Fancy name for a list of links to other blog sites. I just put some up last night.
    • Syndication: Using RSS for aggregators. I’ve written the code to produce the XML files for this, which turned out to be extraordinarily easy, but I haven’t turned it on yet largely because I’m nervous about bandwidth issues.
    • Trackback: A way for bloggers to link to other bloggers’ entries such that the blog they’re linking to knows they’re being linked to. Clever. I don’t know if I’ll support it or not, since I’m the only one running blognutt software :-). Plus, I can already find out who’s linking to me from the server log files.

    There’s more issues. One of the selling points of the bigger blogging systems is that you can update your blog from anywhere on the web, using XML-RPC. Well, the admin interface I wrote for my blog let’s me update from “anywhere on the web” too—from any computer connected to the web, no special software required, just a browser. Nothing fancy. Seems to me that XML-RPC will require some tool or client utility to use, or some interface somewhere, and I guess I don’t see the appeal in this, except possibly to save you time from opening your admin in another browser window. It’s entirely possible I’m missing something here. Having an XML-RPC API interface to a system is cool, I admit, but is it necessary? Maybe someone could enlighten me, here.

    (Of course, I’m not developing software for use by a general audience, so my way of doing things may not be appropriate for a large user base, and XML-RPC might make perfect sense in that situation.)

    One thing I am interested in using XML-RPC for is pinging sites like Weblogs.com to notify them when this site is updated. It would be easy to do; just include a checkbox on the entry add/edit screen that lets me decide when any changes should be pinged, and have PHP send the XML-RPC packet when the form is submitted. In fact, that will probably be the next change I make to the system.

    I have done something cool that I haven’t seen elsewhere (on blog/personal sites, at least): if a user comes to a “top-level” page from a search engine, searching for something specific, I helpfully list up to 3 entries that might be related to what they were searching for. For example, a user searches on Google for “dealing with a strong willed child” (this was an actual search on my site) and follows the results to my site. If they don’t get to a specific entry, and instead come to the home page, or to all the listings for 2002 for instance, then that’s too vague— so I search the database and show the top 3 results for what they might be looking for. Hopefully, this leads to the user exploring the site a little more than just hitting the home page, not finding what they searched for, and leaving.

    I’ve considered releasing my blognutt software as open source, but that raises an issue I’m not sure I want to tackle yet: support. The other issue is competition; there’s already a lot of weblogging software out there, some of it very good. Do I really want to play keeping up with the Joneses with everyone else, or should I just keep myself happy tinkering with my own system?

    All the same, I’ve been going through and cleaning up a lot of the code and modularizing it better in anticipation of a possible release, and there’s still more to finish. If you’re interesting in chatting about blogs, or seeing my code, drop me a line and let’s chat.

  • Some Items.

    Item 1. My in-laws are in town, from today until Sunday. This always causes some tension around here, as my wife doesn’t get along very well with her parents, but the kids just love them, so all’s well. Plus, they’ll watch the kids one night so we can finally go see The Matrix Reloaded.

    Item 2. The free ebooks section of my site here is definitely generating traffic; I get more hits from search engines (mostly Google and MSN) to this page than anywhere else on the site. I’ve also noticed some hits coming in from Google to the page with my PHP porter stemming algorithm.

    Item 3. Never, ever watch the movie SwimFan.

    Item 4. I’m writing up a long, geeky rant on comic books to post here sometime soon. If you’re into comics, keep an eye out. If not, no worries.

    Item 5. I actually can’t think of an “Item 5,” so that’s all, folks.

  • Site Updates

    I’ve been busy on this site the last few days with updates and revisions. To wit:

    1. Got the search feature working (finally). This is using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT indexing capabilities; it’s pretty slick, the first time I’ve played with it. It does natural language searches using frequency of keywords to produce relevancy scores… if you understood that, drop me a line because you’re as big a geek as I am…
    2. I’ve been adding new ebooks for the Palm Reader. I finally buckled down and loaded the Dropbook software on the new machine at home, and hacked up a PHP command-line script to do almost all of the work in converting Project Gutenburg texts to PML format. Now I can crank out several ebooks a day.
    3. Added the “Word Stemmer” item to the list of projects on the right. It’s a PHP class I wrote myself available for download; I’ll be putting more up there as I get them prettied up, code-wise.

    There’s been several other tweaks I’ve been doing behind the scenes, too. Nothing overt, but stuff to make things (hopefully) run more smoothly.

  • Errata

    I was reading through PHP Advanced this evening and on page 63, came across something incorrect (regarding objects in PHP):

    PHP does not support multiple levels of inheritance, so you could not make a Grandchild class that extends a Child class that in itself is an extension of the Parent class.

    Actually, PHP does support multiple levels of inheritance, and you can see the proof yourself by browsing the source code of the PEAR DB class found here. The inheritance path for the DB_mysql object looks like this:

    PEAR -> DB_common -> DB_mysql

    And even the PHP website’s documentation confirms this (found here):

    You create a class, parent, and use extends to create a new class based on the parent class: the child class. You can even use this new child class and create another class based on this child class.

    Now, what is true is that PHP doesn’t support multiple inheritance in general— i.e. inheriting from multiple sources simultaneously. But chaining a string of class definitions singly is okay.

  • Moving right along…

    A few random things.

    php|architect is offering a free issue of their new magazine. Anyone who’s into PHP should check this out.

    I found a neat site today called StoryMania. From their own description, they’re an “online community and marketplace for publishing, discovering, reviewing, buying and selling creative works — interact directly with authors and other viewers.” The site could use some technical improvements, but I like the idea a lot.

    So far I’ve got the first five chapters of Tom Sawyer done in Palm Reader format (.pml). It’s pretty plain, so I’ll be calling it version 1.0 and try to get my hands on the actual book to address additional formatting issues.

  • Grrrrrr

    Something in the server configuration running this site has changed, causing my PHP script to add blog entries to not work, and I can’t quite figure out why. (Incidentally, this is also why there’s a big gap since the last post.) My script is supposed to send an authentication header to the browser, for simple Apache realm authentication, but the browser (Internet Explorer 6; I haven’t tested with others yet) hangs. Very, very, very frustrating.

    As near as I can tell, this became a problem when WebDAV was installed on this server, which must have changed the configuration somewhere to affect this. In the meantime, I’m posting directly via phpMyAdmin, which is a totally killer MySQL GUI-like interface written in PHP.