New York Changing
Great point from Anil Dash about a site called New York Changing, which has wonderful then and now photos of locations throughout the city. Amazing how much is the same actually. Check out the bakery on Bleeker St.-----
Joseph Scott’s Blog » The Metadata Problem With Databases
Joseph Scott's Blog » The Metadata Problem With Databases:
"CREATE FUNCTION metadata_regex(varchar)
RETURNS varchar AS '
SELECT regex
FROM metadata
WHERE column_name = $1;
' LANGUAGE SQL;
ALTER TABLE users ADD CONSTRAINT
username_ck CHECK (
username ~ metadata_regex('username')
);
"(Via Joseph Scott's Blog.)
- Intersting DB field metadata postWhich PHP libraries do you use? - SitePoint PHP Blog
Which PHP libraries do you use? - SitePoint PHP Blog: "For interest, wondering what PHP libraries people use? By use I mean libraries you actually trust and are willing to use / have used on a live website."
- A nice list of trusty PHP libs going over at SitePoint with Harry Fuecks
Blogger sells services on eBay…
Blogger sells services on eBay...: "Wright also writes the Ensight.org Weblog, concentrating on business and technology. He founded the blog and says he has sold it to an American company for $15,000. He will continue to write it and be paid a monthly salary"
(Via EdCone.com.)
- Motivation to keep working on your weblog.-----
Hate Scoble
I think I missed the beginning of the "Hate Scoble" bandwagon but I'm on it now! Oh in case Google is looking: Hate Scoble, Hate Scoble, Hate Scoble!(I don't really, he's got one of the most fascinating and informative blogs out there, but I still Hate Scoble
)
PHP Caching
Photo Matt » PHP Caching: "Has anyone used something like this?"
I've had good luck with Turck but it doesn't really seem to be getting much development. Turck is very easy to use, I wish PHP had this built in and easy to access like ColdFusion does.
Mentoring for the Rest of Us
Interesting Idea - Feedback Requested - Scott on Feedster"What I dont think we need is a Message Board, a FAQ chest, Docs collection, or anything similar; we need something for the rest of the world. We need to let people mentor and be mentored." - It's an interesting idea, a community where mentors and mentored meetup. I guess the question I have is what is the target market? If it's non-tech(which it sounds like it is) there are many many more hurdles. Having worked in academia for sometime and worked with literally thousands of non-tech folks I know that simply having the place to go will not be enough.
Remember these are folks who think the internet is the "big E" on their desktop. I don't mean to be disparaging with this remark, it's just an experience I've had many times. When building any web based application that's the mindset you need to take if it is supposed to be used by normal people not us super geeks
My contribution to the thought process would be to go lower scale than most geeks would think. I'd make this community web based but not central. Not a central site like a .com for instance. See the thing is that any system like this will first off need to be found, but moreover there needs to be TRUST. There is no trust for non-tech folks at a giant (seeming) .com.
I would make this an application which is designed to be installed within organizations. The app would then facilitate mentoring among a know group of individuals (though they may not know each other at first) where trust is inherent. For instance, this could be at a college or a business or a church or a community center, etc.
This would have a couple of positive effects. First the trust issue mentioned above is solved since you're already dealing with a group you know. Second, whoever has taken the time to find and install this now instantly becomes a local cheerleader for it's use as well as someone to go to for technical support. Third, the mentors should feel more inclined to mentor well (which is alot of work) because they are working with people "close" to them. Finally if done right it provides the opportunity for a group of external people to form a community around the product/system which would help further it's reach (think team dynamic consultants,etc).
Simple PHP Email Validation Function
Surprisingly there arn't many email validation functions I like out there so I whipped this up. No fancy checking of mx records just a straight syntax check of an email address in PHP. Returns 0 or 1.
function validateEmail($email){
$pattern = '/^w[wd]+(.[wd]+)*@w[wd]+(.[wd]+)*.[a-z]{2,7}$/i';
return preg_match($pattern,$email);
}
phpclasses.org Stinks
Am I the only one who hates this site? Why make me register? There is nothing I hate more than being forced to register with no benefit to me. There is nothing this site can offer me for registering. They should take a look at hotscripts. They seem to be doing ok without forcing me to register. They have ads plus paid inclusions, both of which are fine with me.By the way, in our help desk software, HelpSpot, we're not doing registration. The forums will be open and the page where you can check on the progress of your request will be protected with a specific password for that one request sent to the user via email. No need to force registration where there is no value and your bound to get a bunch of fake data.
Apple will launch a mobile phone within 18 months
Apple will launch a mobile phone within 18 months: "Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows *he could do it better.* He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world. And he wants that phone. And what Steve Jobs wants, Steve Jobs gets"
- An Apple mobile would be great. I hate my phone and every time I look at others they all seem to be lacking. Hard to use and at the same time not very useful.
(Via Russell Beattie Notebook.)
Sticking it to the man Firefox style
Sticking it to the man Firefox style: "Then I remember: I am the man."
(Via The Scobleizer Weblog.)
ongoing - On Search: Sorting Result Lists
ongoing · On Search: Sorting Result Lists: "Here’s the trick: nobody will ever look at more than the first hundred or so results. So you don’t have to sort at all, you just have to find the highest relevance values."
(Via Tim Bray.)
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PHP Scandir Function
I hadn't noticed this new addition to PHP 5. Finally a nice simple way to get a listing of the directories and files within a directory. Of course it wasn't that hard before but it's one less little function that needs to be added to your code. Of course since it's only PHP 5 it's not going to be much use to me in my current project which needs to be 4/5 :-(PHP Accessing Strings as Array’s
A tip that relates to below. I find that developers often forget that you can access strings as arrays. This comes in handy for finding a specific character in a specific point in a string. For example, when looping over a list of files using:
if($filename{0} != '.'){
.... not a hidden file
}
Will keep you from getting a bunch of hidden files or the '.' && '..' directories. Make sure to note that you have to use curly brackets and not square brackets.
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Roadmap
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Roadmap: "Marketing remains an important part of our strategy."
More CF Goodness
Forta.com - Blog: "
But what if you need to check for types not supported by
In Blackstone we plan to enhance
1) Additional data types (including e-mail, url, ssn, usdate and eurodate).
2) Value ranges using specified minimum and maximum values.
3) Regular expression pattern matching for ultimate control.
Yet another example of one of the many infrequently discussed goodies in the works.
"
- More goodness from the CF world. I mentioned the greatness of CFPARAM previously and my PHP work around for it.
should the IT guys run your website?
should the IT guys run your website?: "My concern isn't that they're losing some ticket sales, it's that they don't appear to know or care. That no one is benchmarking and simplifying and reality checking a site that accounts for a huge chunk of their revenue."
(Via Seth's Blog.)
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Linux Server Sales Up
Dave from Geek News Central points out a report on how Linux Server sales have grown, to over $1 billion last quarter. I'm not suprised by this, he talks about IT professionals but I also think other folks are moving towards Linux for servers as well. I'm no server admin but I've successfully run my own 2 way Dell box on Red Hat for the last 3 years with little trouble. I also know several other small business owners who do the same. My bet is that there are alot of us out there helping to drive up those numbers.USB Teddy
You know, for kids
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Creating a Dynamic List in Javascript
I thought I'd publish this code out to the world in hopes someone else may find it useful. I'm sure there are optimizations that could be made and I'd love to hear them.This is a piece of code I came up with for our upcoming product HelpSpot which is a PHP driven Help Desk program. One of the key features is the ability to tag requests with what we call "reporting tags". Each request can have tags associated with it. Later these tags can be used to build very flexible reports on where your requests are coming from, what the major issues are, etc.
Since people would probably be adding lots of tags I wanted to come up with a good way of getting the input without either a request back to the server each time they added one or making them use a textbox and giving lots of instructions about how there should only be one per line, etc.
So this is what I came up with. You can find an example here. It creates a nice simple list on the fly. Each list item gets a hidden form field that in PHP will be passed back as an array of list items. Then I can insert them into the database and so on. This should work on IE6 and all Mozilla's cross platform. It's still being tested and worked on. If we make any major revisions I'll post them here.