Tinsology » PHP

Client Side Vs. Server Side Code

Tinsley — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:11:31 +0000

In my experience, one of the most common pitfalls for beginning programmers is not understanding the relationships between objects in their environment. This is especially the case in web development where there is in almost every case a blend between multiple client side and server side scripts. Failure to understand the the way browsers and servers communicate or the relationships between (X)HTML (or javascript or CSS etc) and PHP (insert alternative language here) will certainly lead to a poor or incorrect implementation. If you are an experienced programmer you probably won't gain much from reading this, but if you are a beginner, hopefully I can provide some insight that will save you a lot of trouble. Continue reading →

PDO… Use It

Tinsley — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 03:17:25 +0000

The majority of PHP code I see, whether it be posted by a beginner on a forum, or built into a large application, seems to suggest that the current standard when accessing a database is to make use of whatever database specific commands PHP provides for your particular database (ie mysql_query, mssql_query, etc). Often times, calls to these function are coupled with various attempts to prevent sql injections (such as calls to mysql_real_escape_string). Altogether, however, to me it seems clumsy and insecure. Continue reading →

Consolidating Error Pages with .htaccess

Tinsley — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 06:24:54 +0000

Before I get into the topic of how to consolidate all of your error pages, let me first explain how to use .htaccess to create custom error pages. If you already know how to do this feel free to skip to the next section. Continue reading →

Don’t Fear the Re(cursion)aper

Tinsley — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:22:51 +0000

For some reason whenever I see someone post code that cycles through an array or does something repeatedly, that code takes the form of some kind of loop. I admit that I'm guilty of this as well, but when I think about why I cannot come up with a reason. Continue reading →

Intercepting Email with PHP

Tinsley — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:21:18 +0000

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked, or I see asked on forums is "how do I send out an email using PHP?" The answer to that is fairly simple and well documented. It more or less involves the use of a single function mail().

Something a bit more complicated and, I think, more interesting is how you can intercept an incoming email.

Continue reading →