An Exercise in Wordpress Integration, or Why Wordp...

I'd like to prefix my upcoming rant with the fact that Wordpress is good at what it does: making basic blogs and publishing content. I use it, many other people use it, it works. Heck, I'm using it right now. But from a technical standpoint, Wordpress sucks. I'm going to relate my experience here trying write a quick function to store post output to a file, to be used by a separate application on the same server. I...

Facebook Notifications – "An unknown er...

Over the last few months, I've worked with the Facebook Notification system many times, and there has always been a moderate-to-high level of frustration with it. It is difficult to test on a development application, because you simply don't have the same number of users as a live application, and the application settings on a dev app are different, which affects your allocation of allowed notifications. One of the prevalent...

Fixing "Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE)...

Without starting a browser flamewar, I'll just say that Google Chrome is a nice idea, but I won't be switching any time soon. As software evolves, competitors always appear, distilling out the good parts of existing products to create their take on something, and make it better. Google has done that with Chrome; it's light and fast and responsive. Unfortunately, it's still a bit green on the battlefield. Take this...

PHP Variable Test reference

I thought I'd post a link to this PHP Variable Tests reference page. It's a great reference that's kept up to date with the current version of PHP. I use it sometimes when I'm waffling over what function to use to validate a variable. Something I've noticed lately with the newer versions of PHP is that ctype_digit no longer returns true when you give it an empty string (ie. ctype_digit('')). This is great, since I always...

Ten PHP Best Practices Tips that will get you a jo...

The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. I started watching the job boards, and a nice-looking full-time PHP position caught my eye, so I sent out a resume and landed an interview. Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head...