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...

ASP.Net MVC – How to route to images or othe...

A recent question on Stack Overflow (and subsequent answer that I wrote for it) inspired this post. I had recently been discussing URL rewriting in depth with my brother, and have also been doing some introductory work with the routing engine in ASP.Net MVC, and the question piqued my interest since I had been meaning to look at this more closely for some time. The question on Stack Overflow is titled "How do I route images...

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...

HTML manipulation with System.Xml.XmlDocument

HTML Table of Contents Generator Example Sometimes it's easy to forget that HTML is just one type of XML, and hence you can utilize the System.Xml library for fun and profit with your HTML. System.Xml is full of powerful tools to manipulate well-formed documents, and you really don't need to know much about XML to leverage it. With two simple lines of code you can have a document loaded into a data structure that has...