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...

Defend PHP

I ran across a great discussion at StackOverflow today that started with this question: I made a tongue-in-cheek comment in another question thread calling PHP a terrible language and it got down-voted like crazy. Apparently there are lots of people here who love PHP. So I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing? Why makes PHP a good language? The article lists a dozen or so "flaws" with the language, and then continues: Worst...

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...

Build a CentOS LAMP server

I finally finished re-building a development CentOS LAMP server. More importantly, and the primary purpose of the whole exercise, is that I finished my guide to building a CentOS LAMP server. I am happy to now post said guide on this blog (under Articles), for everyone to read and abuse as they please! So here you go... may I present Blake's CentOS LAMP Server Guide, single-page edition, and the perhaps friendlier multi-page...