Dec 5

CSS Variables and why you’re doing it wrong

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” ~ Albert Einstein

I’m a great fan of that quote. It’s completely true that making something bigger and more complex can be accomplished by any old fool. But making that something smaller, more compact and generally speaking more refined—well now, we’re talking about a completely different kettle of fish.

Which is why I can’t browse the Internets these days without stumbling into some new fang-dangled state-of-the-art CSS-parsing-framework Web 2.0 (beta). And every time I see them I cringe. And to be honest they’re normally written in Ruby. Which answers a hell’uva lot of questions.

Sep 26

Design Pattern II: Factory

As you might have grasped from the name of the pattern its role is to produce and dispatch a product. In this case a classes. We use the Factory pattern as it is a standard way to create a class which is very similar to other classes by containing the same functions, but implemented in a different way. I always like to use non-technical terms when explaining, and this example will be no different.

Aug 24

Cookie replay attack protection

So let’s jump straight in, what is a replay attack? Essentially a security breach whereby someone poses as someone else using some unique piece of data the user supplied/was issued to/from the Web server. It’s kind of similar to a man-in-the-middle attack. We’re going to be looking at the attack using specifically cookie authorisation, a very common means of implementing a “remember me” function.

Aug 2

Defensive programming

Earlier in the week, whilst implementing a domain registration API into another client project (and pulling my hair out), I thought back to a seminar from university. The module was Component Based Design and it was all about writing code in a standard way, helping to aid both the supplier (API creator) and the client (the person using the API). Although I didn’t realise it until now it actually played a large role…

Jul 12

PHP __auoload

PHP5 reared it’s head mid 2004, 5 long years ago and all PHP developers rejoiced. Especially me. It gave us lots of new shiny tools to play with, including the obvious improved OO support and my particular favourite: the __autoload function. For all you Java developers out there you know that you never have to include or require files, the Java language instinctively knows where to find them thanks to the…

Apr 2

PHP class: SimpleXML

One thing I have found is the lack of really simple XML classes—that’s not to say there aren’t any good ones out there, I have used several really cracking ones. For my new version of my personal site (yes, this site is planned for a revamp) I wanted to integrate my Twitter feed somewhere. I looked and looked for a really simple XML class but was unable to find one. So I made one. And here is the result:

Jun 28

PHP class: Text to anything

I recently had a client who sent me a 300+ list of items they wanted placing into a drop down select menu. Beside the obvious accessibility issues they were quite set in their ways about what they wanted—per usual.

Jun 26

Design Pattern I: Singleton

In this first episode of PHP design patterns, we will be looking at the Singleton. The Singleton is available in most, if not all, OO languages. The purpose of the Singleton is to only ever have 1 instance of a class available which supplies the rest of the application with consistent data. I would like to point out that my version of a Singleton may differ slightly from other peoples; design patterns are not exact nor are they set in stone.

Jun 19

phpSimpleAuthent

I was browsing a couple of PHP forums the other day, and it seems people require a simple authentication script for their website. So, I thought I would make just that.

Jun 11

Magically dynamic PHP

There are several functions in the PHP language which were made to make classes more accessible and dynamic. I am going to be talking about two of these so called “magic functions” which allow you to set and get information dynamically, whilst also providing a simple log to show you what is really going on behind the scenes. These two functions are of course __set() and __get().

Jun 8

PHP exception handling

Arguably one of the best things to come out of PHP5 was its improved OO support. With OO comes easier separation of presentation, data, and business logic layers which leads to reusable code and better code management, amongst a host of others.