Shawn Donley’s BLOG

As a PHP programmer, dealing with syntax errors is almost as important as breathing… and when a host takes away the ability to view these errors for “SECURITY REASONS” then… wow it sucks. Trying to go through the code to find an error… again… just sucks.

So I hit the old trusty net looking for a resolution to fix my situation. After several lame attempts that didn’t work… I came across the following. Of course you need to have access to modify your .htaccess file, but hey… works sweet for me.

http://www.blizzard-media.com/hosting/question/id/6.html

You have to love this site. Well, at least I do, it has saved me so many times, I have lost track. I’m posting this just to get to it quickly…

The link below is to a table on W3Schools.com that provides a list of the color names that are supported by all major browsers.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colornames.asp

You don’t honestly think I have the time or ambition to create these great looking posts do you? Especially when I cannot even spare a few moments to get the stupid spell checker to work correctly in WordPress… anyways, this is very slick. The following explains the whole thing:

http://skattertech.com/2007/02/word-07-supports-wordpress/

cron is a unix, solaris utility that allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals by the cron daemon. These tasks are often termed as cron jobs in unix , solaris.

Crontab (CRON TABle) is a file which contains the schedule of cron entries to be run and at specified times.

The following link gives some details on how to use the command. I am constantly looking this up.

http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm

A very common task for a cgi script is to be able to inform a set of users with data generated by itself or other programs, cgi’s or not. For example, you might be one of the web designers who have joined one of the myriad of free counter programs on the internet that email you with nice statistics and reports about your web pages’ traffic. Systems like that are responsible for informing such a large number subscribers that sending the reports manually would require a full-time employee devoted to this task only. Obviously this wouldn’t be a sensible option even for a relatively large organization.

The following post has some great documentation on this…

http://www.perlfect.com/articles/sendmail.shtml

Just a quick reference link to the PHP manual for the number_format function.  Use this all the time, but for some reason always seem to forget the syntax.

http://us3.php.net/number_format

Sometimes you run into an issue where you need to override the CSS for the page. Instead of defining a new CSS or adding it to the page (which would change those elements on the page) you can use an inline style which would override all of the mentioned previous. The following link is a tutorial that will explain how to actually do this correctly.

http://www.tizag.com/cssT/inline.php

Dealing with the time filed in MySQL is a little tricky.  The following tutorial explains how to deal with it a little better in PHP. 

http://www.tizag.com/mysqlTutorial/mysql-time.php

I came across an interesting scenerio during the development of yourEZvideo.com where I wanted to do a zip backup behind the scenes on the website, but I didn’t have a command line zip program.  The following came in handy since the main video server was originally designed on a Windows box.  Since the development, it has been moved to Linux.

http://www.stahlforce.com/dev/index.php?tool=zipunzip

The following is a blog for the PayPal development team.  There is some useful information on this blog if you are using PayPal as your shopping cart.  In order to gain access you need to register on the blog.

http://www.pdncommunity.com/