Blogging, code, marketing, online income, sales and other stuff...
A few years ago I built a dodgy little site at Usenet.com.au that rendered Australian text Usenet newsgroups. I’ve since disabled posting while I give the website a complete face lift. One of the biggest challenges I faced in the early days was orientated around optimising threaded articles. With several million articles in the database [...]
Michael Harvey of New York, USA, asks: “I’ve set up private WordPress pages that I’m only giving to friends and family. However, when people use the WordPress search function, these private pages appear in search results. Do you know a fix?” I use the same functionality on my own site(s). I have countless private pages [...]
I was updating a CMS recently to archive various versions of data. If you’ve ever dealt with quality and version management you would appreciate the need to record all changes to specific text for the purpose of quality assurance. In my case, I needed to accomplish four tasks: Record specific changes to the published version [...]
If you want to test the relationship between any two Twitter users (i.e. do they follow each other or don’t they), you can do so via a simple call to the following URL: http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=martykhoury&user_b=kenpascoe This will return a XML file as follows: Alternatively, you could generate a JSON file that will simply render as either [...]
Every application I build now is littered with various types of functionality that links them into different social network. If you’re reading this post it’s unlikely I’ll have to educate you on the merits of plugging your website into the social lives of your readers. What follows is some code that will help you integrate [...]
I have a particular database with over one million rows and was required to extract 10 random rows for inclusion on a page that featured products indiscriminately. My initial query looked a little something like this: SELECT id FROM table WHERE something = something ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10; The problem with a large table [...]
I’ve recently created a large number of websites where I aggregate podcasts and provide a detailed backend subscription and collaboration platform for both publishers and content consumers. I’ll no doubt post details on what I’ve done (and how I’ve done it) another time, but the project(s) forced me to consider a number of issues that [...]
I provided a simple function a few days ago that would unzip a file using PHP. As is usually always the case, it was followed up by a few emails asking for the best method of zipping a file or files. As it turns out, I’ve worked through some ZIP classes over the last few [...]
A Word Cloud is a visual representation of elements or information depicted by the size or colour of a word. Popularised in social media circles, they’ve gained popularity over tables and graphs because they immediately and visually illustrate the weight or value of information in a way that can give people an immediate appreciation of [...]
I received an email yesterday from a gentleman that had some issues related to yesterday’s post, “Working with CSV text files & PHP“. He had a situation where he would – literally, every single morning – download a zipped CSV file containing daily financial data from a remote server. He would then extract the contents [...]
I’ve spent the last couple of days writing a parser for flight crew and cabin attendant rosters that will be used by staff I work with at my day job. At the moment, we have access to a Sabre system that outputs rostered duty details… but won’t let us export it into any usable format. [...]
Marty has been involved with online application development for a number of years and has worked with large scale applications both as a coder and project manager. He is currently actively contributing to 7 blogs and maintains over 300 websites. 
Ken has been developing software solutions and managing IT projects for over 20 years. Ken has a computer science degree and, although his focus was previously on Windows based software, his focus is now on blogging and other online projects.
Recent Comments