I get a few questions here and there about the location detection on whatscloseto.me. Sometimes it seems really near - other times it seems way off. (more…)

A nice free open source alternative to Crazy Egg is ClickHeat. One of my clients wanted this implemented but didn’t want to have to log in again using different criteria. I looked at the code and saw it was surprisingly easy to edit to allow a different authentication method. Let’s check it out: (more…)

When developing an application, there are usually various different environments that you run the code in. First is the development environment. Next, you have the QA or test environment, staging, and then live or production. It stands to reason that if you are using outgoing e-mail in your application, and your application is in production, it should send to the proper recipients. However, what do you do in testing and development? (more…)

Many times, the error property of the jQuery AJAX call is ignored. Most often, you’ll see just references to the success portion. (more…)

For whatever reason, I can never remember the exact coding of MCrypt. And maybe that is a good thing - so I stop doing so much code duplication and start using a class I wrote. For this reason, I’ll save you the same frustrations and share how I do my encryption. (more…)

SimplePHPMailer - my open source plug-n-play emailing script for PHP newbs - has been updated. It now has required fields - no more blank submissions! Check it out here with the updated download link. (more…)

Everyone I’ve spoken to recently no longer puts mailto:// links in their code for fear that the owner of that address will get more spam. However, there are still legitimate uses for a link like this. In order to foil very simple email parsing bots, I’ve come up with the following script. (more…)

Update: I’ve gotten a lot of comments on this code. This was a simple proof of concept at the time when Facebook was creating messages like this. They no longer do it in this manner. I also am not supporting any updates to this code. Thanks for your interest! (more…)

Artsy? I know - this is a bit non standard of a blog post for me… but bear with me. :) (more…)

Google Charts is my hero yet again. This time, I happened to notice that they have a chart in their API for QR Codes. Considering I was just searching google for a PHP class to do this, I was pretty ecstatic. (more…)