With a few steps, you can create redirects using your NGINX server configuration. Let’s see how. (more…)

This quick tip will help you issue a reboot command during your Ansible playbook if a reboot is required. (more…)

CSS contains custom properties or variables which make style reuse a breeze. But, when you use the inspector on your favorite browser, you only see a definition of the variable, not the value itself. If you want to see the value of the variable, it just takes an extra step or two in your favorite browser. Let me show you how. (more…)

Apache’s mod_rewrite module can create redirects with the proper configuration. Let’s dig in. (more…)

To redirect an entire domain with SSL to a single page, you can use the free account on Cloudflare. Let me show you how. (more…)

It can be hard to take a full-height screenshot of a website. Luckily, Chrome gives us a tool to do this - no more stitching images together. Let’s see how… (more…)

When it comes to Open Source Software, you have a number of choices to make for licensing your software. When you provide a license for your software, you, as the copyright holder, are giving various types of permissions and warranties for the use of this software. You might even define the way it can be used and if modifications have to be submitted back to you. But, what do you “license” software that is closed,... (more…)

When you’re trying to demo your work in progress to a client, it can be difficult to know where to draw the line between working and non-working features. On one hand, you want to show them some context so they can understand the current feature. But, then what happens when they invariably try to explore the context (which may not be done)? Let me put that in a more concrete example. (more…)

You may know that you can host a static site on GitHub pages - but what if you want to have a www redirect and also SSL? This isn’t that hard until you get to the www redirect. That would require a subdomain and a second SSL cert, which they don’t provide. (more…)

Measurement is important. Metrics, while not sexy, are concrete to a good business strategy. When you bring a problem to your superiors, they’re going to want to know what is your measurement, what metrics did you use to determine this is a problem. With tasks I’ve given developers, I’ve always said “show me the metrics that your fix is better” versus just looking at the code. (more…)

GitHub is one of the most useful tools I have in my arsenal. With over 100 repositories (some of which are private), it’s the best $7/mo I spend. However, there are a couple things about GitHub you might not know. (more…)

I think around 2015, there was a big splash of good training online for PHP. Frameworks upgraded/changed, helped programmers write better code faster earlier than that. Before that, it was a lot of RTFM. So, before, in the earlier days (maybe somewhat still today), I think PHP developers did this: (more…)

The other day, an acquaintance of mine was complaining about never getting ahead in their career. I didn’t really feel like I knew enough about their area of expertise to give any advice - until I heard what they did when they got home. During our conversation, they described their favorite TV shows, how involved they were with the outcomes; basically once they got home, 4 to 5 hours were spent on the couch watching... (more…)

I tend to use either the web interface for Slack or I use Franz to manage my open connections. When this is not focused, however, it tends to mark you automatically inactive/away after 30 minutes. If you’re hard-core programming, you might not have slack focused for hours - and this is really confusing for your teammates as you might look non-active or even out for the day. (more…)

In an earlier entry here, I described the need for a case-sensitive disk in my development set up. I’ve enjoyed using my SD-based drive, but I wanted to change to using my own drive for two reasons: a) I have 1TB drive, so I have plenty of space and b) the SD is slower than the SSD - at least last time I tested it was. (more…)

One of my projects involves Google AdWords. I was dealing with ad groups in AdWords and I realized I had made a few case mistakes with the filenames. I had files named Adgroup.php instead of AdGroup.php. I went and changed the file name, but, since my project is managed with git, I couldn’t commit the changes. My Mac drive was not case sensitive. Oops, forgot about that. (more…)

So, after reading some of my own entries on my blog, I realized that my last re-design made the font kind of hard to read. Plus, I was reading it on a 27” monitor, and it became hard to keep the long lines of text straight. So, I opted for a re-design… but not before I looked at my Google Analytics. (more…)

Have you ever submitted a debug log for a piece of desktop software? I’m always enthralled at the sheer amount of information that is included in some of these error reports. It reminds me that I don’t do enough logging. As a matter of fact, I think most PHP developers don’t do enough logging. (more…)

In a perfect world, when testing your website you’d have a giant device library, a number of different internet connection speeds, and a bunch of users using the system simultaneously. A perfect world? Pfffft. But, I can help you at least get close to this set of requirements for your test. Let’s see how we can use Google Chrome to simulate different devices and change our internet connection speeds. (more…)

I’ve been working with Swagger, also known as the OpenAPI Initiative lately, and I’ve come to the issue of issuing an update to an object. I’m planning on using the HTTP verb PATCH (yes it is a standard in case you forgot… like I did). (more…)

Wow! Enter Google Fusion Tables - an easy way to show, manipulate, sort and display data. (more…)

One of the applications my team develops is used by a group that we’ve determined to be very much beginners at computer usage and internet comprehension. We attempt to make the product as intuitive as possible - while staying away from the newest trends. I don’t believe our place is to challenge their current notion of what websites do at this time. We stay a bit behind the curve because they need to use this... (more…)

My talk at thatConference went great today. You can download them here. (Also, not sure why, but the second slide would just not download the image of my kayak…) (more…)

In one of our applications, an event system requires a start and end date. There is validation to check to make sure the end date is after the start date. (more…)

Recently, I had a programmer create a new feature for one of our products. He inadvertently caused another feature of our product to look less polished and function a bit weird. (I called it ‘wonkified’). The consensus of the group was to push out the feature, and then go back and fix the broken part of the old feature in the next week or so. (more…)

I constantly look for ways to explain to non-technical people the daily challenges I must face and decisions I make. I like using analogies. One of the biggest ones I face where I work currently is the support of out-dated browsers. (more…)

I often run across this problem and I have to solve it each time. I finally decided to blog about it. (more…)

There are two things that really grate on me as a PHP developer. First, people claiming that PHP is not powerful. And second, those who don’t actually work in the language, but have similar disciplines, trying to teach it. Let me elaborate. (more…)

I’ve heard the argument so many times: “I’m just too busy to do my own website” This usually is followed by pleading statements leading to the fact that no one is paying them to do their own website - like their current workload is paying them. (more…)

A couple years ago, I developed this concept I call “Overtake User.” Basically, in every application I build, I build in the ability for the currently logged-in support specialist or admin to become someone else. Now, this is different than just viewing the user’s information and records. This actually let’s the current user become the other user. This is helpful also for scenarios where the user is “seeing something strange” but you can’t see it.... (more…)

Goal: Clever named site that shows local establishments close to your location. Was based on Google Ip location services. The thought was just for people to think ‘whats close to me’ and type that up. (more…)

Really enjoyed my time at WordCamp Milwaukee 2012. Got to meet a lot of great people. I did a presentation on Secure Wordpress Coding. Feel free to download the slides. (more…)

I’ve been making a push to have more of my projects multi-lingual. However, one thing I kept forgetting about was those super-rare error messages that have to come from the Controller. For the most part, all of your errors should be handled by your validators in your forms. However, from time to time, there needs to be an error handled in your controller. (more…)

Goal: to create a bachelor cookbook and sell it to other bachelors online. The price of the cookbook was to be very cheap so that it wasn’t too much of a risk. The book itself was supposed to be picture rich and very verbose. It showed how to accomplish tasks that other books assumed a person knew. (more…)

Goal: I came up with an idea that I wanted to find local people in our area and mention them using a twitter bot. Pretty simple. Two requirements were they either had to use the word milwaukee in their profile or be from the milwaukee location, and they had to not have a blank profile. The tweet contained a shout out to their name and as much of their profile as could be fit in... (more…)

JEMDiary was one of my longest running websites, from way early in the century. (more…)

Goal: to create a site serving females that felt a specific male in their life deserved positive recognition. Then, to monetize the recipient from one of two targeted ads. (more…)

Note: I have shut down name-tag.me. These notes were taken before I pulled the plug. (more…)

The goal was to use links that Amazon provided themselves to showcase categories and percentage discounts with my affiliate tag. The thought was a clean interface would easily encourage people to click a discount of say 90% but send affiliate contributions my way. (more…)

I’ve always found it annoying when programmers create systems where you create your account and then you’re not logged in. Maybe I’m lazy? I decided to do a poll on a popular social networking site. The poll went like this: (more…)

I will be presenting at the WAIMM Email Marketing Software meetup today. I plan to cover the basics of Mailchimp for comparison to other services like Constant Contact. (more…)

Do you like to be challenged, learn new things, and have a supportive team? Well, let’s chat a bit. I’m building a team and I’m looking for great PHP developers to join it. (more…)

The last time someone brought up authorizing certain actions by IP address - or I should say, limiting the amount of actions that can happen by one IP address. I brushed that off without a second thought. It didn’t occur to me until later that the original owner of that idea may not have known all the reasons why I know this isn’t a good idea. So here’s a quick rundown: (more…)

So it seems like a very common solution for tracking hit rates is the transparent 1x1 pixel gif. Load this and parse your access logs: requests logged. (more…)

You may find while working with projects like Zend Framework that you have a number of publicly available properties of your classes that are not defined and documented. They might be part of a getter/setter magic method or just purely dynamic. Well, using PHPDoc, there is a cool tag called property that helps. For example… (more…)

I had been working with the facebook connect javascript API on one site and transferred over the code to another site. I changed the app ID and clicked connect. Every time I got a popup saying an unknown error occurred and they were taking a look into it. (more…)

I run into this question a lot. Should my website have www in the domain name. Should I be going to aaronsaray.com or www.aaronsaray.com?? That is to say, which should be the default home page domain? Let’s discuss… (more…)

I received a set of cards from meetmeme.com. In addition to my cards, they also provide the following URL: http://mtme.me/c89ab (more…)

When using FirePHP, I ran into this issue where I could not see the output of the debug information. All the documents I found kept suggesting that I had not enabled the Console tab for this particular site. (more…)

Ok - so I can’t take any credit for this - but check out this blog post: http://www.phpied.com/conditional-comments-block-downloads/ (more…)

The other day, I saw some 404 errors for the file IEStandards.xml in my error logs. After a little research, I found some links here and here that lead me to believe that I had done something wrong. Let me explain… (more…)

When running YSlow the other day, I was reminded that I was loading 2 stylesheets when only one would suffice. So, let this be a reminder to you - and a quick excerpt at my own solution: (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

Normally, I’ve been trying to release a new blog entry every Tuesday. I took this last week off to celebrate my birthday. Tomorrow should restart the grind. :) (more…)

If you’ve checked out BitLy Pro, you’re probably pretty excited like I am. I saw it and immediately registered saray.me for a short URL. When I went to sign up, I found it was still in a queue system where you had to wait to get an invite. In the mean time, I still want to start using my domain. (more…)

So I got permission at the beginning of March to add an Internet Explorer 6 deprecation message to one of the sites I’m working on. (more…)

I’ve been researching caching and compression techniques for my external resources for some time. My first design of JEMDiary was very greedy with HTTP connections. Couple that with having a less-than-perfect host (Dreamhost bleh…), users could feel the burn. I didn’t like it because it would even take ME forever to use my own website. I went on to discover many different key points I use when creating sites now - the Steps to Optimize... (more…)

So lately, I’ve been looking into the semantic tools available on the web. I want to make sure that my online identity is easily searchable and undeniably accurate. Using semantic tools such as XFN, FOAF and hCard may help me. (more…)

So I added my own FOAF link on my home page. (more…)

I came across a great idea dealing with protecting image downloads from the site. Now, this is not fool-proof. There are lots of other ways to download the image, but this may stop the casual downloader. Nope, its not disabling the right click or using java. It requires one single transparent gif. Let’s see how. (more…)

Using my javascript error reporter code helps me get a better understanding of what my clients are experiencing when visiting my website. One thing I did notice was the failures from time to time of Google’s CDN based jQuery. (more…)

A while ago, I was reading a usability book - and the author suggested that every time you create your content, remove half of the words. Then remove half of them again. So, by the time you’re done, you really have 1/4th of your content - and it should still make sense. (more…)

After reviewing the Google Javascript API project, I am torn. Pro’s and cons below… What do YOU think? (more…)

One thing I remember being pounded into my head is to not create CSS classes after their physical attributes. So, for example, if your error text is red, do not call the class red. Instead, be more descriptive of the content. (more…)

I hate filling out login forms to discover that half of my password is in the username box. Lets talk about why - and then a solution. (more…)

One of the biggest time wasters I deal with is parsing out static web designs given to me by designers. They don’t know programming, so they design it with static HTML in mind. Even if you’re using a tool like dreamweaver, updating static pages can be a hassle. Then, a lot of times, they have to remove their ‘lorem ipsum’ text and send it to me - and then I continue to chop it up.... (more…)

In this post, I’m going to cover what a System Architect/Analyst (SA from now on) is and why you need one. (more…)

If you’ve ever worked with a customer’s CMS pages and heard the term “Oh but I want some images underneath the links” - you need this script. Whether your using old style tables or the coolest CSS tricks, filling in space to the bottom of the page can be useful. (more…)

Well, I’ve officially resigned from “The Triangle.” Don’t worry, I’ve got a new place to keep bring experience to this blog. I look forward to my new opportunities. (more…)

This example is a proof-of-concept I worked on years ago when people first started talking about making 3D games with no images - CSS only. (more…)

Lately, I’ve been trying to find ways to reduce the amount of time I spend on stupid sites like myspace (nevermind the fact that the time it took to reduce this amount took me enough time to visit myspace 1x a day for another month – heh). At any rate, I’ve been using Google Reader a lot more (I’m up to 180 or so feeds) and I thought: Why don’t I make an RSS feed... (more…)

I just thought I’d drop some useful links and tools your way for those beginning and non-tool-cist peoples: (more…)

I was reading on a forum the other day about some benchmarks for PHP. The guy had posted some results in ms measurements, and was getting upset about his erratic results. There were some things that he was forgetting, however. (more…)

Although I’d like to pretend that my side jobs always are pure programming, but alas, not the case. There are times when the users send word docs to me and I have to convert them to html. Now, even these word docs might have spelling mistakes - but that’s just not ‘acceptable’ to them - I should correct those issues too! Whats up with that? But anyway, I now have a good plugin to do... (more…)

I have been writing code snippets in this wordpress blog alot - and I wanted to possibly have the code highlighted. One of the things that happened with code highlighting plugins I’ve noticed is that the code has to be valid (I’ve posted invalid PHP because stupid wordpress kept eating it) or one type of code (I post javascript/html combinations, with ellipses and such…), and so I finally decided to not highlight my code -... (more…)

I just finished reading a snippet of a book about design patterns - of which Strategy, Adapter, Decorator and others were discussed. It got me to thinking about my design patterns that I used in JEMDiary - and what I’ll be using in this project. (more…)

There seem to be two schools of design lately: Feature rich, RIA designs and simplicity. (more…)

In my “younger years” in the coding world, I’d have an idea like I have right now with the website monitoring project - and immediately start coding. I’d get the framework done, implement a feature or two, and then finally start thinking about my requirements. Predictably, the code would turn into an unmaintainable mountain of crap - and I’d be wasting more time rewriting and refactoring than I wanted. For this project, I decided to... (more…)

Recently, while working at (“the triangle”), I came across a project that I had to research. This project’s definition included finding an up-time monitoring system for our websites as well as a dead link finding feature. So, after doing about 8 hours worth of searching, I didn’t find anything that met our needs. There were tons of dead link finders that could be ran on demand off your desktop platform, but very few that could... (more…)

In this posting, I’m going to share the steps to making a slimmed down, cleaner, nicer layout for MySpace to help showcase your personal interests, your band, or your business. (more…)